Latest / The Speak Life Podcast / Christianity is the Greatest Story - Tom Holland and Paul Vanderklay || SLP427

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Christianity is the Greatest Story - Tom Holland and Paul Vanderklay || SLP427 · The Speak Life Podcast

0:06
SPEAKER_00: Well, hello, and thank you so much for downloading this episode of the Speak Life Podcast.
0:11
SPEAKER_00: My name is Thomas Thorrogate, media producer at Speak Life, and today I'm delighted to bring you this conversation that was recorded at Oak Hill College on Saturday, the third of September.
0:22
SPEAKER_00: I believe some of our listeners were there in person.
0:25
SPEAKER_00: So I hope you guys enjoyed it.
0:27
SPEAKER_00: Great to have you along.
0:29
SPEAKER_00: It's a conversation between uh Tom Holland, a historian who wrote Dominion and co-presenter of the very popular podcast, The Rest is History.
0:39
SPEAKER_00: So absolutely privilege to have him along.
0:42
SPEAKER_00: Paul Vanderclay, who is also known as the pastor to the intellectual dark web, he's responded a lot to Jordan Peterson and the meaning crisis.
0:51
SPEAKER_00: He has his own YouTube channel, which is well worth checking out.
0:55
SPEAKER_00: And the third member of this conversation is of course Glenn Scrivener from Speak Life.
1:00
SPEAKER_00: It starts with a short talk by Paul Van Der Clay, and then the three of them enter the conversation together, and then there are questions from the live audience.
1:09
SPEAKER_00: So enjoy.
1:19
SPEAKER_09: Now what I'm about to tell you, you might be very familiar with, because this might be your story.
1:26
SPEAKER_09: You're home alone, it's at night, you've done pretty well, you've done college or university, you've gotten a good job, perhaps in IT.
1:40
SPEAKER_09: You pay your rent, you might have a car, relationship with the family is on again, off again, but it's late at night and you're alone, and you might be drinking, and YouTube is running.
1:57
SPEAKER_09: And you might have found Jordan Peterson because about four years ago everybody could find Jordan Peterson on YouTube.
2:06
SPEAKER_09: And then a crazy pastor from Sacramento with facial hair that seems a little out of control comes up and starts talking.
2:17
SPEAKER_09: This is how some of you, maybe more of you than care to admit, have found me.
2:26
SPEAKER_09: And we found Jordan Peterson, and then of course there was a guy in, he'll probably watch this, so I have to be careful what I say, a guy in South Africa who was also alone watching YouTube, had found me, and then he said, Oh, there's another University of Toronto professor you should listen to, John Verbake.
2:49
SPEAKER_09: And he has Buddhism and cognitive science, a course like that with terrible audio.
2:56
SPEAKER_09: And you should talk to him.
2:58
SPEAKER_09: And I talked to him, and he talked about the meaning crisis.
3:02
SPEAKER_09: Because even though you have a decent job, at least if you're in the States, maybe you have health insurance, and you can pay for your flat.
3:12
SPEAKER_09: And as compared to a lot of the other people around you, you might be doing better than average financially, and you can buy what you want.
3:21
SPEAKER_09: A story has been told to you that accumulating a variety of things status, position, money, goods, would be sufficient to a happy life.
3:33
SPEAKER_09: A number of years ago I visited a gator farm.
3:36
SPEAKER_09: I'm an American, and so we have things called gator farms.
3:41
SPEAKER_09: And there was a giant alligator named Goliath sitting in a warm pool of water.
3:48
SPEAKER_09: He's just sitting there.
3:50
SPEAKER_09: And so I asked his feeder, um, does he do anything?
3:55
SPEAKER_09: And he said, no.
3:57
SPEAKER_09: I just throw chicken at him, and that's enough.
4:02
SPEAKER_09: And he lives his life.
4:04
SPEAKER_09: And when you're sitting at home late in the night, again, probably having drunk a little too much, watching whatever the YouTube algorithm is serving up to you, you know that you are not like Goliath.
4:21
SPEAKER_09: Dostoevsky, of course, explored this in Notes from the Underground.
4:27
SPEAKER_09: That he postulated, even if he had all the cakes and all the sex he could want, he might destroy it.
4:38
SPEAKER_09: And he didn't know why.
4:42
SPEAKER_09: I listened to half of Jonathan Peugeot talk to Michael Knowles.
4:48
SPEAKER_09: I'm a little worried about this whole Daily Wire thing, as some of you know.
4:54
SPEAKER_09: But Jonathan Peugeot was making the point to Michael Knowles that we are very strange creatures because we simply need to care about beauty and truth and goodness.
5:08
SPEAKER_09: And unlike Goliath sitting in a warm pool of water, having enough to eat, or having all of our creature comforts met, is insufficient because, as the author of Ecclesiastes notes, at least in the English translations, we have eternity in our hearts.
5:28
SPEAKER_09: And that sounds sort of nice, except if you think about it, eternity is a lot, and it's more than a human heart can hold.
5:41
SPEAKER_09: What happens when that eternity starts to ache, and you begin to imagine that you were made for more than that alligator in that warm pond in a gator form in Florida?
5:56
SPEAKER_09: That perhaps there is a suchness and a mourness, to use some of these fancy verbakey words, there's a suchness and moorness in life that draws you into some place that is beyond your mere creature comforts.
6:14
SPEAKER_09: So I found Jordan Peterson like many of the rest of you, and I wondered, what is with this Canadian psychologist?
6:23
SPEAKER_09: Why does he want to talk about the Bible?
6:25
SPEAKER_09: He understood the strangeness of that, but as a pastor, I thought, why is it that this man can charge 40 bucks a pop and fill a theater in Toronto and ramble for two plus hours?
6:40
SPEAKER_09: And many of the people in churches, I knew some very good preachers in Toronto, many of the people in churches begin to squirm after 20 or 30 minutes and you know are a little cranky if the hour goes over an hour and 15.
6:57
SPEAKER_09: And I had to ask myself that question, because I also have that ache in my heart.
7:04
SPEAKER_09: And even though I'm a Christian minister, even though I'm the son of a Christian minister, even though I'm the grandson of a Christian minister, that ache is in my heart too.
7:15
SPEAKER_09: And even though I believe that Jesus is risen from the dead, and even though I believe that Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life, there is a moreness to it that draws me in deeper and further.
7:34
SPEAKER_09: And so when I saw Jordan Peterson on the internet, I thought, if I can do the Freddie and Paul show, I can probably talk about Jordan Peterson.
7:43
SPEAKER_09: And I decided to turn the camera on and just share the world, just share with the world what I thought.
7:51
SPEAKER_09: And I thought maybe a few dozen people would be interested.
7:55
SPEAKER_09: And to my surprise and a bit of horror, there were more of you.
8:01
SPEAKER_09: And then people started asking for my time.
8:06
SPEAKER_09: Would you talk?
8:07
SPEAKER_09: Of course I'll talk.
8:08
SPEAKER_09: I'm a pastor.
8:08
SPEAKER_09: That's what I do for a living.
8:10
SPEAKER_09: Actually, the truth is pastors talk from podiums and pulpits like this, but what we mostly do with people is listen.
8:19
SPEAKER_09: Because all of you have aches in your hearts.
8:23
SPEAKER_09: And really, a lot of what you want is for someone to listen.
8:29
SPEAKER_09: So then people began wanting to talk to me.
8:32
SPEAKER_09: And they talked and talked and talked.
8:34
SPEAKER_09: And as a pastor, I would pull their stories out of them, and we would work on their stories a little bit, and I would give them the little blessing of my year, and I would send them out.
8:46
SPEAKER_09: And then, as some of you mentioned in the little in the little reception midway through, um, I don't have enough slots for all of you to talk and to share your story with me.
8:58
SPEAKER_09: And that for me is a real source of dissatisfaction.
9:04
SPEAKER_09: It's also for me an indication that we will have time later when we've been there 10,000 years, bright shining as the sun.
9:13
SPEAKER_09: There's no less days to sing God's praise and to hear your stories than when we first began.
9:21
SPEAKER_09: So what that has led to is this, which is a strange thing.
9:26
SPEAKER_09: It's an estuary tour.
9:27
SPEAKER_09: And John, the guy who asked about herring in the first, he's in the back.
9:31
SPEAKER_09: If you want to know what estuary is, talk to John Van Domp.
9:36
SPEAKER_09: Because what I realized was that there's not enough of me to go around.
9:39
SPEAKER_09: And what I also realized is that, although the world is filled with churches, as I heard many of your stories, you said, either I don't dare walk into a church, or I'm not exactly sure anybody will care about me in a church.
9:54
SPEAKER_09: And so I don't know what to do.
9:56
SPEAKER_09: And so what we've started are estuary groups where all we do is talk.
10:01
SPEAKER_09: There's no, there's not necessarily a gospel presentation, there's not necessarily a pitch or a come to Jesus moment.
10:09
SPEAKER_09: All there is is a little group of people that are willing to sit in a circle and have a meaningful, respectful, civilized, not dominated by one person.
10:19
SPEAKER_09: We have a little protocol to make sure that doesn't happen.
10:22
SPEAKER_09: But a conversation where you can share your stories, where you can know and be known, and hopefully love and be loved.
10:28
SPEAKER_09: And as a Christian minister who went for years on a corner with people mostly asking me for a little bit of food help or maybe some, maybe$20 to go buy maybe food, but would go for years or months without anybody wanting to sit down and actually talk about what most mattered to them.
10:51
SPEAKER_09: I thought that starting a group that would encourage people to imagine that a church might be a place where they could walk in and find a listening ear and a meaningful conversation, not something shoved down your throat.
11:09
SPEAKER_09: That might in fact be a helpful thing.
11:13
SPEAKER_09: As a pastor who wants to talk to people about what I believe, it's an extremely helpful thing.
11:21
SPEAKER_09: And so all of that has brought me here to the meeting crisis.
11:25
SPEAKER_09: And I um I do I am worried that Tom Holland's publicist will complain about how often I've used the cover of his book as a thumbnail in my sermons.
11:37
unknown: She went.
11:41
SPEAKER_09: When Glenn said, Would you like to do a thing with Tom Holland?
11:45
SPEAKER_09: I said, Absolutely.
11:47
SPEAKER_09: If you don't listen to the rest is history, it's my favorite podcast.
11:53
SPEAKER_09: And it's not just because I'm a fan of history, and it's not just because they have interesting speakers, it's because you know what's at the heart of that podcast?
12:03
SPEAKER_09: It's friendship.
12:05
SPEAKER_09: And it comes through every episode.
12:09
SPEAKER_09: Because when it gets right down to it, that ache of eternity in our hearts, friendship is often the next step towards hopefully something that goes even deeper.
12:23
SPEAKER_09: And when it comes to the meaning crisis, I think there is nothing more convincing for people to understand that they are not simply the accumulation of randomly collected atoms that have somehow found themselves into the kind of creature that has a bigger brain than Goliath the alligator in Florida and is therefore disturbed at not being amused or entertained.
12:45
SPEAKER_09: But that at the heart of us are beings that, in fact, have an appetite for eternity.
12:53
SPEAKER_09: And well, all around us are similar beings who have a similar appetite.
13:00
SPEAKER_09: So why don't we go and look for it?
13:17
SPEAKER_08: Paul, thank you very much for that.
13:20
SPEAKER_08: I want to uh start with Tom, and Tom, pull out from this question whatever you want to pull out, really.
13:27
SPEAKER_08: Um Paul mentioned Jordan Peterson a number of times, and so much of the channel and the success, or certainly the the initial bump that your channel got was through through Jordan Peterson.
13:39
SPEAKER_08: Um I've certainly met lots of people who became interested in the Bible and then fascinated by the Bible, and then wanted to find out more and ended up in church.
13:54
SPEAKER_08: And so he became a gateway drug, really, for a lot of people I know in terms of faith.
13:59
SPEAKER_08: I've met people like that who have found Dominion to be, let's not say it's not the same pathway into taking Christianity seriously again.
14:10
SPEAKER_08: Um, but people have certainly read your book and come to see that they are believers too, in a way that has made faith plausible for them.
14:23
SPEAKER_08: When they thought they were utterly faithless, and yet you point out, well no, you believe in me too, and you believe in human rights, you believe in all these liberal values, you too are a believer, and it's become plausible for them to take steps of Christian faith.
14:37
SPEAKER_08: How do you feel uh representing that kind of figure?
14:44
SPEAKER_01: Um am I on?
14:45
SPEAKER_01: Can you Yeah, yeah.
14:48
SPEAKER_01: Well so I I wrote I wrote a book um about ten years ago on uh the origins of Islam, which ended up taking quite a sceptical perspective on um the stories told by Muslims about Muhammad, about the Quran, about uh the early history of Islam.
15:10
SPEAKER_01: And I remember doing a book event, and there was a Muslim in the audience who said, um, why have you why have you written this book?
15:20
SPEAKER_01: Uh you know, it why are you doing this to our beliefs?
15:25
SPEAKER_01: You you would never do this to your own beliefs.
15:27
SPEAKER_01: Why aren't you doing, you know, why are you doing it?
15:29
SPEAKER_01: And I felt the sting of that uh charge.
15:33
SPEAKER_01: Um but I had also begun to question my own beliefs.
15:39
SPEAKER_01: Because I found the process of questioning Islam uh why you know why why did I think that um uh the Quran had not come from God?
15:51
SPEAKER_01: Because I I I I didn't believe in God.
15:53
SPEAKER_01: I I I didn't believe that any of this supernatural stuff was possible.
15:58
SPEAKER_01: Uh and you know, and if you're writing a history, um uh of course you have to explain um everything in human terms.
16:05
SPEAKER_01: That was my conviction.
16:07
SPEAKER_01: Um and and so I wrote it thinking, I I guess naively that I was being neutral.
16:12
SPEAKER_01: But of course, that question from the Muslim in the audience reminded me that I wasn't remotely being neutral, that that my disbelief in the divine origins of the Quran was as much a belief as the Muslim belief that it did come from God.
16:25
SPEAKER_01: Um and I the the process of writing that book had already started to clarify for me all kinds of senses and suspicions that my my humanism, my secularism, my liberalism actually were a kind of, you know, they they they they were a belief system.
16:44
SPEAKER_01: And so just as looking at Islam and not accepting that it came from God and therefore had to have come from somewhere else, uh, and the question of where else might it have come from involved asking some you know, from the Muslim point of view, some quite awkward questions about Jewish or Christian or Zoroastrian or whatever influences on what becomes Islam.
17:05
SPEAKER_01: So similarly, I was starting to uh uh question the origins of my beliefs and coming to recognise that they had not originated in the Enlightenment because the Enlightenment was too similar to the Reformation.
17:18
SPEAKER_01: Just as you know, the Quran is too similar to um to Jewish and and Christian and Zoroastrian writings.
17:28
SPEAKER_01: The line of descent, the process of evolution seemed too evident.
17:31
SPEAKER_01: And likewise the Reformation emerges from centuries and centuries before that, and starting to recognise that even that in a way atheism is a kind of logical endpoint, I think, of Christianity.
17:45
SPEAKER_01: That Christianity So Christianity has its roots obviously in in the Old Testament.
17:53
SPEAKER_01: And the Old Testament is all about uh prophets um vulminating against people who think that there is the divine in springs or in hills or in trees or whatever, and saying, no, there isn't.
18:05
SPEAKER_01: And the Christian missionaries, when they you know, in the early Middle Ages, when they're going into the dripping forest of Saxony and chopping down trees, they're saying to the Saxons, these trees have nothing.
18:15
SPEAKER_01: God is manifest all around, but he's not in a tree.
18:18
SPEAKER_01: You shouldn't worship a tree.
18:20
SPEAKER_01: Um and in a sense, in the Reformation, uh Protestants are applying that lesson to the Roman Church.
18:28
SPEAKER_01: And there's a sense in which atheists now are applying that lesson to the Christian Church in total.
18:34
SPEAKER_01: They're simply saying, you know, we you have to bleed everything of, dare I say, the sacral.
18:40
SPEAKER_01: You have to drain it of uh anything that might be redolent of the divine.
18:46
SPEAKER_01: Um I I I just came to the conclusion that even the most fundamental lack of belief is is is merely an expression of Christian belief.
18:56
SPEAKER_01: And I felt both I felt both kind of helpless, really, in in in the way that I feel sometimes helpless when I'm aware of you know my the kind of the uh the mammalian instincts that reach all the way back to some primordial blob in a Pre-Cambrian sea.
19:15
SPEAKER_01: You know, there's no escaping it.
19:17
SPEAKER_01: Um so likewise I feel I'm so much the creature of the inheritance of of Christianity in this country and and and before that, that in a way there's no escaping it.
19:27
SPEAKER_01: But I also kind of felt liberated because I suddenly realized that actually the the these beliefs you know in in the secular or in human rights or whatever, which had actually always seemed to me slightly anemic, slightly, slightly dull, were actually if they were rooted in Christian faith, a lot more exciting.
19:51
SPEAKER_01: Um I mean it didn't that didn't mean I actually literally believed in the resurrection of Jesus or angels or anything, but but it made it much more dramatic to think that this is where it had come from.
20:04
SPEAKER_01: Um and actually, rather than kind of shrinking from from that origin, I rather I have rather embraced it.
20:10
SPEAKER_08: Yes.
20:10
SPEAKER_08: So and and how do you feel about that?
20:13
SPEAKER_08: So i i've I've heard you say that to believe in human rights is as theological as to believe that Jesus Christ rose from the dead and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
20:21
SPEAKER_08: And I think you've helped others to take that journey too, of thinking there's a whole range of things that I cannot prove mathematically or logically or put into a test tube, and yet I take it as real, I live my life on it, I sacrifice for it, I may as well, I may as well believe.
20:39
SPEAKER_08: Um how do you feel being a person who has helped others take that journey?
20:50
SPEAKER_01: I think on one level, I I feel completely neutral about it.
20:55
SPEAKER_01: Because I I've written, you know, when you write a book of history, you have to write what you think.
21:00
SPEAKER_01: Uh that's what you do.
21:02
SPEAKER_01: You're not right so you're not writing it as a philosopher, you're not writing it as a Christian apologist, you're not writing it, uh say as you wrote your book as a Christian.
21:09
SPEAKER_01: I I I objectively I I have no view on it.
21:12
SPEAKER_01: I have simply written what I think is the case.
21:15
SPEAKER_01: And I strongly and passionately believe that the argument of Dominion, that basically in almost every way, that the culture of the West is saturated with Christian assumptions.
21:26
SPEAKER_01: I j I I utterly believe that to be the case.
21:28
SPEAKER_01: So in that sense, uh you know, in the same way that I think that you know Julius Caesar was assassinated or Napoleon died, I would say, hell no, you know, that's these are just historical facts that I I feel in that sense neutral about.
21:40
SPEAKER_01: But in the other sense, I I think that um I I I I I I do I do quite like kind of prodding the humanists.
21:55
SPEAKER_01: And I say that as someone who was a humanist myself, so I have the kind of thrill.
22:00
SPEAKER_01: of of apost you know apostasy really so you know but I shouldn't really tell a whole full of Christian ministers I just love seeing some shrill dogmatic atheist coming out with Christian stuff and just occasionally pointing it out to the public which is very very unchristian thing to do we would we would never want to I know you wouldn't but but I can't confess my sins in such an audience welcome back so Paul when when did you come across Tom's work and how did it strike you as as you were first hearing his thesis in certain traditions of the church there's a real antithesis you're in or you're out you're saved or you're lost and in for example my tradition is Dutch Calvinism you have Abraham Kuyper and he emphasized both the antithesis and also common grace and what Tom's thesis he he's given me actually a number of things that I've found extraordinarily helpful but but the nexus of it was the fact that I increasingly saw as I think we get further and further away from modernity that the assumptions of our world are have been sort of um Christian sleepwalking.
23:38
SPEAKER_09: And so they're having atheist dreams they're having dreams of I don't know world domination through technology and science they're having all of these dreams but they're essentially Christian sleepwalking and and what's been happening in modernity is that they're bumping into things and if they wake up they might discover that secular isn't quite the thing they thought it was.
24:06
SPEAKER_09: I was on a podcast in the Netherlands and it was not a Christian podcast or anything and the the academic asked me what I thought of this very secular place called the Netherlands.
24:18
SPEAKER_09: And I told him I think it's a much less secular place than California where I live and he found that shocking because well California has megachurches and Christians and all of those things.
24:31
SPEAKER_09: But I said you know the stones are crying out in your streets here.
24:35
SPEAKER_09: Christianity is built into the buildings it's built into the structures of your towns I can't go through the Dutch countryside and not see all of these church spires that connected heaven and earth to the little towns.
24:49
SPEAKER_09: And then I met someone who said in South Africa they weren't allowed to start a town until they first had a church.
24:57
SPEAKER_09: And so I told him even though with all of the babbling Christians in North America I think it's more secular than your land and he was shocked.
25:11
SPEAKER_09: And Tom was the one that opened my eyes to that.
25:15
SPEAKER_09: Yes.
25:16
SPEAKER_08: Yes when you when you say that secular is one more gift of the Christian revolution to the world it's it's kind of it's kind of eye-opening.
25:24
SPEAKER_08: Tom you said um that atheism might be a logical endpoint to Christianity.
25:31
SPEAKER_08: If that is so then I guess mission in the middle of the meaning crisis might be working at odds.
25:37
SPEAKER_08: You know if if if atheism is the endpoint of Christianity then I guess we ought not to be reviving the Christian myths, we ought not to be retelling the old old story or how do those things relate?
25:49
SPEAKER_01: Well I I I think there is a real problem which I've talked about before which is that basically Christianity has won.
25:56
SPEAKER_01: So you saw that manifest in the in the pandemic that people took for granted that the young should make incredible sacrifices for the sake of the old and that the healthy should make incredible sacrifices for the sick and this was taken for granted.
26:10
SPEAKER_01: And welfare states exist as a monument to traditions that in Christianity go back to at least the second century AD and and at the time were utterly radical, unprecedented you know the very concept of a welfare state didn't exist.
26:29
SPEAKER_01: And essentially so much that made the church distinctive has been nationalised.
26:34
SPEAKER_01: And I think that's a massive problem for for for churches everywhere.
26:38
SPEAKER_01: I mean I I I think it was and again I I I said this during the pandemic that I I thought it was there was a huge missed opportunity for say the Church of England who by and large the leading figures I thought in the church were content to play the role of kind of minor functionaries in the welfare state you know to tell people to wear masks and wash their hands which I'm sure was was excellent advice and very valuable but there were lots of other people to say that as well.
27:05
SPEAKER_01: What they were not doing was talking about the book of Job or you know the the the all the kind of mad weird stuff that basically if you even if you're a Christian minister why aren't you talking about this stuff?
27:21
SPEAKER_01: Because that's that's the unique selling point.
27:23
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
27:24
SPEAKER_01: Talking about washing hands is not the unique selling point.
27:28
SPEAKER_01: Talking about plagues boils there you there you speak there you see but because what people wanted to know in the in the pandemic was why you know what's going on and it was it was a why that was more than just you know did it escape from a lab or did it come from a bat uh it was more than that it was kind of what is going on how do I how do we process this how do we understand that and I think that you know as as the horsemen of the apocalypse continue to gallop uh across certainly Europe perhaps less so in in gas rich United States but um you know we're facing hard you know I so so so one of the things is okay is that um we are we are returned we have returned to a world where winter is something to be dreaded we've had that for three years now so we had two years where we knew that the pandemic was going to be worse in the winter and that feeling as autumn came this is going to be this is going to be grim.
28:24
SPEAKER_01: And now we've got you know people are going to be cold people are going to be hungry people may be dying from cold we've got the threat of war on Europe's frontiers it's going to probably get worse that's going to get worse.
28:35
SPEAKER_01: So people are looking forward with real dread and I've read over and over again that people are saying well you know Christmas is going to be something really special this year.
28:45
SPEAKER_01: And I've you know what it was really striking both the two years and the pandemic Christmas really mattered.
28:50
SPEAKER_01: And I think there was a sense that this was about more than just you know people want to meet up although of course they did uh people uh having presents or all the things that they couldn't have I think it was about feeling that there is in in the heart of winter in the depth of winter there is this kind of point of light and hope which was you know is drawing on what Christmas would have meant to people in a world without central heating or a world without germ theory.
29:17
SPEAKER_01: Yeah uh and and I think that um it present there is the sense when we're talking about the meaning I think the meaning I think I think we live in a world where that the sense of meaning that is imminent say in the cycle of the Christian year has been lost.
29:31
SPEAKER_01: Because we all have central heating we all have or air conditioning in California or whatever.
29:35
SPEAKER_01: You know you lose the sense of the rhythm of the of the season.
29:38
SPEAKER_01: But those great feasts of the church of which really only Christmas and perhaps Easter remain in the popular consciousness I I I think that that there is huge scope at the moment as we become more aware of the passing of the seasons I think for the church to amplify that.
29:54
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
29:55
SPEAKER_01: So you know the the festivals that that punctuate the harvest that punctuate you know all souls you know all these kind of other festivals I and I I think the kind of the sense of of the strange within the passing of the seasons would be for me an absolute classic example of where I think the church should be investing.
30:15
SPEAKER_01: I I don't know whether that is that too papist an argument but but I think I mean I think I think you know the sense that because I think the sense that what one of the things that Christianity brings for people is the sense of a communion with people countless generations who've lived before and one of the things I thought when I went to churches during the pandemic once we were allowed to go to churches in the pandemic was I am doing something that people have done in the Spanish flu, in the Great Plague of London, in the Black Death, probably in the Justinianic Plague who knows that it it it it it kind of humbles you before the span of all the the the generations that have gone before you and by humbling you makes you feel part of a continuum and therefore enables and raises you.
31:04
SPEAKER_01: And again I think that that is something that I I just think it's this huge huge accumulation of spiritual spiritual wealth that it seems to me the church is not currently using.
31:19
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
31:19
SPEAKER_01: That it's it's it's it's sitting in this incredible property and it's kind of kind of using it's kind of squatting in a in a a slightly jerry-built bungalow that's been attached to it.
31:31
SPEAKER_01: Yes that may be slightly harsh but you know but I could go out and explore that incredible sprawling massive moving edifice that is the accumulated wisdom of of the church that was historian Tom Holland speaking about mission in the meaning crisis and there's plenty more where that came from.
31:58
SPEAKER_00: With the help of Christy Mayer we'll be diving into this very topic during the Speak Life vision evening and you yes you are invited.
32:09
SPEAKER_00: It's happening from 8 to 9.30pm UK time on Thursday the 20th of October.
32:16
SPEAKER_00: To sign up go to speaklife.org.uk forward slash vision along with hearing from Christy Mayer and the Speak Life team you'll get a first sneak peek at our new evangelistic course and you'll be the first to know about our exciting plans for creative evangelism.
32:36
SPEAKER_00: This really is a unique opportunity and it's completely free.
32:41
SPEAKER_00: Whether you've been following Speak Life for hours or for years whether you live in England or Djibouti join us over Zoom as we think about the future of Speak Life.
32:52
SPEAKER_01: That's Thursday the 20th of October at 8pm let's tell the greatest story of all time the illustration I always use is Christianity is this massive cathedral that so much mission has been standing outside the cathedral in the sort of tourist information booth with a tiny little pamphlet and with a thumbnail sketch explaining how the building works and just throw them in the building I writing Dominion I I I I had to kind of read you know various church fathers or or preachers or whatever or poets or whoever you know period for period for period period period and every time I wrote that I thought wow this is amazing I could I could happily spend years researching this but then I have to move on to another one it it was so brilliant to have that opportunity and what again and again opened my eyes was the incredible wealth beauty sophistication and ability to kind of open my eyes and make my heart sing in a way that I had not anticipated and which I had simply never heard from anyone involved in in the church when I had been going to church.
34:06
SPEAKER_01: Wow heartbreaking in so many ways um but it may also be a reflection on on the inadequacy of my church attendance which is I think much likely but I just I just think there is you know there is so much wealth there.
34:21
SPEAKER_09: Yes and you're noticing as well Paul that um those who in a meaning crisis are fleeing back to something more substantial tend to be fleeing back to something that is liturgical that is sacramental that that has the the the seasons and that and that kind of thing is that your experience it's been it's been interesting I'm a Dutch Calvinist pastor and all the things that I do on YouTube people after people come to me and say Paul I'm you know I'm solidifying my relationships I'm going to church and I'm going to be Orthodox and it's like Orthodox?
35:00
SPEAKER_09: You know how difficult it can be to find an Orthodox church and then once you find one it's not the seeker sensitive thing.
35:10
SPEAKER_09: You're going to maybe ask to be you know a Catholic human and then you're gonna spend a year doing that.
35:17
SPEAKER_09: No communion for you yet and at the end of it I talked to Paul Kingsnorth yesterday and he said yeah when I got baptized it was in a river in the cold and um and so then you're going to church and you're standing up and you might be listening to some Romanian or some um Greek or some even Russian and so why this church and I remember Tom an unbelievable talking about the pandemic and and I thought two things I thought number one especially for men they need to be challenged and number two it needs to be strange it it and I and that's a funny point but it's a serious point because something has to break in order to really pursue a new life and I think for that reason for many who are sort of hungering for for that eternity to be addressed it's demanding and it's strange.
36:27
SPEAKER_09: And it's not wash your hands and do a little bit here and that'll be alright.
36:32
SPEAKER_08: What was it like for you Tom going to going to church for some of those first times into the strangeness I remember um so I went to uh St.
36:45
SPEAKER_01: Bart's which is you know it's it's the oldest church it's the only church that where both the Virgin Mary and Benjamin Franklin have been basically what's not to lie and it it's it's it's you know it's a Romanesque church.
37:03
SPEAKER_01: It dates back to the 12th century and I love old things so that's the huge I'm not denying that's a huge part of the appeal for me but it it it um I I found I I I think because I'd been so starved of live entertainment that I found the sense of it as a great drama incredibly powerful.
37:22
SPEAKER_01: Yeah uh the the way in which um the Bible readings and the structure of the liturgy were telling a story that was a drama that that the that the everybody could participate in I found incredibly moving.
37:38
SPEAKER_01: And again I think part of the part of the problem you talk about meaning I just think there's a meaning overlay we have so much information we have so much entertainment it's almost impossible these days to be bored because you know stimulation is every every point and I think one of the things about coming out of the uh the um out of the pandemic and going to going to a church like that was to was to realise just how intense the impact of a church service would have been in a world where there basically wasn't anything else to do.
38:06
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
38:07
SPEAKER_01: So maybe you just need to shut down the internet that'll that'll work for you.
38:12
SPEAKER_01: I mean I so I I I I I and I think that you know on the subject of meaning I think that everywhere I so I think and again I've said this before I think the 1960s will be seen by historians in the 23rd or 24th centuries as a decade on a par with the 1520s that it's it's uh it it's a kind of convulsive process of reformation and it took people several decades before you know in the 16th century before they realized they were living in the Reformation.
38:40
SPEAKER_01: And so likewise I don't think there's a quite a word for what we've been going through.
38:44
SPEAKER_01: But clearly it's it's it's a just as as the Reformation was a reaction against um what was seen as a corrupt Roman church I think a sizable part of the of the Reformation of the 60s was a reaction against what was seen as against Christianity full stop.
39:01
SPEAKER_01: But the the the rhythms and the impulses remain completely Christian.
39:05
SPEAKER_01: But I think and and I think the problem is that by jettisoning scripture by jettisoning the habit of going to church by jettisoning the rituals by jettisoning the feast days by jettisoning everything that in the Protestant churches as in the in the in the Catholic church had given structure to belief and a kind of explanation for belief that has been jettisoned and and so as a result people are are looking around for other frameworks other other ways to kind of to kind of clothes hangers from which to hang the clothes oh god my metaphor is going all over the case basically they feel things so deeply and they lack they lack a structure for these feelings so I I think that one of the one of the structures is a a a strong sense that the Nazis are are incredibly are the ultimate in evil and a desire to fight them.
40:05
SPEAKER_01: And you can see that you know online if you go and make any faintly controversial statement you'll be accused of being a Nazi within three minutes everyone knows that.
40:13
SPEAKER_01: That's an expression of the desire to fight the devil I think in a way and you can see it in in the the language that is used about the war in Ukraine you know Putin is Hitler.
40:23
SPEAKER_01: People find that quite exciting I mean it's a terrible thing to say but they find it exciting it gives a sense of meaning it gives a sense of light and and and dark of of uh of truth and falsehood it it it it it it gives people a sense of meaning.
40:36
SPEAKER_01: I think it was absolutely manifest in the uh the reaction to the uh the murder of George Floyd I think you know the the the the the the the religious manifestations of that were often very very overt uh but the you know the the rituals the taking of the knee the uh the the the the the the confession I mean you know it it was fairly obvious that these were drawing on deep-seated Christian beliefs but but they were expressive of a desire for for justice for all kinds of things you know to see the last become first and all that kind of stuff I mean deeply Christian impulses but because it was without a set ritual the rituals had to be invented and I was thinking I and I was thinking because we've just done two podcasts on thank you so much for for very very grateful on Tolkien with all the the palaver around the um the Amazon thing that I I think in a way the success of of Lord of the Rings is also a kind of manifestation of that because Tolkien's very obviously very devout Catholic it was incredibly important to him and I think the popularity of Lord of the Rings is expressive of a way in which Tolkien is articulating deep deep Christian myths and I use the word myth in the Tolkien sense I'm not meaning it's false I'm meaning it's you know it it's something deeply deeply felt um and I think the power of that the reason for its popularity is because it's it's chiming with these deep-seated cultural Christian echoes and people can feel them without necessarily kind of buying into you know the all the baggage that comes with institutional Christianity.
42:15
SPEAKER_01: So I I and my feeling is for what it's worth is that the church to compete with you know all these other traditions that are kind of emerging and ways for people to to to to focus their these kind of incoate Christian instincts that that it it needs to kind of re-glamorise the story to a degree.
42:37
SPEAKER_01: It needs to make it strange it needs to make it because it is a very weird story.
42:41
SPEAKER_01: I mean it's a very odd story um and I I think I think this the kind of slight sense of embarrassment about the Old Testament for instance you know um kind of slight Marcionite quality I think to the modern church and and I think that that's something that needs to be dealt with because I think I think the kind of you know it's the Silmarillion isn't it I think I think it's all or nothing.
43:10
SPEAKER_08: I think just pile into all the kind of all or nothing re-glamorize the story.
43:15
SPEAKER_08: Okay let me ask the same question to you both and then we'll throw it open to uh to the room but maybe maybe Tom can go first and then Paul but the question is if Christianity has won and now we have a large welfare state now we have we now we have agreed that we should lock down to um sacrifice the strong for the sake of the weak um now that we have a great awokening we don't need a great awakening right what would you what would you say if if we have if atheism is the sort of logical endpoint of the the the reformatio that's been happening um why go back?
43:59
SPEAKER_08: Surely this is This is just the logical endpoints.
44:02
SPEAKER_01: Do you well it I mean it may be.
44:04
SPEAKER_08: Yeah.
44:04
SPEAKER_08: It may be.
44:06
SPEAKER_01: I think that there are you know there are various kind of possibilities.
44:09
SPEAKER_01: And one is absolutely that uh Christianity has played its part.
44:13
SPEAKER_01: It's kind of like the you know the rocket booster, got us through the atmosphere, and now liberalism can just you know sail its merry way on through the inky vast vastness of space.
44:23
SPEAKER_01: So you know, maybe maybe.
44:26
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so maybe so maybe that's fine.
44:27
SPEAKER_01: Or or maybe uh you know, uh uh as basically Nietzsche argued, you can't really have uh Christian values without Christian belief.
44:37
SPEAKER_01: And in the long run, uh you know, if you're if you're not watering the soil, the bloom will fade.
44:44
SPEAKER_01: Um and I think and the implications of that would be very alarming.
44:49
SPEAKER_01: You know, and we have you know we have seen what that might mean.
44:52
SPEAKER_01: We've seen what that might mean.
44:55
SPEAKER_01: Because we've we've we've we've fascism was all about the utter rejection, not just of institutional Christianity, as the French Revolution was and the Russian Revolution, but about the rejection of its core value, so the value that there is no Greek or Jew.
45:11
SPEAKER_01: Of course the Nazis completely thought there were differences between the Greek and Jew.
45:15
SPEAKER_01: And the and and um and the rejection of the idea that the strong have a duty of care to the weak, and that there's value in weakness.
45:21
SPEAKER_01: The Nazis obviously completely rejected that.
45:23
SPEAKER_01: And I think the shock and the horror of that was so intense that we as a society are now kind of living off the capital of that.
45:29
SPEAKER_01: But it may be that that will fade, and and and the kind of I think the kind of natural instinct of humans, which is to is to worship the strong, will come back in, and particularly if things start to go really really wrong with the economy and with you know, I mean, go wrong earth than there already, already is.
45:47
SPEAKER_01: Um, I mean we may enter very dark times from a from a Christian perspective.
45:52
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
45:52
SPEAKER_01: Uh but but but uh but the third option is to make a virtue of the fact that you know the Nietzsche in a point that you can't really have Christian, you know, that these values are all fundamentally theological.
46:04
SPEAKER_01: If you want to believe in human rights, the point will come when, and I think you can see that already happening in India, say in Turkey, where people will turn around and say, what about that?
46:17
SPEAKER_01: You know, or the secular or anything like that.
46:19
SPEAKER_01: Uh, you know, these are just kind of mad quick Western imports.
46:23
SPEAKER_01: Um and people who want to defend that will have to start looking at the the history, the origins of these things, and that may well lead them to come back to the church.
46:33
SPEAKER_01: I mean, that's certainly the the path that I've been on is you know, I I recognizing that these beliefs that are important to me that the rocket fuel for these beliefs is not what I thought they were.
46:51
SPEAKER_01: And I want that rocket fuel therefore to be as strong as it possibly can be.
46:54
SPEAKER_01: And I I I you know, maybe I mean there's always the risk of identifying your own feelings with the broad sweep of history.
47:02
SPEAKER_01: So I don't want to do that.
47:03
SPEAKER_01: But I think I bet but it may well be that that what I'm going through is something that lots of people are going through because we're all experiencing the same kind of thing.
47:11
SPEAKER_01: So I I so maybe it won't maybe maybe it will, you know, maybe Christianity will die, as John Lennon said.
47:18
SPEAKER_01: Uh maybe it will mutate into something the worship of the strong, uh, the validation of differences between you know the abandonment of the idea that that all uh human beings have an equal value, um, or maybe um the sense of strain that these values and beliefs are coming under will prompt a return to the source, yeah.
47:41
SPEAKER_01: Um and and a kind of recognition that actually the the Christian story is the best version of all these other stories that are starting to emerge from it.
47:49
SPEAKER_06: Yeah, thank you, thank you.
47:50
SPEAKER_08: Well said.
47:51
SPEAKER_08: Paul, how would you answer the same question?
47:55
SPEAKER_09: There are a lot of Viking programs on Netflix.
48:01
SPEAKER_09: And one of the amazing things about so many of these Viking stories is that you have these people with beards that look like mine and a lot more muscles, and they come out of the north with better ships and you know, invade monasteries, and the priests die at their hands and on and on and on.
48:20
SPEAKER_09: But what the Viking stories usually struggle with telling is that in the end, the Vikings get conquered by the religion of the people that they brutalized.
48:34
SPEAKER_09: How?
48:35
SPEAKER_09: That's a difficult thing to answer.
48:38
SPEAKER_09: In the United States, the most Christian group, uh, the most Christian demographic group of American citizens are African Americans, the group of people that I grew up with in Patterson and continue to minister to in Sacramento, and you would imagine that people taken out of their homes in Africa and brought to North America and put into a sort of modern industrial agricultural servitude would hate the religion of their masters.
49:10
SPEAKER_09: And instead, what happened was that they took that religion, gave it a few different twists, and in fact have held it longer and harder than the slavery that was used to enslave them.
49:32
SPEAKER_09: G.K.
49:33
SPEAKER_09: Chesterton in his last chapter of The Everlasting Man says, Christianity has died many deaths.
49:41
SPEAKER_09: And it's still here because our God knows the way out of the grave.
49:47
SPEAKER_09: Now I spend a lot of time with Orthodox people like Jonathan Peugeot and the people who watch my channel, and there's a lot of hand-wringing about the Enlightenment.
49:56
SPEAKER_09: Oh, I wish the Protestant Reformation never would have happened.
49:59
SPEAKER_09: The Protestant Reformation hadn't happened, yada yada.
50:05
SPEAKER_09: And they say that on YouTube with electricity and all the things that the Enlightenment gave us.
50:10
SPEAKER_09: I don't know.
50:12
SPEAKER_09: And I know that many think that, well, maybe this has sort of played itself out.
50:21
SPEAKER_09: I don't I don't think so.
50:24
SPEAKER_09: And I don't think so because there's a way in which, in a variety of things in history, once you see it and it happens, it can't be unseen.
50:36
SPEAKER_09: So a young woman who was watching my channel, she was in the army, she had a divorce, she had a child, she had a new marriage, went into orthodoxy, and you know, going into orthodoxy, she had to submit, she learned submission, and then the orthodox priest said, We're gonna wear masks in church.
50:55
SPEAKER_09: And she didn't like that.
50:57
SPEAKER_09: So she decided she wasn't gonna go to church, so she sat down on her front lawn and she opened up her Orthodox Study Bible and realized I'm still a Protestant.
51:11
SPEAKER_09: In all the work that I'm doing, I I believe that the harvest teaches the harvesters to gather in.
51:20
SPEAKER_09: And I really don't know, and I know I get criticism from some of my colleagues on this, I really don't know the new shape of Christianity.
51:28
SPEAKER_09: I think it's telling that a lot of people are looking at orthodoxy, something that won't change.
51:34
SPEAKER_09: And there are a lot of reasons for that.
51:37
SPEAKER_09: But yet they've all passed through the Enlightenment and modernity, and and I tend to think that what we will see will be again another something we've seen again and again in history, where the church seemingly falls apart, and many of its riches are lost or forgotten, only to have something new, usually struggling, sometimes kind of heretical, usually a little misshapen and lost, but eventually things emerge out of that.
52:11
SPEAKER_09: And I think we will continue to see it, and all of my work is involved in, for the most part, when I come to an event like this, what I most want to do is listen.
52:23
SPEAKER_09: Because I do believe that God is at work, and he is using surprising people in surprising ways to continue the story.
52:35
SPEAKER_09: And the most remarkable thing about Christianity is I think if you drop St.
52:39
SPEAKER_09: Augustine into a deeply reformed North American church that loves to parade his name, it would probably find it unintelligible.
52:50
SPEAKER_09: And they might find Augustine unintelligible.
52:53
SPEAKER_09: Yet somehow through this story, we have imagined that there is a thread that somehow connects those Hebrew prophets complaining about gods of stock and stone, and Jesus who says in the Gospel of Mark, it's not what you put into your mouth that makes you unclean, it's what's in your heart, and this continual, these continual tensions that Tom writes about incredibly beautifully in his book Dominion, unavailable at many shops.
53:20
SPEAKER_09: I guess that's where you but those tensions continue to work their way through.
53:30
SPEAKER_09: And I believe we are, I agree with him 100% about his regard for the importance of the 60s, and I think we will continue to work our way through, and the church will once again fall, be refined, restored, and that process will continue.
53:49
SPEAKER_08: There is a case to be made against the sexual revolution, uh, as Louise Perry would say, and uh her book is available next door as well.
53:57
SPEAKER_08: Um, a fascinating read.
53:59
SPEAKER_08: Uh so I said I was gonna throw it open to the floor.
54:02
SPEAKER_08: Do we have someone to run around with questions?
54:05
SPEAKER_08: Hands in the air, we've got a mic there and a mic there.
54:08
SPEAKER_08: Who's got a question?
54:09
SPEAKER_08: Rory?
54:10
SPEAKER_08: Let's see you first.
54:11
SPEAKER_08: For those playing uh Rest is History Bingo, we've had Sacral.
54:16
SPEAKER_08: And for those playing Paul Vanderclay Bingo, we've had Patterson, New Jersey.
54:19
SPEAKER_05: So thank you.
54:21
SPEAKER_05: And this one is fascinating.
54:23
SPEAKER_05: Thank you for the discussion this evening.
54:24
SPEAKER_05: It's been quite good.
54:25
SPEAKER_05: And this one's for Tom.
54:27
SPEAKER_05: Um you've bemoaned a lot about the church being very much silent or giving some hand washing advice during the pandemic.
54:35
SPEAKER_05: What charge would you have to this winter to for the church leaders that isn't just putting on an extra little jumper on or maybe install a little bit more insulation?
54:50
SPEAKER_01: Um I guess to provide the comfort, but not false comfort, that is drawn from the Bible, I guess, and from the great heritage of Christian writers, uh, Christian festivals that have provided comfort to people who have gone through cold winters before.
55:28
SPEAKER_01: Um I mean the the fact that the year has summers and winters and that it's hot and then it's cold is kind of woven into the language of the Bible and it's woven into the uh the the pattern of the Christian year.
55:46
SPEAKER_01: And there will be any number of of uh of government officials and public health officials and all kinds of people like that offering advice on uh uh you know how to cope with fuel bills and and all that kind of stuff.
56:04
SPEAKER_01: And I I understand that the temptation must be because priests have have public roles.
56:10
SPEAKER_01: They they are people who who who can offer advice and help.
56:14
SPEAKER_01: Uh and and so I entirely understand the the impulse to feel well we that that's what we should be doing, but there are other people who will be doing that.
56:23
SPEAKER_01: And I think what what obviously what what Christian priests uniquely can offer is a distinctively Christian perspective, and and that for is is what I would be looking for.
56:33
SPEAKER_01: I would be looking for, you know, what does the Bible say about this?
56:36
SPEAKER_01: What have the church fathers said about this?
56:38
SPEAKER_01: What what have what what what do we get from the festivals traditionally?
56:44
SPEAKER_01: What are the what are the dishes for the festival you know the festivals?
56:47
SPEAKER_01: Uh what you know, and Christmas would be the obvious, obvious, obvious gateway drug for this.
56:53
SPEAKER_01: People are in a mood to hear that, the light amid the darkness and all that kind of stuff.
56:57
SPEAKER_01: And I think that, you know, just the on the most basic level, thinking about the opening to John's Gospel, I mean that will have an incredible power this year.
57:06
SPEAKER_01: Because that is bread of an age where darkness is properly something to be dreaded in a way that probably for the first time this year, you know, in a long time, you know, it will have an incre you know, the force of that will have an incredible power.
57:23
SPEAKER_01: So I I I am looking forward to hearing that from priests and from church leaders.
57:30
SPEAKER_01: Offering solace and explanation for what is going on in ways that that are not to do with the news cycle and not to do with the kind of stuff that that everyone else is talking about.
57:45
SPEAKER_01: But but specifically drawing on that heritage.
57:48
SPEAKER_08: Yeah.
57:49
SPEAKER_08: Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
57:52
SPEAKER_08: Um who else has got a question?
57:55
SPEAKER_08: Um, thanks for coming.
58:00
SPEAKER_07: Another one for you, Tom.
58:01
SPEAKER_07: Just picking up on the the mission of a mission of meaning and the fact that you um touched on a little bit of your interaction with Muslim people and someone who every so often goes to speaker's corner and interacts with Muslims there, I'd be really interested to know from someone you know who's a well-recognised historian, if you were to judge, or if you were to give a mark out of, say, a hundred for the evidence just the evidence of Jesus Christ, and then if you do the same exercise, you know, say out of a hundred for the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, if you were to give the mark out of a hundred.
58:34
SPEAKER_01: I can give you exactly what you want.
58:38
SPEAKER_01: The evidence for the crucifixion of somebody called Jesus is, I would say, uh, 99% wow.
58:45
SPEAKER_01: The evidence for pretty much everything that the traditional accounts of of Mohammed say, I think there are elements that clearly are historical, uh, but but it it's I mean is it we're not really comparing like with like.
59:01
SPEAKER_01: Uh so let's say um the evidence that Muhammad fled Mecca, said the Hijra.
59:11
SPEAKER_01: Um I think it's a lot more complicated.
59:14
SPEAKER_01: I think there was a Hijra, but I don't think he fled from probably from what's Mecca.
59:17
SPEAKER_01: Uh and I think that's been kind of endlessly recycled, and the model of the uh of the Hijrah is uh you know is modelled on Exodus and all kinds of ways like that.
59:25
SPEAKER_01: So I think that is much, much more complicated.
59:27
SPEAKER_01: I think I would say that there is almost no reputable historian who would argue against the fact that that somebody called Jesus was crucified.
59:39
SPEAKER_07: Then what do you say to Muslims who believe that he existed or wasn't they believe that evidence, but they don't believe the evidence of the crucifixion.
59:47
SPEAKER_07: As a historian, what do you when you interact with what do you actually say on basically?
59:50
SPEAKER_01: I mean it seems to be that I mean that seems to me uh absolutely one of the reasons why I I do not think that uh the Quran comes from God is that it's recycling the gospel of Basilides.
1:00:00
SPEAKER_01: Uh and I don't think that God would be pumping out Gnostic Gospels from the late second century.
1:00:08
SPEAKER_01: You know, when even Tacitus knows that Jesus was crucified.
1:00:12
SPEAKER_01: I mean so I mean I just think I just think it's very bad history, the Quran.
1:00:18
SPEAKER_01: I'll be quoting on that.
1:00:19
SPEAKER_01: Tom Holland says the Quran isn't isn't claiming to be history, it's a completely different, you know.
1:00:26
SPEAKER_01: It's you have to you know what one of the things about the Gospels is that it's very important to them that they're situated in a given place and given time.
1:00:36
SPEAKER_01: So is it Luke where he he he says, you know, it's in the reign of Tiberius, it gives all the details of the Roman apparatus of state control in that part of the world to say this is what happened when it did.
1:00:50
SPEAKER_01: Uh and it's shaped by it seems to be pretty pain by classical traditions of historiography.
1:00:55
SPEAKER_01: But the Quran is I mean the Quran is something radically, radically different and weird.
1:00:59
SPEAKER_01: And I think it's very, you know, it's it's it's very, very different, difficult for people raised in a kind of a a Christian tradition, I think, to get a handle on what the Quran is about.
1:01:12
SPEAKER_06: Come with me next time.
1:01:17
SPEAKER_08: Um Okay, please um thank you so much for for this evening.
1:01:26
SPEAKER_03: So I Tom, you you said briefly we should just turn off the internet.
1:01:31
SPEAKER_03: And so I I want to sort of uh rather in the way that the cardinal said, you know, close stop the printing press.
1:01:40
SPEAKER_03: I'm one of the IT workers that Paul was talking about earlier.
1:01:44
SPEAKER_03: Um keep talking about this a little bit.
1:01:47
SPEAKER_03: No, but I I I want to ask you in the light of you know, like the the future of belief and the future of meaning and how we get out of the meaning crisis and how that relates to the attention, because I think that's what you were talking about, really.
1:02:03
SPEAKER_03: Is um uh my question is not more concrete than that, so I don't know if you can take it from there.
1:02:10
SPEAKER_01: But do you do you understand roughly what I do I understand entirely what you mean that that that we we you know there's too things are too much, you know, there's too much fun.
1:02:17
SPEAKER_01: There's too much on on you know on Netflix or I mean there's this we are never bored.
1:02:24
SPEAKER_01: You never hear the still quite you know quite still voice or contemplation or anything.
1:02:28
SPEAKER_01: There is no space for that.
1:02:30
SPEAKER_01: And there was briefly in the in the in the pandemic, I think, and coming out of the pandemic, suddenly, you know, with all the theatre sharp, the cinema sharp, music venue sharp, you could go to church, you could hear music, you would pay attention to the inherent drama within the liturgy.
1:02:47
SPEAKER_01: And it just seemed intensely uh exciting.
1:02:50
SPEAKER_01: Um the question of how uh a a church can make that seem as exciting as you know the return of Game of Thrones.
1:03:04
SPEAKER_01: I did I I'm not pretending there's an easy answer to that one.
1:03:09
SPEAKER_03: Well just to spin on this a little bit more, you did talk about uh, you know, like unashamedly talking about the old stories and now being ashamed of the Old Testament, and I'm getting back to what you said, Paul, about Jordan Peterson.
1:03:25
SPEAKER_03: That's exactly what he did, right?
1:03:27
SPEAKER_03: And that that got quite a bit of attention.
1:03:29
SPEAKER_03: Anyway, that's just a reflection.
1:03:31
SPEAKER_01: So what I think is that one of the reasons why I compare the 60s to the 1520s is is that Protestantism in England, as I say, in the Netherlands, became very rapidly hegemonic.
1:03:46
SPEAKER_01: And people adjusted very, very rapidly to it, and people who had been Catholic priests adjusted to it very rapidly and started talking in Protestant terms, even perhaps when they weren't aware of it.
1:04:01
SPEAKER_01: So even the Council of Trent, you know, the the smithy of the Counter-Reformation is unthinkable without a Protestant Reformation.
1:04:08
SPEAKER_01: The Catholic Church is, as it exists today, is as much a product of the Reformation as the Protestant churches are.
1:04:14
SPEAKER_01: And I think the risk for for the for for the Christian churches in the post-60s Western order is that they just they blur in and become part of the kind of hegemonic ideology, which is liberal, uh secular, sceptical, progressive.
1:04:38
SPEAKER_01: And you know, it's it's it's the thought for the day curse.
1:04:45
SPEAKER_01: You never hear anything on Thought for the Day that you know, there's nothing particularly ever anything distinctive about anything that anybody says on Thought for the Day.
1:04:55
SPEAKER_01: It's always coming from the same kind of you know, you know exactly what everybody who goes on Thought for the Day thinks about pretty much every single issue.
1:05:03
SPEAKER_01: It doesn't matter whether they're Catholic, Anglican, Methodist, Muslim, Buddhist, you know that they're all going to be basically articulating the same liberal nostra.
1:05:15
SPEAKER_01: Because that's that is the hegemonic doctrine.
1:05:17
SPEAKER_01: Everybody thinks that.
1:05:19
SPEAKER_00: And I think that's a good thought for the day to Paul.
1:05:23
SPEAKER_00: Just briefly, you might need to say what thought for the day.
1:05:25
SPEAKER_00: Okay, so thought for the day.
1:05:26
SPEAKER_01: Thought for the day is the God slot on the Radio Four News that is, I think, part of the charter that you have to have someone come on and talk about God for five minutes every just before the eight o'clock news.
1:05:38
SPEAKER_01: And the BBC users hate this so much that they find people who will say nothing distinctive at all.
1:05:46
SPEAKER_01: And I think it's I think it I I think along with uh the the religious studies GTSE, which is what they study up until 15 or 16, it's the single fastest motor for de Christianisation.
1:06:04
SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
1:06:06
SPEAKER_01: And so I think the danger for for Christian leaders in this country is that they just they think the way to be popular and the way to get a hearing is to sound like everybody else.
1:06:16
SPEAKER_01: But it isn't.
1:06:18
SPEAKER_01: Because why would anyone pay any attention to a bishop who is who is saying exactly what everybody else is saying?
1:06:24
SPEAKER_01: But if a bishop is is coming out and banging on about, I don't know, crossing the Red Sea or angels or something, then that's really interesting.
1:06:34
SPEAKER_01: And to go back to the Tolkien thing, and the you know the the the huge excitement around this new TV series.
1:06:44
SPEAKER_01: People love all that stuff.
1:06:46
SPEAKER_01: Elves and you know darkness and orcs and things.
1:06:51
SPEAKER_01: And and and and it's all drawing on, you know, it's it's it's deeply, deeply Christian.
1:06:55
SPEAKER_01: If people are into the into into kind of you know the Erzatz version, I think people would be very into the original version as well.
1:07:03
SPEAKER_01: It's I mean it's it is the best story ever told.
1:07:06
SPEAKER_01: Christianity is the most popular explanation for why we're on this planet that humanity has ever devised.
1:07:14
SPEAKER_01: I mean, whether it's true or not is a different matter.
1:07:17
SPEAKER_01: But but as a matter of historical record, it is the most compelling story.
1:07:23
SPEAKER_01: More people have found it thrilling and moving and exciting and believed in it than in any other comparable conglomeration of stories.
1:07:32
SPEAKER_01: But it it it often seems as though people involved in the churches are somehow embarrassed about these stories.
1:07:41
SPEAKER_01: Which seems to me insane because they're great.
1:07:45
SPEAKER_01: Keep going, keep going.
1:07:49
SPEAKER_01: It's kind of like you know, being uh you know, running the globe and never putting on Shakespeare.
1:07:59
SPEAKER_08: Thank you, John.
1:08:01
SPEAKER_08: Um two more questions.
1:08:02
SPEAKER_08: Uh can we go here and then here?
1:08:05
SPEAKER_08: Um so, John, could you uh purple shirt in the middle or might just be the light?
1:08:12
SPEAKER_08: It might be the effulgence of John Lunger's glory.
1:08:18
SPEAKER_08: There we go.
1:08:19
SPEAKER_02: Thanks.
1:08:20
SPEAKER_02: Um I guess this one's for Paul and Tom equally, and it's sort of about that whole weirdness thing, and about that whole um, you know, tell them the real story thing.
1:08:32
SPEAKER_02: Um should the church, and I guess to clarify, I'm one of these weird post-Peterson sort of Christians, where it's like I've gone along the journey, and explaining that journey to anyone normal is completely pointless.
1:08:49
SPEAKER_02: Because they haven't watched a thousand hours of Paul Van der Klee.
1:08:53
SPEAKER_02: And you know, I might have, but they won't, no matter how many links I send them.
1:09:02
SPEAKER_02: But I guess the point is that because it's so complicated, I think that the thought of the day thing is because if they did start saying all the biblical stuff, there is such a percentage of the population who that's just it for them.
1:09:18
SPEAKER_02: They haven't come across the Peterson journey, they haven't had that initial weigh in.
1:09:23
SPEAKER_02: They hear the Bible, they hear whatever.
1:09:26
SPEAKER_02: The fact that I go to mass is a sort of odd curiosity to my housemates, they just put it down to the fact that I'm Irish.
1:09:32
SPEAKER_02: And it's Tom's book has been really useful because it's a history book.
1:09:39
SPEAKER_02: I've got housemates who listen to the rest of history.
1:09:42
SPEAKER_02: I say I'm going to a Tom Holland thing, they've read the book, they think it's interesting.
1:09:46
SPEAKER_02: That other way in is so much more difficult to explain.
1:09:50
SPEAKER_02: So, in a way, Tom, you've sort of become an accidental fifth columnist for the Christians on this.
1:09:56
SPEAKER_02: And I was wondering, Paul, and I don't know if Tom has anything to add on this, is there a way of distilling the Peterson thing, the Paul Vanderclay thing, the whole idea of there being a mini meaning crisis that is actually digestible in the way that Tom Holland's book is?
1:10:14
SPEAKER_09: So, my my travel companion, John Van Dunk, is a very interesting critter.
1:10:18
SPEAKER_09: He used to be a minister, he'll tell you the story.
1:10:23
SPEAKER_09: American evangelicals have, for a very long time, probably learned from you all, but I won't blame you, tried to sort of distill and package and put in pill form the gospel so that it can be reliably delivered to thousands of people.
1:10:44
SPEAKER_09: There's something deeply idolatrous about that.
1:10:48
SPEAKER_09: So I'm a Calvinist, and a lot of people speculate exactly what kind of a Calvinist am I, because a lot of Calvinists say I'm not sufficient, others say I'm too, whatever.
1:11:01
SPEAKER_09: Many people I know in this strange age have become a Christian through the strangest, weirdest, sometimes supernatural events.
1:11:11
SPEAKER_09: That whether it's a very strange arrangement of history, or one friend of mine dating a Christian girl suddenly on his bed one night, God comes upon him.
1:11:26
SPEAKER_09: Another 80, 96-year-old woman tells me one day, she was always, she's an African-American woman, always struggling with the fear of the Lord, that I don't know what that means, and then God comes to her and and and she just knows it's God, and then a voice says, Do you fear me?
1:11:47
SPEAKER_09: Christian conversion is full of weirdness.
1:11:52
SPEAKER_09: And as a Calvinist, I think God gets to have who he wants.
1:11:57
SPEAKER_09: And I'd warn Jordan Peterson that it's a very dangerous thing to really try to avoid him because this God who would send Israel back for 40 years in the wilderness can go to some pretty alarming lengths to get what he wants.
1:12:14
SPEAKER_09: So I think you should do what you can to be um to be Jesus' witness, as the first chapter of Acts says, and uh let God deal with your friends.
1:12:29
SPEAKER_02: Thank you.
1:12:33
SPEAKER_08: Thank you.
1:12:34
SPEAKER_08: Last question.
1:12:35
SPEAKER_06: Perfect.
1:12:36
SPEAKER_06: Um be interested in the impact of globalization and everything that's sort of been spoken about.
1:12:41
SPEAKER_06: I realize we've got three different parts of the world kind of represented on the stage tonight.
1:12:46
SPEAKER_06: Um, what sort of opportunities or difficulties in the crisis of meaning that that particularly opens?
1:12:54
SPEAKER_06: And I guess maybe uh a slightly jokey, flippant way of putting it, is the crisis of meaning a crisis of too many people being able to speak English?
1:13:02
SPEAKER_06: And what is the effect on that, on sort of the ways that we we talk about these things?
1:13:11
SPEAKER_08: Too many people speaking English.
1:13:12
SPEAKER_08: So it's it's a are you saying it's it's an Anglosphere kind of a an issue?
1:13:16
SPEAKER_08: Right.
1:13:17
SPEAKER_06: Should we just blame all the Americans for the problem of crisis?
1:13:23
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I do think America's gone mad.
1:13:32
SPEAKER_01: I think that America is going through one of its periodic religious revivals at the moment.
1:13:37
SPEAKER_01: Um and because America um is is bred of British Protestantism, basically, um we we are obviously very susceptible to it.
1:13:53
SPEAKER_01: Um and I would you know I I I would include every everybody in the Angliosphere uh Catholic, all the Orthodox guys who seem to be converting.
1:14:03
SPEAKER_01: I mean everybody.
1:14:04
SPEAKER_01: I I I think in that sense we're all basically Protestant.
1:14:08
SPEAKER_01: Uh and and we're so shaped by this kind of Anglo-American Protestantism that of the 18th and 19th and 20th centuries.
1:14:15
SPEAKER_01: Um and the last kind of great American religious revival was the 50s and 60s with the civil rights movement and and uh counterculture and all that kind of stuff.
1:14:25
SPEAKER_01: And I think we're going through another kind of massive spasm of it at the moment.
1:14:30
SPEAKER_01: And I I I I do think that that anyone who speaks English, uh particularly who you know as a native speaker, is is very susceptible to it.
1:14:39
SPEAKER_01: Although it's interesting that, you know, it's kind of the the Danes and the Dutch, I think, who uh you know speak English or probably better than we do, uh who also seem very susceptible to it.
1:14:50
SPEAKER_01: But but it's expressing itself in I I agree.
1:14:54
SPEAKER_01: I mean I think it it it it's so I found when when Domin Dominion is translated and I go to you know to France or to the Netherlands or to Spain or whatever, uh the the reaction to it is always different.
1:15:10
SPEAKER_01: Because everybody's Christianity is something universal for those countries who've been shaped by the Christian tradition, but uh it's also very specific.
1:15:20
SPEAKER_01: You know, on the most basic level, you know, are you Catholic or Protestant?
1:15:23
SPEAKER_01: I mean on that most basic level.
1:15:25
SPEAKER_01: Um and I would guess that that if I went, say, to um to Africa to talk about you know to talk about it, my my my experience of what they would say would be fundamentally different.
1:15:38
SPEAKER_01: Because the sense I get from Africa, and I I I speak from a position of someone who basically was running out of time by the time I came to write the chapter on Africa.
1:15:47
SPEAKER_01: So it's basically a week's research, weeks reading.
1:15:50
SPEAKER_01: But the sense I get in Africa is that they have no problem believing in angels and devils, and you know, the drama of it is much, much more vivid there.
1:16:00
SPEAKER_01: And perhaps that in part is because it's so much fresher.
1:16:04
SPEAKER_01: It's it's it's so much more vivid, it's it's so much more novel.
1:16:08
SPEAKER_01: Whereas here it's so old.
1:16:11
SPEAKER_01: And perhaps everything that I've been talking about, that sense of the great tradition, perhaps that's something oppressive as well as as something to be drawn on.
1:16:19
SPEAKER_01: And perhaps what you see in Africa now is what Europe was like in the early Middle Ages, with the kind of you know, what you were talking about with the Vikings.
1:16:26
SPEAKER_01: Um, the kind of the the sense of excitement of discovery that is so manifest in in Christian history in the early Middle Ages.
1:16:33
SPEAKER_01: I I can I'm slaloming off here in all kinds of directions.
1:16:35
SPEAKER_01: I'm not answering your question at all.
1:16:38
SPEAKER_01: I will stand down.
1:16:40
SPEAKER_01: Um yes, basically it's America's fault.
1:16:42
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
1:16:44
SPEAKER_01: Is America going mad?
1:16:45
SPEAKER_01: Is it America's fault?
1:16:46
SPEAKER_09: Oh, we've always been crazy.
1:16:50
SPEAKER_09: I worked for six years with among Haitian illegal immigrants in the Dominican Republic, and I can't think of a single incident of suicide.
1:17:01
SPEAKER_09: I was in Northern Ireland for two days, and I sat next to a woman who was leaving the event we had to go to a funeral for a friend of hers whose son took his life.
1:17:17
SPEAKER_09: That is the symptomology of the meaning crisis.
1:17:20
SPEAKER_09: I'll differ with Tom in the sense that when I watch someone with a remote control and Netflix on smart TV, you know what they do?
1:17:30
SPEAKER_09: Click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click.
1:17:33
SPEAKER_09: Why is it that there, when I grew up, we had, I was outside of New York City, we had like eight channels to watch.
1:17:41
SPEAKER_09: There's eight.
1:17:49
SPEAKER_09: I'm old too, remember.
1:17:52
SPEAKER_09: There's near limitless sources of diversion, and almost everyone that I deal with can't find anything that can hold their interest.
1:18:07
SPEAKER_09: In the midst of the most amazing attempt to harvest human attention that this world has ever seen, that says something to me.
1:18:21
SPEAKER_09: That people have an understanding that there is meaning beneath all of these stories, that the stories are, in a sense, getting in the way of.
1:18:34
SPEAKER_09: And part of what happened with the Jordan Peterson thing in 2017 and 2018 that I figured out by the end of 2018 was many of the people coming to me had what I call nihilism-induced depression.
1:18:53
SPEAKER_09: And it was a strange thing that watching videos of this man rambling about the book of Genesis could relieve their nihilism-induced depression.
1:19:03
SPEAKER_09: But then what I also learned was that that medication had a short-term effect, and they needed to follow it up with stronger medicine.
1:19:12
SPEAKER_09: And that was the strangeness of this story that is beneath all of these other stories that we keep clicking through on Netflix.
1:19:23
SPEAKER_09: And so I don't think it has much to do with the English language.
1:19:26
SPEAKER_09: I think it has a lot to do with our power and our affluence.
1:19:58
SPEAKER_08: Uh for sparing an evening and and uh being with us.
1:20:01
SPEAKER_08: Uh thank you for your writing, Tom.
1:20:05
SPEAKER_08: Thank you for your podcasts.
1:20:06
SPEAKER_08: I hope everyone is subscribed to uh the rest is history and uh keeping up with you that way.
1:20:11
SPEAKER_08: I hope everyone is uh following Paul Vanderclay on YouTube, and you can get them on podcasts as well.
1:20:18
SPEAKER_08: Listen along.
1:20:19
SPEAKER_08: Um in a second, we'll uh give a round of applause to thank uh Tom and Paula.
1:20:24
SPEAKER_08: I want to thank you guys for coming along.
1:20:26
SPEAKER_08: If you want to keep up with some of the things that we're doing, we'll be sending out an email uh in the next week and uh ways that you can follow up with that.
1:20:34
SPEAKER_08: Afterwards, we're gonna have some more refreshments.
1:20:36
SPEAKER_08: I think this this is like tier one level refreshments.
1:20:41
SPEAKER_08: We've gone from yeah, we've yeah, really pushing the boat out.
1:20:45
SPEAKER_08: There's even wine, I believe.
1:20:47
SPEAKER_08: Okay, how about that?
1:20:49
SPEAKER_08: Um get on to another engagement uh very shortly, but uh, thank you so much for being with us.
1:20:58
SPEAKER_08: And uh why don't we show our appreciation?
1:21:03
SPEAKER_00: Well, there we go.
1:21:04
SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much for listening.
1:21:05
SPEAKER_00: I hope you enjoyed that conversation.
1:21:07
SPEAKER_00: I I certainly enjoyed it.
1:21:08
SPEAKER_00: Tom Holland came out with some absolute zingers, didn't he?
1:21:13
SPEAKER_00: Well, if you would like to receive more conversations like this, plenty more where that came from, you can go on our YouTube channel and browse uh previous discussions we've had with Tom Holland and Paul Vanderclay.
1:21:26
SPEAKER_00: And they're also available via the Speak Life Podcast.
1:21:29
SPEAKER_00: Do subscribe to the Speak Life Podcast on your podcatcher of choice if you haven't done so already.
1:21:34
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1:21:35
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1:21:40
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1:21:43
SPEAKER_00: And we love hearing people's thoughts.
1:21:45
SPEAKER_00: You can email info at speaklife.org.uk if you have any questions or comments.
1:21:51
SPEAKER_00: Likewise, for our recent uh videos and podcasts responding to the life and death of Queen Elizabeth II.
1:22:00
SPEAKER_00: We would love to hear any thoughts you have on that.
1:22:04
SPEAKER_00: Any conversations that you've been having with friends about the Queen.
1:22:08
SPEAKER_00: Well, that's all from me, Cold Black, and see you soon.