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Jordan Peterson Wrestles with the Resurrection (Ep. 590)

May 2, 2024 41m 34s Full transcript available
Jordan Peterson Wrestles with the Resurrection (Ep. 590)
0:00 / 41m 34s
In this episode, I dive deep into the insights of Jordan Peterson, a pivotal figure in today's cultural landscape. We explore his thoughts on the resurrection, the moral order, and the importance of sacrifice, all while emphasizing the need for men to aim for the highest good in their lives.
Transcript
325 segments
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0:30 This is Undaunted Life, a man's podcast.
0:53 I'm your host Kyle Thompson. Let's get into it.
0:56 To him, the gatekeeper opens. The sheep hear his voice, and he calls his own sheep by name, and leads them out.
1:01 That is John 10.3. Keep that in mind as we go through today's content.
1:04 We're so thankful to have you guys, and we also just want to give a big shout out.
1:07 And thank you to all of our donors if you've been wondering, how in the world are they able to pull all this off?
1:11 How can he afford a microphone in front of his face?
1:12 And the electricity that keeps it all running, is because we have donors.
1:15 We have guys just like you that are with us in this goal to equipment around the globe to be able to push back darkness.
1:21 And so we have monthly donors. We're so thankful for you guys, and just a reminder, I'll keep reminding you until it actually happens.
1:26 But on May the 17th, I will be speaking live at Church of 1122 down in Jacksonville, Florida.
1:31 It will be at the San Pablo campus. That is 14286 Beach Boulevard, number two in Jacksonville.
1:37 And I'm going to be presenting my defeating pro-abortion arguments talk.
1:40 And so they're calling it a seminar. You can call it a seminar or class, whatever it is.
1:44 But it will be like, you know, an hour, hour and a half of me taking you through the entirety of the abortion argument,
1:50 kind of going through the facts of the entire process, but also looking at the top 18 pro-abortion arguments,
1:56 and how you can keep your witness, but also defeat all these arguments. It is starting at seven o'clock.
2:01 Okay, so there's, there's no food, there's no childcare, nothing like that. You don't have to be 18 or older to come to it.
2:06 But, you know, I've had people that are like teenagers, kind of young teenagers that have showed up to this,
2:10 but there's not going to be childcare. But yes, seven o'clock at the San Pablo campus.
2:14 If you were anywhere near Jacksonville on May the 17th, make sure you get your tickets out there.
2:18 We've got people flying in to come and see it. And I just, I love that people are wanting to come and learn more.
2:23 So we're happy to provide that to you. We're not doing any quick hitters today because I just want to spend time talking about Jordan Peterson.
2:29 Okay. So as I've talked about on the show, I think roughly a thousand times in the 600 or so episodes,
2:35 Jordan Peterson is very, very important to me. His work is very, very important to me.
2:39 It's important to Christiandom, even though I don't think he's a Christian more on that in a second.
2:43 It's very, very important to conservatism. It's very important to the tenets of a free society and free speech and really everything that we see,
2:53 even though he's Canadian in our bill of rights here in the United States, our US Constitution.
2:57 He's just a very, very important man. The 12 rules for light book is a top 10 book for me.
3:01 Again, we have the book list on our website of the 100 books every modern Christian man should read list.
3:05 It is certainly on there, but it is definitely a top 10 book for me. And I had the amazing opportunity last year.
3:11 I think it was last February to meet him when he came through Tulsa. So I've been working with this team for a while and believe me guys,
3:17 I know, I know you went to Jordan Peterson on the show. I want him on the show too.
3:20 His schedule is perhaps the most busy schedule that I've ever dealt with, that I've ever had to try to work around.
3:27 We're still working on it. It may end up working out. It may not end up working out. But anyway,
3:32 I got connected with Greg Hurwitz, came on the show. He and I hit it off. He knew Jordan Peterson was important to me.
3:37 And he was like, Hey, if Jordan's tour is beyond ordered tours coming anywhere near you, just let me know and I'll hook you up.
3:42 And like two or three weeks later, he was coming through Tulsa. So he got me connected. I got to spend some time with him, my wife and I got to meet him.
3:48 I got him that ESV reference study Bible with his name on it and all that. And it was just cool to get to see his show, see him, you know,
3:54 operate and lecture in person and then get to spend a little time with them afterwards. Now, this year, he's doing his We Who Wrestle with God tour.
4:01 And it was again coming through Tulsa. I would have seen him in Oklahoma City, but that was the same night as UFC 300 and I just wasn't going to miss that.
4:08 And so we made sure that we went and saw him in Tulsa. And so the interesting thing that I want to point out is I talked to a few people that went to go see Jordan Peterson when he came in
4:19 I guess the night of UFC 300 and came to Oklahoma City. And I was shocked at their responses because they they talked as if they didn't really enjoy the experience.
4:27 And when they started describing their experience, they're like, yeah, you just started kind of like, you know, talking about a bunch of different subject matters.
4:34 I didn't know exactly what it was talking about. And you know, it seemed like he kind of me andered around and then came back to his main point.
4:39 And then I was like, okay, so you've only seen YouTube clips or like, you know, Instagram reels of Jordan Peterson where you're getting these 60 to 90 second soundbites because if you've read any of his books, if you've listened to any of his lectures before, that's his style.
4:54 Like he will verbal process something out loud, especially when he's speaking live, he'll start with an idea. He's not reading a manuscript to you.
5:01 Okay, he's not performing a keynote or a TED talk. He is very much so spending an hour to an hour and a half weaving through an idea as he continues to really sharpen his thinking on the subject matter.
5:13 So for any of you that are wondering, is it going to be a bad tour? Absolutely not just, you know, you have to be you have to understand what you're walking into.
5:20 And so one thing that I noticed with Jordan Peterson is when he was writing the book Beyond Order, he was in the fog.
5:29 If you can remember back to that time period, he almost died at one point. He was coming off of some medication and it really kind of jacked with him and he kind of went all over the world to get that figured out.
5:38 And so he was writing basically impaired to a degree when he was writing Beyond Order.
5:42 But then as he was finishing Beyond Order, you could tell that he was coming out of the fog, you know, he came back and was interviewed on Joe Rogan and he did some other things with his show and you could tell that he was coming out of the fog.
5:54 And then by the time he got to his tour, the Beyond Order tour, this is after Beyond Order came out, he was completely out of the fog.
6:00 You can tell he was he was firing and he was doing really well.
6:03 But especially after seeing him here recently on this tour, I think it is safe to say that he is sprinting out of full clip and running on all cylinders and he can't even see the fog anymore because it's so far behind him.
6:15 Hey guys, real quick, as you've likely heard me talk about on the show before, it took me forever before I started taking supplements of any kind.
6:22 I was always nervous about taking like whey protein and creatine or really anything beyond that because I was just afraid of what was in the product and if it was going to like give me cancer someday or something like that.
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7:41 One thing that was interesting about this presentation that he gave in Tulsa is his eyes were closed a lot and he would process and he would be very precise in the language. He was picking to say when he was trying to go through a topic. And then he would open his eyes and then he would slam home his point.
8:03 That is not something that I recall seeing from him before because typically he's a he processes by looking up and I know there's there's something to be said like if you look up into the ride or down to the left and you know says whether you're concentrating or lying or comfortable or whatever.
8:18 But I just could sense so many times during this presentation in Tulsa where he was so fervently trying to make sure that he got his characterization right the words right the cadence right and he was really, really concentrating.
8:32 And I literally had my phone out from the moment he walked out on stage and I'm like okay, I know I'm going to need to take notes but I ended up taking a crazy amount of notes so I do want to go over to a degree what he went over on 42124 in Tulsa at the B.O.K. Center because you're not going to get that version of his show anywhere else because every show he kind of moves around and talks about something differently or in a slightly different way.
8:56 And so I just want to kind of go over briefly some of my notes on this. So, well, may not be brief. We'll see how it goes. But he started out by talking about Moses in the desert.
9:04 And he talked about how the desert is where you are, but it's also where you are when you're lost.
9:11 And where you end up as you're going through the desert is where tyranny collapses.
9:16 And he also talks about how Moses was only able to get a glimpse of God. He spent quite a bit of time talking about that where he was only, you know, able to see him through a rock and only his backside and basically only the trails that were behind him.
9:28 And that's all we get. And he was talking about in terms of that that we just get a glimpse of that which we can't understand.
9:35 Because if Moses had gotten a glimpse of the full power of God, he wouldn't have survived. Like we see that throughout scripture and that's why Moses only got to see a hint of that.
9:46 But also he talked about the infinite number of ways to see any particular situation. And he talked about it in terms of to solve the problem of perception, you have to have an aim.
9:58 And perception itself is a moral act because it's dependent upon your aim and what you're valuing and in order to see what you value.
10:06 And so your character is a revelation of the structure of values in which you prioritize your attention and interactions.
10:13 And that reflects a lot of things. So every word you say is a reflection of your aim.
10:18 You really can't organize your perception or how you view the world without an aim of some kind.
10:24 And he also talked about how the Bible helps us figure out our aim.
10:29 Then he got into a discussion about Genesis 1.
10:32 And he talked about how God is portrayed as resting on the face of the deep is the way that he described it, which I thought was interesting.
10:39 And he talked about the deep as something like potential itself, like capital P potential itself, potential manifest.
10:46 And it's the same idea as consciousness confronting a potential that we can wrestle into realization as a consequence of the decisions that we make.
10:55 And he says that God spoke order into chaos.
10:58 So there was nothing but chaos, but he spoke order into it.
11:02 Aiming upward in love and using the words of capital T truth, which is a really heady sentence, but that's what he was trying to flesh out.
11:10 And he talked about the, the logos or the logos, that's the spirit of capital T truth aimed at capital L love again.
11:18 He's really getting into the weeds here all the way back for Genesis one.
11:21 And that describing it in that way is the spirit of which the days of creation are laid out.
11:26 So it's in the spirit of truth aimed at love, speaking order into chaos.
11:32 But then he talked about how Christ was the pattern of sacrifice that Christ is a pattern of sacrifice that if you aimed at establishing order in your day, you would do that via self sacrifice.
11:45 So if you were to wake up and, you know, he's talking to all of us, if you wake up that morning and you aim at self sacrifice, that is a way to establish order in your world.
11:53 But it's also an offering up of something that is beyond you, because when you sacrifice for a goal, it's typically for something that goes beyond something that would serve you.
12:03 And he also talked about the ultimate version of sacrifice.
12:06 So, so in terms of humanity or existence, the ultimate version of sacrifice, the style of sacrifice is Christ's life.
12:13 And this conceptualization is at the bottom of our culture here in the United States.
12:18 And he talked about, you know, if you're an atheist, and you don't believe in God and you certainly don't believe in Christ or the resurrection, it still doesn't matter, because everything that I just said about the establishment of your day and the patterns of sacrifice.
12:31 What we see in the ultimate sacrifice of Christ is still a true, a truism, if you will.
12:36 But then he started talking about the biblical stories, try to provide a picture of what should be at the highest place of what you aim at.
12:44 And when you do that, you will be within the will of God.
12:48 So that's what the Bible is trying to show us that whenever you're, when you're aiming at the highest possible thing, you will be within God's will for you.
12:56 And the reason that we have freedom in this governmental system, you know, for instance, like the one here in the United States, to a degree, is that order comes from our individual responsibility to do the will of God.
13:10 And it's not that we have, you know, this was a really interesting statement. He said, it's not that we have something important to do.
13:16 It's that everything we do is important. Again, he's talking about this within the context of serving God and doing his will as we aim for the highest possible good.
13:26 And our greatness as a country, again, he's speaking in America to Americans, is an offshoot of the initial presupposition or presumption that we are all valuable on an individual level.
13:37 Again, we don't get that from atheism. We don't get that from materialism. We only get that from a Judeo-Christian ethic.
13:42 And also he talked about the purpose of prayer and how that is a reminder to ourselves to orient or to aim upward with everything that we do.
13:52 And it's a practice of proper orientation, which I think that is true. Like some of us have, you know, we come with requests or with praise, but also it's for direction.
14:03 And that direction always takes us to what would be ultimate and infinite.
14:08 And then he also spent some time talking about the garden, Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve, and why the natural habitat of man and woman was a walled garden. So he talked about the walls. He said that walls are barriers, but also walls are social structures.
14:24 And so he talks about your neighbors know the boundaries of your house or of your land and what they are responsible for versus what you are responsible for.
14:33 And this leads to, you know, who has dominion over what? Like, I don't have dominion over my next door neighbor's kitchen and he doesn't have dominion over my yard. You know what I mean?
14:43 They may help in those areas. I may go over there and cook them a meal in their kitchen and he may mow my lawn for me, but we don't have dominion. Dominion would have to be granted or transferred.
14:51 He also talks about how walls are social order and that how garden the garden is nature. So the walls are social order. The garden is nature.
14:59 And the walled garden is where nature and culture or where nature and social order work together. And we as the created are given dominion over that where nature and culture come together in perfect order and harmony.
15:14 So the message that God gives to man and woman, Adam and Eve in the garden is that they are not to make the moral order, but they are to abide by it. Again, they're not to make the moral order, but to abide by it.
15:28 And the it is what God has given them, right? So what's moral is given to humans, but not created by humans. So this, this is a counter cultural ideal in terms of the culture we live in today, because obviously we live in a time and a place where we are to create the moral
15:45 order that we abide by, that we don't appeal to a higher authority. Our higher, our highest authority is our truth, as it were.
15:53 But also, there's an insistence in our culture that our identity is exactly what we say it is, that we are the final judge of identity, and that that identity can shift as we see fit and that no one can say anything about it other than ourselves, right?
16:10 So we get to make our own reality. He also spoke about the moral order that we are called to abide by and that being a necessary consequence of the community itself, because community starts with, you know, our relationship with our spouse and our children, and then our
16:24 neighborhood, and then our friends outside of that neighborhood and then the town we live in the state, the country, all those different things that's a necessary consequence of community itself and we all come together to make a moral order. He also spoke about how the collapse of the family is a catastrophe, because nothing else can
16:41 societally, if the sacrificial union of marriage can't stand. That's why it was such a big deal that Republicans and conservatives ceded ground on the gay marriage issue, because the, the basic building block of society at
16:57 large, humanity at large, is the male female union within marriage that leads to procreation and the propagation of the species. Also, our identity in our marriage is not what we claim it to be. Our identity in our marriage becomes a combination of both of our
17:14 perceptions. So my perception of me is not singular to me, because now I have been bound to my wife Kelsey, and we have become one flesh, and that we have to take our partner into account in our marriage and we would have to modify our identity to really coalesce with what we're doing inside of our relationship.
17:32 And there's this overall the apprehension of that harmony. That is the basis of romantic love. Then he got into a very interesting discussion of the typical temptation of each of the sexes.
17:43 So, you know, what we fall prey to, which leads to the collapse of the moral order. So he talked about how Eve is convinced that she will become like God, the serpent has done that, that we can be the center of moral order.
17:56 She listens to the serpent. The serpent is camouflaged and distant. A serpent doesn't fit well in the present order. Eve is a victim of the temptation of femininity itself.
18:08 Eve is created because Adam is not sufficient. She's created because she brings what Adam cannot. And so that's basically like the concept he was flushing out is that the feminine examines the current moral order.
18:24 And in this case, that which was made and decided on by Adam, and she brings to that order that which has been excluded. So think about it in your own marriage. You as a man, created as a male, driven as a male, you will see situations in a certain way and then your wife can see it differently.
18:42 Many of you very smartly utilize your wives to be an extra voice for you are an extra, I guess, perceiver in situations because they can perceive an intuit things that we as men cannot.
18:55 So the problem with this feminization or with the temptation of the capital F feminine is that we see the infantilization of all issues inside of our culture.
19:09 And so you have these childless liberal women that are involved in politics or culture or education or entertainment or something like that.
19:19 And they will infantilize these issues so that they can mother them. Right. So they don't have children themselves. So their favorite pet issue. Right. That becomes the thing that they mother. That's why we see this over feminization of our culture that is in desperately desperate need of more toxic masculinity.
19:39 And then he talks about how Eve sin is to make of her feminine virtues, the capacity to bring what's serpentine or the serpent into the moral order. Okay. So that's her sin. She brings the serpent into the moral order.
19:53 And the sin of Adam is that he listens to Eve that he was passive and just listened to Eve as opposed to leading Eve. And the temptations of the feminine are to see feminine virtues as God like.
20:04 And the temptation of the masculine is to accrue status and reputation in the eyes of women. So the women want to control the men want to accrue status and reputation to seem as if they are in control, at least within the eyes of the women.
20:18 And so this harkens to the voice of Eve, even if she's under the dominion of the serpent. But then he also spent some time talking about how we as humans, we suffer when we overreach. So back to Adam and Eve, they literally like all pun, you know, no pun intended, all kidding aside.
20:36 Adam and Eve bit off more than they could chew. It was pride. They had a desire to put themselves and we have a desire to put ourselves at the center of our moral order.
20:46 We don't like when God tells us what to do. We don't like when God's word is different than what we see that we need to do. And so we buck that.
20:54 So Adam and Eve eat the scales fall from their eyes. They become aware of the limitation and error and loss for the first time.
21:03 And prior to the fall, Adam walks with God as a matter of course he is in sync with the implicit moral order after he eats of the fruit given to him by Eve. God walks in the garden looking for Adam, even though he knew where he was.
21:18 And Adam hides from God. Adam rejects the responsibility to abide by the divine moral order because he recognizes for the first time that he is insufficient that he has insufficiencies.
21:29 And then he complains to God about Eve, right? We all saw that's like, ah, it's a woman you gave me, right? And men will blame the suffering of their life on the judgment of women.
21:38 We've seen this with involuntary celibates or people that are part of the red pill movement. These are people that have just sworn off women because of the suffering in their life and they see that as the cause of women and that leads to their own misogyny, right?
21:51 And then we have God basically wrapping up the story of Adam and Eve where he guards the gates of paradise by putting cherubs to guard the gates of Eden with flaming swords.
22:02 And so cherubs are not fat babies, you know, hanging out in the clouds. These are just absolutely terrifying beings with flaming swords.
22:10 And he talked about a flaming sword. He's like, what is a flaming sword? A flaming sword is something that cuts and burns.
22:17 It cuts and burns and it can't be avoided. And he said, the sword that cuts and burns everything that is unfit for paradise is what is put in front of paradise in order to guard it.
22:28 Then he spent some time talking about Cain and Abel, okay? So these are the first human beings that were not just straight up created by God, they were created by man and woman that was created by God.
22:37 And he talked about how Cain and Abel represent two patterns of sacrifice. Cain offers less than his best. He's a farmer, but he offers less than his best than you have Abel, who's a shepherd, but he offers the best of what he has.
22:49 And they both make a sacrifice to God, but God only recognized one of the sacrifices. So God calls out the inadequacy of those whose sacrifice is their second best.
23:00 So Cain complains about the order that God established, right? He complained about the entire system. Cain takes vengeance on Abel, and in this, he also takes vengeance on God himself by destroying God's favorite son, right?
23:16 So this reverberates throughout the Bible and culminates with the death of Christ as well. So we will destroy what is good itself by taking vengeance on God's order.
23:26 We do to rebel against God. And God condemns Cain to a life of wandering. And he said that anyone that sacrifices the ideal becomes a wanderer.
23:35 And he talked about how Cain's descendants are worse than Cain. That Cain kills his brother because Abel is the ideal, but Cain's descendants kill many, many more.
23:43 They create way more bloodshed, right? So the downstream consequences and spread of consequences is a major deal. And the spread of the consequence of insufficient sacrifice, which is where this began, right?
23:53 With Cain and Abel, Cain provided an insufficient sacrifice. The spread of the consequence of insufficient sacrifice has these far reaching implications.
24:02 And his sin of murder didn't stop there. Cain was just the beginning of the genocidal spirit that is carried out through through all of humanity up until this day.
24:13 And to the degree that we aim away from the ideal, the more we are aligned with the ultimate vengeance against God.
24:22 Then he spent a little bit of time toward the end talking about how we see the world through story, through character imitation, that we imitate the character that is the highest of all possible characters.
24:33 So we do that whether we're reading a book or we're watching a movie or something like that, we want to imitate or imitate rather the character that is highest.
24:41 And we participate in God's process of making order from chaos. And that's what it means to be made in his image.
24:47 And so ultimately, he talks about creation fall and the two patterns of sacrifice that we see in Cain and Abel.
24:52 And then he spoke a little bit about the flood and, you know, why that was the next story that we see in scripture in this because the consequence of the failing and failure to sacrifice appropriately, what is best is murder and genocide in the end.
25:07 And how that's on us and we participate in the process of sacrificing like Cain and Abel and Abel's, you know, sacrifice leads to God's favor and pleasure and Cain's leads to murder and genocide.
25:18 So that wrapped up and then Constantine Kisson came out who was the host and they did kind of a Q and A thing, not very many questions.
25:25 And one of the questions, I forget, I forgot to jot the question down, but he made a very, very important thing that I thought was, it was something that I certainly needed to hear in the moment.
25:36 And I've heard him say this before, but it really landed with me this time.
25:39 He talked about people that argue with their spouses.
25:42 And he talked about how in a relationship, one of the spouses is just better at arguing.
25:48 Okay.
25:49 But if you are that person, so in my, I'll talk about me in my relationship, I am the better arguer.
25:55 My wife would concede that the exact same.
25:58 I'm the better arguer.
25:59 But what Jordan said is that if you win the argument with your spouse, she's defeated.
26:05 And if you keep doing that a hundred times in a row, the consequence is that you have a defeated wife.
26:13 Yeah.
26:14 I'd never really thought about that because I just think about it like, well, no, I'm winning this argument because I have the better points.
26:19 And oop, I can throw a Bible verse in there too, right?
26:22 Extra bonus points.
26:23 But if you do that and you keep doing that over and over, you're only left with a wife that is defeated.
26:30 So he brought up a very good ideal, which is maybe instead of debating your wife and defeating her, maybe you can help her make her point.
26:40 I was like, help her make her point.
26:43 Like, what are you talking about?
26:44 He's like, if you're a better arguing, you better help them argue.
26:48 And this is why because they might be right.
26:52 That just blew my mind because it was like, yes, you're absolutely telling the truth there.
26:57 That I could be arguing with my spouse.
27:00 I could win the argument because I'm a better debater, but she might be right about the core issue.
27:05 So instead of just crushing her, or for you, instead of crushing your spouse, perhaps help them make their argument, help steelman their argument, and then you both can look at it together and determine who's right and what actions need to be taken from there.
27:21 And so he was like, hey, you know, scour your own consciousness to figure out what stupidity you brought to the conflict because typically in a conflict, you know, at, at worst, it's 99% one person and 1% the other.
27:34 But we both tend to bring our own experiences and negativity and stupidness or stupidity to the conflict.
27:42 He also spent a little bit of time talking about Richard Dawkins and how Richard Dawkins, as I've talked about, really said, hey, I'm a cultural Christian and how Dawkins realized that there's something at the core of Christianity that's worth protecting and propagating.
27:56 And that how, you know, look, Christianity invites you to do the worst thing possible, which is to voluntarily shoulder the cross and how that's just really a crazy thing.
28:05 Then the last question that I was, what's the best piece of advice that he's been given? He took about three or four seconds, and then he said, the truth shall shut you free.
28:16 Or he said, the truth will set you free.
28:20 And so he, he talked about how, you know, children that are more intelligent, they will lie earlier.
28:32 And the question is not why do children lie? Why do people lie? It's why don't they lie all the time?
28:40 So why do people lie so that we can escape the consequences of our behavior or attain something that we didn't earn? That's why we lie.
28:49 Why don't we lie all the time? Because we would be sacrificing the truth.
28:55 And he said, if you speak falsehoods, they're not your words. They're the spirit of falsehoods. So as you lie, you don't even have your own life. You don't have any control.
29:06 The spirit of falsehood, the spirit of the lie has your life.
29:11 And if you decide to tell the truth, you gain your life.
29:15 And he says, that's what adventure looks like. To tell the truth, you have to let go of your wish.
29:21 You have to embrace consequences. The consequences that you get though are your life and you want to have your life and how truth is a form of voluntary self-sacrifice and there's no adventure like the truth.
29:34 And so then the show wraps up and come down to the front of the stage and his manager takes us back.
29:41 And there was a larger group this time when we went back there. And so we just got to chat with him for a little bit, you know, took some pictures and all that.
29:47 But then he just sat down and he said, well, I have some time to answer some questions if anybody has one before you know, I go greet the VIP, which are, you know, the people that paid for extra tickets to go, you know, just take a picture and chat with them for 20 seconds.
30:00 And so I go, well, I got a question.
30:02 Because when you go to his shows, you can send in a question to the Q&A thing and then they may ask it afterwards, but they really only ask like two questions.
30:10 And what I said was is, okay, you're wrapping up a book right now. He's actually finishing the introduction. He's written the entire rest of the book. He's finishing the introduction.
30:17 And he said, or I said to him, I just like, okay, so you're wrapping up this book called We Who Wrestle With God.
30:25 You just recorded 20 hours of content of a seminar for the daily wire. You know, he did the Exodus seminar.
30:34 Now he's doing one on the gospels or he just got through doing one. It's coming out later this year.
30:39 So some of the same guys, you know, Greg Horowitz and Dennis Prager and some of the other guys, they spent 20 hours, 10 to hour sessions talking about the gospel accounts.
30:51 And so what I asked him is, is there something in particular about the gospel narrative that you're wrestling with?
30:59 We Who Wrestle With God. That's a tour we're at. That's a forthcoming book.
31:02 It spends 20 hours in the gospels. Is there something in particular about the gospel narrative that you're wrestling with?
31:07 So he hinted that he, in writing We Who Wrestle With God, that he wrote so much that a second book would be on the heels of We Who Wrestle With God.
31:19 And they're figuring out how to group these things to where it's coherent, not only in the book, but also in the tome of what he's creating with what's going to end up being a multiple book work on this.
31:30 And he said he ended up writing the equivalent of three books when he was trying to just write one for We Who Wrestle With God.
31:36 But this is a direct quote, and I'm quoting him exactly. Okay.
31:41 When he started to answer after he told me about the three books thing, he said, well, obviously, the toughest nut to crack is the resurrection, obviously.
31:51 And then he just kind of sat there for a second.
31:54 And I was kind of like in my head, I'm like, yep.
31:57 That's the toughest nut to crack and the most important.
32:00 So he says that in his writing that he says what he can say about the resurrection and that he's going to leave the recipe and he kept repeating that, that hey, I wrote what I could about the resurrection that I'm just going to leave it be.
32:15 He said that the gospel accounts are very hard to understand, not like, hey, I'm having trouble reading it. It's like they're mysterious in a way, you know, why did his followers not recognize him initially and, you know, he's just kind of talking about how there's no bottom to the stories of the
32:31 gospels. And so this is a guy that the reason why he went so far into studying the dictatorial regimes and totalitarian regimes of the 20th century, because there's technically a bottom to that you could get to bedrock and in most of the situations the bedrock was just the overall concept of capital evil.
32:49 But he said the gospel stories have no bottom, which I thought was interesting.
32:54 And he also said again he's just answering me that we're all related to the infinite so capital T the capital I infinite in some manner, but we don't really understand or it's hard to describe the nature of that relationship.
33:07 So you can tell that, you know, people ask him, you know, hey, do you believe in God, he's thinking about it, maybe in a much deeper way than most of us are thinking about it.
33:16 So he said his ideas on this concept started to change when he started to really look at the problem of evil and really take it seriously.
33:25 Because he said that you can't delve into the idea of the problem of evil again, a question as old as time, and especially in the apologetic space like how you deal with the problem of evil.
33:37 But he said that if you delve into that idea without changing, it's just not possible that you've delved in far enough.
33:46 Like when you delve into the idea of the problem of evil, you have to change and you change for the better.
33:51 And so there's one other thing that he said that I want to quote specifically and so, you know, I have the quote exactly.
33:58 So this is exactly how he said it. He said, what is the resurrection? It's at least the fact that the human spirit is invigorated as a consequence of voluntary challenge.
34:10 It's at least that. And that's not nothing. What does that mean in the final analysis? No one can say, right? Because to say that would be to be able to proclaim what it means to be related to the infinite.
34:28 And so some other people were there, they got to ask some questions and then he had to be whisked away. I was fortunate. I brought him a couple of copies of Joby's book. So if the tomb is empty and anything is possible.
34:40 And so I gave him a couple of those books because it's like, hey, just got through writing the big book and you got through doing this 20 hour seminar on the gospel.
34:48 Well, here's kind of a two book collection about the pathway to the cross, the importance of it, and what the reality of the empty tomb means.
34:57 And it's kind of implicit in the titles that if the tomb is empty, anything is possible. And so he's, he was very excited by that. And he liked that they were paperback because you can easily throw it in a bag and different things like that.
35:09 But as I reflect on my time with Jordan Peterson, again, I've been able to spend very, very short amounts of time and I'm working to make sure that those times can be increased in the future.
35:18 I'm struck by a lot of things. One thing is going to be a repeat that you've certainly heard me talk about before and that's I'm not trying to get too excited or wrapped around the axle about the salvation of Jordan, Jordan Peterson.
35:30 I'm just not.
35:32 Believe me.
35:34 As I would want anyone to be a Christian, I want him to be a Christian.
35:37 I can obviously see that if he becomes a Christian, it changes the dynamic for a lot of people.
35:43 There will be people that all of a sudden will start taking Christianity and the scriptures and the accounts of the resurrection more seriously because Jordan Peterson does.
35:51 I also like it because of the impact that he can have on people.
35:56 So, so think about it this way. Maybe you're a fan of Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan and you're like in all of both of them.
36:03 Well, Joe Rogan is an is an all of Jordan Peterson.
36:06 And so if Jordan Peterson can speak to him at a higher level in this way, that obviously directly affects people like Joe Rogan or anybody else.
36:14 And again, as I told you with the Joe Rogan episode on how he's just being ignorant and has no real idea about that the history of Christianity or the resurrection or even the existence of Jesus.
36:23 Don't get too wrapped around the axle about someone you don't know becoming a Christian and forget about your neighbor.
36:29 Forget about your children.
36:31 Forget about the people that you work with.
36:33 But I understand that it would really change a lot of things, but my overall thing that I wanted to share about Jordan Peterson is heresy hunters out there.
36:42 Look at Jordan Peterson as a wolf.
36:45 A wolf in sheep's clothing and they see him as somebody that is leading the brethren astray and I could not disagree with them more because I'm more concerned about people that purport to be a shepherd of the father, a pastor.
37:02 And these people holding to heretical worldviews.
37:05 When you read through the New Testament, when you read through the Gospels, those are the wolves and sheep's clothing that were worn to be wary of.
37:13 The people that seem holy that say the right words, but then they sneak some other things in.
37:18 They're a walking talking modern version of did God really say, right?
37:23 But Jordan Peterson has never put his flag in the ground said, I'm a Christian.
37:27 I'm a follower of Christ.
37:28 I'm a believer in the resurrection.
37:30 I believe in the resurrection as a payment that satisfies my sin debt to a holy and just God.
37:36 He's never said that.
37:38 So what is Jordan Peterson?
37:40 He's a seeker.
37:42 He's a he's a fervent seeker.
37:46 He's a fervent seeker that takes the holy scriptures that we see in the Bible more seriously than most Christians do.
37:56 I was talking about this with Matt Chandler, but I was like, if we really believed that the Bible was the word of God, don't you think that we would actually read it?
38:04 And I'm talking to me too, guys.
38:06 Remember, I admitted where we got the idea for the fording tables because I wasn't reading the Bible basically at all while I was reading libraries of other books, right?
38:13 But if we really believe that the Bible is the word of God and that it had something to tell us that was beyond mere stories so that we can regurgitate the right answer in Sunday school, we would actually take it seriously.
38:24 Not only would we read it, we would probably study it.
38:27 Not only would we study it, we would probably teach it.
38:30 Not only would we study and teach it, but we probably study and teach it in groups and spread that message out to all the people groups of the planet.
38:39 But we just don't look at it that way for the most part.
38:43 But Jordan Peterson does.
38:45 He thinks there's something in the Bible.
38:47 He thinks there's something to it.
38:49 He doesn't think it's just a collection of ancient stories that have just been given to us and have been mistranslated throughout time to create, meaning that wasn't there to begin with.
39:00 And now he's specifically focusing on Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, the four accounts of the life of Jesus.
39:07 He's reckoning with it right now.
39:09 So as he's in this process, I think that we should all pray for him.
39:13 We should pray that God reveals himself to him and that Jordan accepts that free gift of grace.
39:18 All right, guys, before we let you go, we are going to do a quick resilience boost.
39:20 Add on Dawn to life.
39:21 Our mission is equipping men to push back darkness with content that forges, spiritual, mental, and physical resilience.
39:25 Only two links for you today.
39:26 I've got a link to our donation page.
39:27 And guys, that's how we keep the lights on around here.
39:29 And also, I've got a link to the tour dates for Jordan Peterson's We Who Wrestle With God tour.
39:33 So guys, I cannot stress this enough.
39:36 I know it's kind of expensive to essentially go see a college professor lecture, but it is well worth your time.
39:41 If he's coming anywhere near you in your city in these coming weeks and months, you got to get out and see him.
39:47 Thank you guys so much for listening to this episode.
39:49 Wherever you're listening to this, please subscribe, rate, and leave us a positive five-star review.
39:53 If you want to come speak live at your event or on your podcast to shoot me an email to info@undonton.life,
39:58 that's i-n-f-o @undonton.life.
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40:05 including how to donate to keep more content like this coming your way.
40:07 Just go to www.undonton.life.
40:10 And also, we want to thank the band Holy Name for allowing us to use their music for our content.
40:15 The music on this podcast is our song Perpetua, which is off their self-titled debut album on Face Down Records.
40:21 The links are in the description.
40:23 I'm your host Kyle Thompson.
40:25 Remember, keep pushing back darkness, keep forging spiritual, mental, and physical resilience.
40:30 Keep seeking the lion of Judah.
40:45 (upbeat rock music)
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Jordan Peterson
What is the resurrection? It's at least the fact that the human spirit is invigorated as a consequence of voluntary challenge.
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