499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie AI transcript and summary - episode of podcast The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

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Episode: 499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie

Author: Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
Duration: 01:40:24

Episode Shownotes

Dr. Jordan B. Peterson sits down with the senior pastor of the Harvest Christian Fellowship, Greg Laurie. They discuss the true story behind the hit film “The Jesus Revolution,” Laurie’s relationship with hippie-preacher and counter-culture icon Lonnie Frisbee, how he found faith in the most unlikely of places, and the

past 50 years of building his world-renowned ministry. Greg Laurie is the senior pastor of Harvest Christian Fellowship with campuses in California and Hawaii. He began his pastoral ministry at the age of 19 by leading a Bible study of 30 people. Since then, God has transformed that small group into a church of some 15,000 people. Today, Harvest is one of the largest churches in America and consistently ranks among the most influential churches in the country. In 1990, Laurie began holding large-scale public evangelistic events called Harvest Crusades. Since that time, more than 9.8 million people have participated in these events in person or online around the United States. In 2012, Laurie launched Harvest America, a nationwide event using the internet to simulcast live HD video to thousands of locations across the country. With an unprecedented 306,000 Americans in live attendance, Harvest America ranks among the largest presentations of the gospel in United States history. Harvest Crusades have also been held internationally in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. More importantly, some 531,889 people have made professions of faith through these outreaches. In 2020 and in partnership with Kingdom Story Company, Laurie premiered his first-ever cinematic crusade, “A Rush of Hope,” viewed by over 2 million people in its opening weekend. Laurie is the featured speaker of the nationally syndicated radio program, A New Beginning, which is broadcast on more than 1,200 radio outlets around the world. Laurie’s weekly television program, “Harvest + Greg Laurie,” is carried on major TV networks such as Lifetime, Fox Business, Newsmax, Daystar, KCAL 9 Los Angeles, and the Trinity Broadcasting Network. This episode was filmed on November 4th, 2024 | Links | For Greg Laurie: On X https://x.com/greglaurie?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor On Instagram https://www.instagram.com/greglaurie/?hl=en On YouTube https://www.youtube.com/greglaurie

Summary

In this episode of 'The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast,' Dr. Jordan B. Peterson converses with Greg Laurie about his evolution from a hesitant convert to a prominent church leader. They address societal shifts prompting young men to seek meaning and guidance, reflected in Laurie’s own experiences with faith. The episode also delves into biblical narratives, particularly focusing on Abraham's transformative journey. Laurie shares his encounter with Christianity amid the drug culture of the 1970s, emphasizing the importance of genuine prayer and belief. Ultimately, it highlights themes of faith, sacrifice, healing, and the promise of an afterlife, showcasing Laurie's impact on community through his ministry.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

00:00:02 Speaker_01
I had the opportunity today to sit down with Greg Laurie, and many of you will be familiar with Mr. Laurie as a consequence of the movie Jesus Revolution, which is really the place where he came to

00:00:31 Speaker_00
where I came to know about him. And so, I reached out to Mr. Laurie to find out more about the underlying story. So, he started a ministry as a reluctant convert, let's say, in the hangover decade of the 1970s, ministering to disaffected young people.

00:00:56 Speaker_00
and himself in a manner that had quite a revolutionary impact.

00:01:01 Speaker_00
He started with a very small church of about 30 people and grew that into a massive organization in a short time, which meant that he hit the target squarely in some relatively mysterious manner. And so I wanted to find out how he did that.

00:01:14 Speaker_00
I wanted to hear the background story. And so we talked about the development of his interest in the religious, which had made itself manifest in a variety of ways, including some experimentation with hallucinogens.

00:01:27 Speaker_00
We talked about his fragmented family background that partly gave him the craving for something authoritative and genuine. We talked about the state of the world of youth in the 1970s after the hedonistic utopianism of the 1960s had collapsed.

00:01:46 Speaker_00
We talked about the

00:01:48 Speaker_00
meaning of the story of Abraham, which is an archetypal story of individual development, and the emergence of the spirit of the benevolent father in that story, and the parallels between that and his own life, and his own quest, and his own ministry.

00:02:05 Speaker_00
And then we talked about the broader significance of the longing for a grounding meaning that characterized the 1970s and that also characterizes young people, especially young men, but not only young men now.

00:02:20 Speaker_00
And so we weaved that all together quite successfully, and that's what you're in store for if you participate in this podcast. So I think, Mr. Lorry, I think we'll talk today. Yes, call me Greg is good. Greg is good.

00:02:38 Speaker_00
I think we'll start today with this description, a discussion of a recent New York Times article. And you know something's going on in the religious side of the world if the New York Times deigns to report on it.

00:02:52 Speaker_00
They're reporting something that I've been tracking for a couple of years, which is the return of young men to churches, particularly more traditional, not only, but particularly more traditional churches.

00:03:04 Speaker_00
But I'm wondering, well, first of all, I guess I'm wondering what you think about that. Is this something that you've seen, again, accelerating more recently? And what you think might be accounting for it?

00:03:21 Speaker_02
You know, it seems to me that this young generation, so many of them raised in broken homes and often fatherless homes, which really is at the root of so many social ills.

00:03:32 Speaker_02
You can, I'm sure you know a lot more about this than I do, but I've done a little research on it and you can almost trace everything in culture from,

00:03:42 Speaker_02
people getting into crime, drug use, girls getting pregnant outside of wedlock, to broken homes, specifically the lack of a father.

00:03:50 Speaker_02
So I think that, I think one of the reasons that you have connected with younger people, and especially younger men, is you're a father figure. And they're looking for an authoritative voice.

00:04:02 Speaker_02
And I think sometimes parents are trying to be a friend to their children when they need to be parents to their children. And so I think that there's something about coming to a church and hearing someone say, without apology,

00:04:14 Speaker_02
Here's the Bible, here's truth, here's what God says, and here's the way that you should live. And I think that there's an appeal to that that is just lacking in our culture.

00:04:25 Speaker_02
You know, we've pushed so hard against these values and against these absolutes that there is, you know, a reaction. There's always an action and a reaction. So my generation,

00:04:34 Speaker_02
You know, the baby boomers were the children of the people that came out of World War II, you know, building families, rebuilding America. And so many of us maybe didn't get the affirmation or attention we thought we should get.

00:04:48 Speaker_02
So maybe we overindulged our children. Then there's a reaction to that. And it just goes on from generation to generation. But I think this is a generation that to me, having lived through a few decades, is in many ways parallel to my youth generation.

00:05:05 Speaker_02
I see more of a connection between the late 60s and the early 70s and today than they do in any other decade.

00:05:11 Speaker_02
I don't see that with the 80s necessarily or the 90s, but today I see young people, they're looking for a cause, they're looking for meaning. I was talking to some Gen Z kids recently.

00:05:22 Speaker_02
I said, why do you think so many kids of your generation are out there protesting against Israel? was slogans like, you know, from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.

00:05:33 Speaker_02
I don't even think they know what the river or the sea are, but they're involved in it. And they said, they're looking for a cause. They're looking for something to speak up for, something to believe in.

00:05:45 Speaker_02
So I think that when you come to the church and you come to the Bible,

00:05:50 Speaker_02
If we offer theology without apology and make it understandable to people, I think there's a great appeal in that, and that's probably part of the reason that young men in particular, but I think people of all, young women too, are looking for that.

00:06:09 Speaker_00
Searching for a cause, I don't think there's any difference between searching for a cause, let's say, and searching for an identity.

00:06:17 Speaker_00
And of course, you see a lot of clamor in the modern world about identity, a tremendous amount of misconception about what constitutes identity, a tremendous insistence that identity is to be defined only subjectively, which is really, I think, technically equivalent to the claim of a spoiled two-year-old

00:06:38 Speaker_00
who wants exactly what he or she wants right now, regardless of the consequences. And I really do mean that technically, because as you mature, the focus of your attention moves beyond your immediate self-gratification.

00:06:53 Speaker_00
And it doesn't only do that because you're more controlled then in a sort of patriarchal manner. It does that because as you become more sophisticated, you can play larger and larger scale games that last longer and longer with more and more people.

00:07:07 Speaker_00
and that's a form of maturation.

00:07:09 Speaker_00
It's completely appropriate anthropologically and psychologically for young people to be searching for a cause or for identity because, well, neurologically what happens, for example, there are two periods of mass neuronal die-off that characterize human development.

00:07:30 Speaker_00
So when you're first born, you have more neural connections than at any point in your life. And then a lot of what happens in early infancy is that many of those neural connections die.

00:07:41 Speaker_00
The ones that aren't performing a rewarded and socialized function all disappear. That pruning takes place again in late adolescence. And so there's a call for the catalyzation of identity in late adolescence.

00:07:56 Speaker_00
It's probably something like the transformation from that group-centered identity of early adolescence that substitutes for the parent is probably something like the transformation of that into independent adulthood.

00:08:13 Speaker_01
Yeah.

00:08:13 Speaker_00
Right. And so, of course, young people are going to be searching for an identity because that's exactly what they should be doing at that time. The question is, you know, what should the identity be? So let's talk about some of the markers of success.

00:08:30 Speaker_00
Money, fame, power. Fame in and of itself is not a bad marker for success. Not everyone who's famous is useful and not everyone who isn't famous is useless.

00:08:47 Speaker_00
Why is there a small percentage of hyper-successful men who are willing to sacrifice everything in pursuit of that success? It's like if you intervene at the right time, you don't need to use power. Success is not a place you get to and stay.

00:09:07 Speaker_00
It also integrates the idea of the journey and the idea of the destination. And so there now you have a definition of success. Here's a thought. Tell me what you think about this. So I have this new book coming out called We Who Wrestle with God.

00:09:38 Speaker_00
And one of the stories that I deal with in that book is the story of Abraham. So I want to just delve into that a bit in relationship to identity. And I want you to tell me what you think about this.

00:09:49 Speaker_00
Okay, so what happens in the Old Testament and the New, this book concentrates mostly on the Old Testament, is that

00:09:59 Speaker_00
You see dramatic characterizations of God, and the characterizations are, there's a multiplicity of characterizations, and each of them highlight a different aspect or trait. There's an underlying presumption that all of these...

00:10:18 Speaker_00
this multiplicity of characterization has a fundamental unity. So it's all the same thing, but you're seeing it from different angles. So whatever the ultimate is, is very complex. It can't be reduced to a simple unidimensional characterization.

00:10:33 Speaker_00
So you have to see pictures of it, dramatic pictures. So in Abraham, there's a very specific kind of picture. So first of all, these are all definitions of the highest, let's say. So God comes to Abraham in the guise of the spirit of adventure.

00:10:54 Speaker_00
Okay, now there's something paternal about that, right? You could think about the role of a father in a family as if the role of a mother is totalizing acceptance, the role of a father is something like discriminating encouragement.

00:11:12 Speaker_00
And one encloses and the other thrusts out into the world. Now, both parents can play that role, but one is more typically masculine and one is more typically feminine. So, God comes to Abraham as the voice of adventure.

00:11:27 Speaker_00
And he says to Abraham, you have to leave your comfort. Now, Abraham is wealthy. He has wealthy parents. And so, all of his needs are already Insofar as needs can be met materially, Abraham's got that covered.

00:11:45 Speaker_00
It's a very interesting starting place because it implies that whatever the highest has in mind for human beings, it transcends mere satiation. You could also think of that as a maternal role to satiate, right, to take care of needs.

00:12:01 Speaker_00
But Abraham, he's got all that covered. But God shows up nonetheless, and he says, you have to take yourself out of your zone of comfort, and you have to leave everything you love, and you have to go into the terrible world.

00:12:15 Speaker_00
And then he makes him a deal, and this is the covenant. And this is very interesting because the relationship with God is portrayed, particularly in this story, as a contractual arrangement with something like the spirit of the potential future.

00:12:30 Speaker_00
So God says, if you hearken to the voice of adventure, you'll become a blessing to yourself. So that's a good deal, because people often aren't blessings to themselves. They have miserable, self-conscious, neurotic, painful lives.

00:12:44 Speaker_00
So God says, this is the way out of that. Take the path of adventure. If you do that, your name will become known among your people, and your reputation will be valid. So that's a good deal, because people want to be...

00:13:00 Speaker_00
They want to, that's what the search for fame is. It can corrupt into just the search for fame, but it can be genuinely predicated on the desire to do something that's worthy of recognition. Okay, so that's deal number two.

00:13:15 Speaker_00
Deal number three is you'll simultaneously establish something of permanent value. So that's the dynasty of Abraham. He'll be the father of nations. Now he's the spirit of the father as well, right? He's the veritable spirit of the father.

00:13:29 Speaker_00
And then the final deal is, you'll do that in a way that will be beneficial to everyone. So that's a pretty good deal. And so you think about what that story is doing. It's remarkable. It's remarkably sophisticated.

00:13:40 Speaker_00
It says that the same impetus or spirit that thrusts you out beyond your zone of comfort is the call to a pattern of behavior that would make you a blessing to yourself, capable of establish something permanent,

00:14:02 Speaker_00
capable of generating a name for yourself, and capable of doing all that in a way that's maximally beneficial for the community. Okay, so that's a good deal. That's the covenant. Now, I've been thinking about this biologically.

00:14:17 Speaker_00
So you imagine that psychologists have been wrestling with this idea for quite a while that there's a very sophisticated motivational system that's operating in human beings that's something like a unifying force.

00:14:31 Speaker_00
So it's not sex, and it's not thirst, and it's not hunger, and it's not power. It's none of these particular drives, you might say. It's a force that integrates all of them. and integrates that integration with social integration.

00:14:47 Speaker_00
And it's an instinct as well. It's the instinct to develop. Now, that's what seems to be highlighted in the Abrahamic story, is to follow that.

00:14:55 Speaker_00
And so, the biblical insistence is that the call of the spirit of adventure, which is a divinely unifying voice, is aligned with the pattern of being that would make you a blessing to yourself, good for everyone else, establish something.

00:15:13 Speaker_00
But it makes sense to me because the alternative hypothesis is that the voice that calls you forward

00:15:22 Speaker_00
would be antithetical to developing relationships, or antithetical to developing anything permanent, or to living in a manner that would be a benefit to you and others.

00:15:33 Speaker_00
And that would mean that our deepest instinct to develop would be set at odds with the sociological surround, and that doesn't make any sense at all, right? They have to be integrated. Okay, so one more thing.

00:15:44 Speaker_00
And we're talking about why this might be particularly attractive to young men at the moment. So one more thing, which is that the ascent of Abraham, once he starts this adventure, So he decides he's going to go along with this, right?

00:15:59 Speaker_00
He's going to throw himself into it wholeheartedly and pursue it wherever he goes. So that's his adventure. And then what happens is that he undergoes a series of transformations that are upward, and with each transformation, there's a sacrifice.

00:16:14 Speaker_00
That's the rekindling of the covenant. So he has to remember what he's up to. But the sacrifice seems to me to be something like the necessity of Abraham abandoning everything that's no longer appropriate as he climbs up Jacob's ladder, right?

00:16:32 Speaker_00
And he does that so thoroughly and in such a devoted manner that the adventures expand as he moves and become greater. Demand for sacrifice also becomes greater, right? And it culminates, of course, with the potential sacrifice of Isaac. Yes.

00:16:51 Speaker_00
So, this is the pattern. And I think it's the patriarchal pattern. So, as the biblical stories progress, The prophets that are after Abraham describe God, the Father, as the God of Abraham and Isaac. So, we know that we're talking about the same Spirit.

00:17:11 Speaker_00
And it seems to me that it is the Spirit of the encouraging Father. And that can be made manifest in any particular father, but it's that Spirit as such.

00:17:22 Speaker_00
beckons forward, calls out of security, establishes the social contract, establishes the pattern of psychological transformation, and indicates that there are sacrifices at each, what would you say, point of crisis that have to be rectified for the personality transformation to occur.

00:17:41 Speaker_00
Yes? That seems reasonable to you? Well, yes.

00:17:45 Speaker_02
You know, I think the thing to start with is just that God spoke to Abraham. He's coming from a completely pagan background. And God establishes a relationship with him, and then he has the tension with his nephew Lot.

00:17:58 Speaker_02
And you can compare the two of them because it's like Lot was drawn to the bright lights of the big city, if you will, to Sodom. Yeah, he pitches his tent towards Sodom. And progressively goes downhill from there. And Abraham is looking elsewhere.

00:18:13 Speaker_02
In the New Testament it says he was looking for a city that had foundations, whose builder and maker is God. So I think there's this longing in Abraham for God. but him and his wife never have a child, and they finally have Isaac in their old age.

00:18:27 Speaker_02
And Isaac means laughter, he's the joy of their life. And then the Lord asks for the ultimate sacrifice from Abraham, take your son, your only son, whom you love, and offer him as a sacrifice to me.

00:18:40 Speaker_02
And kind of a common misconception, I think, about Isaac in some religious art is you see him portrayed as a young child, when in reality he was probably a young man.

00:18:52 Speaker_02
And therefore, it wasn't just a father sacrificing a son, but it was a son fully cognizant of what he was being asked to do, willing to sacrifice himself.

00:19:02 Speaker_02
But the Lord intervened, said the angel, and you know, and it was never God's intention for Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, but it became a perfect picture of what would happen later at the cross.

00:19:13 Speaker_02
You know, and I think one of the best summations of it all is the story that Jesus told. We call it the parable of the prodigal son. But, you know, we wonder, what is God like? You know, is God austere? Is God harsh? Is God distant?

00:19:28 Speaker_02
Does God have an interest in us? And if Jesus had not suggested this, it might even seem somewhat irreverent. Jesus portrays God as a Father who loves His Son, who misses His Son. And when his son is gone, he longs for his return.

00:19:45 Speaker_02
And not only that, but when the son is a long ways off and comes to his senses and returns, the father runs to him and kisses him. And a better translation would be he smothers him with kisses. So this is an affectionate father.

00:19:59 Speaker_02
And you think this is a boy who came from an affluent home, he came from a loving home, but yet he went away But that's God. Like, what is God like? God is like a Father that misses us and longs for fellowship with us.

00:20:14 Speaker_02
And then, of course, the Son is restored to sonship. So, I think we're all longing for that. Just to go to my own personal story, Jordan, you know, my mother was married and divorced seven times.

00:20:27 Speaker_02
And she was a beautiful woman, literally a dead ringer for Marilyn Monroe. And she had a bunch of boyfriends in between. She was a raging alcoholic. So I never had a father growing up. And I was searching for a father myself.

00:20:41 Speaker_02
And so I saw my mother's lifestyle that was sometimes affluent, primarily alcoholic. She would drink to excess and pass out. in a stupor every night, and suddenly I became the parent in the relationship.

00:20:55 Speaker_02
Even though I was a little boy, I didn't make sure my mom didn't die, right? So get her in bed, make sure she eats something, and care for her. So I can understand young people searching, young men searching.

00:21:08 Speaker_02
I was searching too, but I didn't know what I was searching for. I just knew out there there was something better than the life I was living. And so it's almost like my mother engaged in a form of pre-evangelism.

00:21:22 Speaker_02
She sort of, in her way, showed me the adult world had nothing that I really wanted, and so the answer must be somewhere else.

00:21:29 Speaker_02
But unfortunately, the whole drug culture was happening, and I bought into the lie of turn on, tune in, drop out, you know, along with a lot of other young people, and I quickly- Timothy Leary. Yeah, Timothy Leary, exactly.

00:21:43 Speaker_02
And I quickly found that wasn't true. And I tried, I smoked a lot, I did those things every day. And I saved that for weekends. And I had a couple bad trips, and I thought, this is not the direction I want my life to go.

00:22:02 Speaker_02
And I lived for a time with my grandparents, and they had a portrait of Jesus on their wall. And I would often look at it as a young boy and think, I wish I could have known Jesus. It's too bad He was merely a historical figure.

00:22:18 Speaker_02
And somehow I made a connection on my high school campus when there were these kids that were very outspoken for their faith that were talking about Jesus. We called them Jesus freaks, not meant as a compliment. And I thought they were all crazy.

00:22:33 Speaker_00
How old are you?

00:22:35 Speaker_02
Now? Yeah. I'm 70. I'm 72. So you were born in?

00:22:40 Speaker_00
52, right. Yeah. So you were 18 in 1970.

00:22:45 Speaker_02
Yes.

00:22:46 Speaker_00
Right. OK, OK. I'm just trying to place you with regard to the hippie movement. Right. So you were 16 and 16. 17 in 1970.

00:22:55 Speaker_02
And that was the year that I, well, I saw these Christians on my high school campus that would sit around at lunchtime and sing songs about God, and I just looked at them and thought, they're all crazy.

00:23:07 Speaker_02
And then I tried a thought on Versailles, what if it's true? And I quickly dismissed it as impossible, it couldn't be true. Because I'd become very cynical because of my upbringing. I'd been so disillusioned by the adult world.

00:23:20 Speaker_02
But then I tried that thought on again, what if it's true? And there was a guy speaking, it's in the movie, the Jesus Revolution movie that it's shown in the film.

00:23:31 Speaker_02
Jonathan Rumi, who plays Jesus in The Chosen, plays the role of Lonnie Frisbee, this evangelist who had long hair and a beard, who was speaking that day. And he made one statement that got my attention. He said, Jesus said, you're for me or against me.

00:23:46 Speaker_02
So I looked at all these, Jesus freaks. And I thought, well, I'm not one of them. Does that mean I'm against Jesus? I thought, well, I don't want to be against Jesus. I believe he's out there. I've seen all of his movies.

00:23:58 Speaker_02
What I know of him, I have a respect. But then I realized, but I'm not a believer in this sense. Could this happen for me? And I ended up praying. And that was the day that my life changed. And so coming back to fathers again,

00:24:14 Speaker_02
My mom had been married and divorced so many times, I had a full-time ministry trying to evangelize my former father, so-called. But, you know, here's what happened.

00:24:24 Speaker_00
Okay, so let me tangle some of the things we talked about together then, and correct me if I'm wrong. Okay, so we started out talking about why there might be a movement more towards traditional faith among young men, right?

00:24:39 Speaker_00
And then I told the story of Abraham, and then you started to talk about your childhood. So I want to elaborate on that a little bit because there's a theme emerging here that's particularly relevant. And you compared her to Marilyn Monroe.

00:24:53 Speaker_00
Now, Marilyn Monroe, of course, died an unpleasant death and in many ways had an unpleasant life. But she was definitely an archetypal figure. And so I want to delve into that a little bit.

00:25:09 Speaker_00
Now, if your mother was comparable to Marilyn Monroe, then she had a tremendous sensual cachet, right? And that is an immense power. And Marilyn Monroe could wield that better than anyone. in the last century, let's say, that we know of.

00:25:28 Speaker_00
She said she could turn that on and off. I heard an interview with her and she said she could walk down the street as, was Norma Rae, was that her?

00:25:35 Speaker_02
Norma Jean.

00:25:36 Speaker_00
Norma Jean. And no one would pay any attention to her. She could walk down the street as Marilyn Monroe and then she was just magnetic. And so she had learned how to turn that on and off. So there's a tremendous sexual power there.

00:25:49 Speaker_00
But Marilyn Monroe and your mother both got caught up in the shadow side of that. And I think the shadow side of that is the fact that sexuality, like any primordial motivational state, is very short-term and hedonistic in its orientation.

00:26:08 Speaker_00
And that means that if it's the ruler, then things are going to devolve very badly. It doesn't have a long-term vision. And so it's pursuing its short-term ends.

00:26:19 Speaker_00
Anything that only pursues short-term ends isn't going to survive in the medium to the long run. It has to be integrated in something that's broader.

00:26:25 Speaker_00
Now, you as a child, again, correct me if I'm wrong because I'm going on very slim evidence here, you as a child saw the power of that and also the dark side of it. Yeah. So the power of it was the fact that your mother was capable of

00:26:40 Speaker_00
attracting men and pursuing sequential relationships. Like, she had that ability, but the downside was, well, the alcoholism that's often, and drug use that's often associated with hedonism, and the fact that she was abandoned and alone, right?

00:26:55 Speaker_00
So those are terrible dark sides. Now, you could imagine that in you, Because this has to happen. There's going to be the emergence of a deep longing for the corrective to that.

00:27:06 Speaker_00
So then you might ask, well, what's the corrective to hedonistic sensuality? And it is something like ordered patriarchy. So let me give you an example of that, a reverse example. So I wrote this paper with Jonathan Paggio.

00:27:22 Speaker_00
on the imagery of the Scarlet Beast and the Babylon. Wow. So the Scarlet Beast is a multi-headed monster that's blood-colored, and it represents the degenerate patriarchal state.

00:27:33 Speaker_00
So when God dies, so to speak, and that unity disappears, the state turns into a multiplicity and the heads war with one another, and that's like bloodshed. And so there's the Scarlet Beast, the degenerate masculinity.

00:27:47 Speaker_00
Okay, on the back of that is degenerate femininity, and the message seems to be that when the masculine state deteriorates, the feminine state deteriorates, which is exactly what you'd expect, unless you propose that one sex could go astray without the other going astray.

00:28:03 Speaker_00
That's not going to happen. When the state degenerates, feminine sexuality commoditizes. That's a good way of thinking about it. And then you get the tension between the two. And in that story, the Scarlet Beast ends up killing the whore.

00:28:19 Speaker_00
So the degenerate state will offer hedonistic gratification as an attractant, but in the final analysis will demolish all of that.

00:28:29 Speaker_00
which is, you know, married religious couples have the most sex, which is like one of the funniest statistics ever as far as I'm concerned. It's like unbridled hedonism destroys sex itself. That's another way of thinking about it.

00:28:42 Speaker_00
Right, so that's... Okay, so in you, obviously, and to some degree you were a child of your times, in you is going to emerge a longing for whatever would rectify whatever you saw your mother go through, right? Now, so you could imagine that that would

00:28:57 Speaker_00
manifest itself as a desire for the presence of something paternal, but also But underneath that, there would be a religious longing as well, which would be something like a longing for the spirit of the benevolent patriarchal.

00:29:11 Speaker_00
Okay, so now you're watching these kids, the Jesus freaks, and you're having ambivalence about that. Okay, what's the basis of the ambivalence? What is it about what they're doing?

00:29:21 Speaker_00
Because this kind of strikes to the heart of the atheistic conundrum, too. You know, I mean, there can be something… The enemies of Christ in the Gospels, the primary enemies, are the Pharisees, right? They're religious pretenders.

00:29:37 Speaker_00
Right, so that's a very interesting thing. So, you're watching the Jesus freaks, and you said that that wasn't a laudatory term, and you're wrestling with their attractiveness, you know, on the one hand. you think there's something to it.

00:29:51 Speaker_00
On the other hand, you find what is it that you weren't happy about that you were seeing, do you think? What was it that was pushing you away?

00:29:58 Speaker_02
Well, I think it's just that they seem fanatical. They seem extreme, and it seemed too obvious. Like, are you kidding me? Are you telling me that

00:30:07 Speaker_02
after my search into all these things, thinking maybe it's in astrology, maybe it's in Eastern religion, maybe it's in drugs, maybe it's in this or it's in that, that it's literally Jesus Christ, that portrait hanging on my grandmother's wall.

00:30:22 Speaker_02
Like, I never even considered that is what I was looking for. Or I should rephrase it, that's who I was looking for. But there it was in plain sight. And so, it can't be this simple. That seemed too absurd, in a way.

00:30:37 Speaker_02
Well, yes, but then there was something—some of these kids, I knew them, I grew up with them, I partied with them, and I saw they were changed.

00:30:45 Speaker_02
So I couldn't dismiss them as all being crazy people, because I knew them before, and I saw transformation had happened in their life.

00:30:52 Speaker_02
So I prayed a prayer, and I said, God, if you're real, you need to make yourself real to me, because I'm full of cynicism, I'm full of doubt. How old were you at this time? I was 17. Yeah, but I felt like I was older because I had to grow up faster.

00:31:06 Speaker_02
And so I think my life experiences were not the typical 17-year-old. But, but... Well, especially for that time, because at that time, where'd you grow up? I grew up in California, Newport Beach, Orange County.

00:31:19 Speaker_00
Okay, so things would have been a little more fragmented there than in many places. But most people at that time would have come from intact families. Did you have any male figures in your life? that helped you orient yourself along that axis?

00:31:35 Speaker_02
No, not really. Not until later, where there was one person, Oscar Laurie. So my mom, almost looks like she kept marrying the same guy. They were kind of, you might call them barflies.

00:31:46 Speaker_02
You know, the guys that have just a few too many of their buttons on their shirt undone. and they're hanging out in the bar. And so she kept marrying, like, the same guy, in a sense. And then she met this guy from New Jersey. He was an attorney.

00:32:01 Speaker_02
He was intelligent. He was educated. He was very conservative. And I don't know what my mother saw in him. He was so different, but he literally took an interest in me. He adopted me.

00:32:14 Speaker_02
He gave me his last name and treated me as a father should treat his son. So one day—

00:32:20 Speaker_02
Yeah, so he was that one bright spot, and then there's a neat connecting story where I was able to reconnect later with him and, in a sense, return the favor a little bit.

00:32:33 Speaker_02
So when I came out of school one day in New Jersey, where we were living at the time, the car was packed up with all of our luggage, and I said, where are we going? My mom said, we're going to Hawaii. I said, well, where's dad?

00:32:45 Speaker_02
She said, he's not coming. And I didn't see him for the rest of my childhood. So we flew to Honolulu. She had already met another guy who was the most abusive of all of her husbands.

00:32:55 Speaker_02
In fact, this guy knocked her unconscious with a wooden statue when they were having a drunken fight. And I climbed out of the window of my bedroom and ran to the neighbor's and we moved back to California. But you know, so this was, I remembered him.

00:33:11 Speaker_02
And he was someone that was stable. He disciplined me. He gave me an allowance. One time I stole something from a store and he took me down to the jail and introduced me to the prisoners trying to keep me away from a life of crime.

00:33:25 Speaker_02
Problem was I thought it was kind of cool. I kind of missed the memo, but, but he was, he was a father figure.

00:33:32 Speaker_02
So even though I never, cause I was not planned, you know, my mom had a one night stand in Long Beach and I was conceived and I found that out like 30 years later.

00:33:41 Speaker_02
But because He treated me as a father should treat a son, I've always thought of Him and spoken of Him as my dad. So here's the cool thing.

00:33:50 Speaker_02
Even if you're raised in a broken home and you don't have a biological father, I think a man can step in and be a father figure.

00:34:00 Speaker_02
It could be a pastor, it could be a coach, it could be an uncle, it could be a friend, but a man can step in and show a young man—or a young woman, because young women obviously need dads, too—he can step in and be that father figure for them.

00:34:18 Speaker_02
And Oscar did that, and then later, after I became a Christian, there was a pastor named Chuck Smith. who was kind of that father figure for a lot of us. So it kind of helped me and a lot of other young men find our way.

00:34:30 Speaker_02
And I think that needs to—and like I was saying to you earlier, I watched a film about you in The Rise of Jordan Peterson, and I saw these young men coming up to you. And it was so interesting to me, because they're very young,

00:34:45 Speaker_02
And they're reading what you've written, and they've found you on YouTube. One young man said, I was extremely depressed and even suicidal, and you helped me.

00:34:54 Speaker_02
And I just thought, you're doing that in your way, being a father figure to a generation that is seeking. And I think that's fantastic.

00:35:02 Speaker_00
Yeah, well, there's a longing. There's an innate longing for the realization of certain patterns, right? And the longing is vague. Established by God. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's deeply instantiated.

00:35:14 Speaker_00
The longing is vague, and there's various ways that it could be catalyzed. But my sense as a developmental psychologist is that a neurologically intact child needs one good example. right? Zero is too few. That's fatal, so to speak.

00:35:34 Speaker_00
But if you're neurologically intact, one example will do the trick. And so you had the gentleman that you described. You know, it's also for people who are more

00:35:44 Speaker_00
aesthetically oriented or intellectually oriented, they can often derive some of that from books and from abstracted representations. You can pull it in that way too, but you definitely need it. So now these Jesus freaks.

00:35:56 Speaker_00
So when I was a kid, you see, I was struck by a moral conundrum. And I think it has something to do with religious pretension. And so I'd be interested in your opinion on this, is that the more religious people that I grew up with,

00:36:14 Speaker_00
So I grew up in what was essentially a frontier town. Fairview had only been settled about 50 years before, scraped out of the prairie 50 years before. We were in the northernmost reaches of the North American prairie.

00:36:27 Speaker_00
And it was a relatively rough working class town. And most of my friends were relatively rough working class kids.

00:36:35 Speaker_00
And I hung around with, I wouldn't exactly call them delinquents, because there were some seriously bad kids and my friends weren't in that group, but they were,

00:36:44 Speaker_00
Most of them dropped out of high school, you know, in grade 10 or so, went and worked on the rigs. They were tough kids. And there was the odd evangelical. They weren't exactly Jesus freaks, because we weren't a hippie community, really.

00:37:02 Speaker_00
But I was leery of them because I, and I think there was a Nietzschean reason for that, is that, you know, Nietzsche said that most morality is cowardice.

00:37:12 Speaker_00
Now, he didn't mean that morality was cowardice because he wasn't a simple-minded character, but what he meant often was that people who were afraid justified their fear by giving it a facade of the moral.

00:37:25 Speaker_01
Yeah.

00:37:25 Speaker_00
And what I noticed about the moral Christian Teenagers that I knew is that they were timid and afraid and obedient, and they justified that by reference to their religious morality. And I didn't like that.

00:37:40 Speaker_00
I like the more... I like one of my best friends, for example, he got kicked out of school when he was in grade 10 for picking a fight with the Vissette instructor. And you think, well, that's pretty bad.

00:37:52 Speaker_00
It's like, well, he was only 15 and this phys ed instructor could do an Iron Cross. He was tough, muscular, tough guy. And the fact that my friend picked a fight with him, you know, I'm not trying to whitewash that, but it was also extremely brave.

00:38:08 Speaker_00
He was not a coward. And it was a foolish thing to do because he hadn't progressed any great distance, he would have been pounded flat. But he was a tough kid. And I admired that.

00:38:19 Speaker_00
And when I watched the more religious types, so to speak, they were too afraid to engage in life. And then I learned later, you know, as a psychologist, there's a literature on misbehavior in adolescents.

00:38:30 Speaker_00
Okay, so you imagine a normal distribution of misbehavior. Over here are the kids who, like, they steal, and they drink, and they take too many drugs, and they engage in early sexual promiscuity, and they don't do well.

00:38:44 Speaker_00
That's like pathway to life course criminality. Then there's the kids over here who never break any rules. They don't do well either. They end up dependent and depressed and anxious. Then there's the kids in the middle who

00:38:57 Speaker_00
break enough rules when they're teenagers to explore, but basically take a straight path, they're the ones that do well. And so I saw the religious type, so to speak, fall into that timid camp that was dependent. that turned me away from that.

00:39:13 Speaker_00
So, I don't know if that experience rings any bells for you, Warren.

00:39:16 Speaker_02
Well, I'm over in this category here. You know, I was the one, like, my cousin, older than me, named Wayne, he is a psychologist, preparing to become a psychologist.

00:39:27 Speaker_02
And so, he did a study on me as a young man, and he said, clearly, you're headed in the wrong direction. And I was always getting in trouble at school, always creating chaos. And I think I was just looking for attention. I was looking for purpose.

00:39:44 Speaker_02
And so, for me, I didn't have any religious hypocrisy to rebel against because I didn't know any religious people. All I knew were basically hedonists, adult hedonists.

00:39:55 Speaker_02
who didn't give me anything even remotely close to an example worth emulating or following. So all I knew in life at that stage, at 17, was like a process of elimination.

00:40:07 Speaker_02
I hadn't found what I was looking for, but I knew it wasn't here and it wasn't there. So where was it?

00:40:14 Speaker_00
If anywhere.

00:40:14 Speaker_02
Yeah, if anywhere. But there was something in me that said, it's going to get better.

00:40:21 Speaker_00
What do you think that was?

00:40:23 Speaker_02
I think that, I think God, you know, the Bible says that God has put eternity in our heart. And I think that deep inside of us, we're pre-wired to know God. I think that there's a longing, you know, it was C.S.

00:40:35 Speaker_02
Lewis that called it the inconsolable longing. something that won't be satisfied by anything. But the right thing, but the right thing. And so that was in me.

00:40:44 Speaker_02
And, and I was, I became an artist, a little cartoonist, and I drew these little cartoon adventures and I created my own characters because it was a private world I could retreat to. And it was also where I developed a slightly warped sense of humor.

00:40:59 Speaker_02
It's very sarcastic. Like I was more drawn to reading. I don't know if you've ever seen these mad magazine.

00:41:04 Speaker_00
Oh, yes.

00:41:05 Speaker_02
instead of normal comic books, because I liked things that were subversive and sarcastic and somewhat irreverent. And I still have that sense of humor today. It's changed somewhat as a Christian, but it's still there.

00:41:18 Speaker_02
You know, I see the absurdity in situations. I think I see facades maybe a little more quickly. But at the same time, there was a longing for something good and pure. So when I met my wife-to-be, Kathy.

00:41:31 Speaker_00
How old were you when you met her?

00:41:33 Speaker_02
I was, let's see, I would have been probably 18 years old. And we got married, and we just celebrated 50 years of marriage. We're still together. We're still celebrating, but she's here in the room with us.

00:41:48 Speaker_02
So, you know, to be able to come from a home where my mom was married and divorced seven times with a bunch of boyfriends in between, with a life that was on the wrong trajectory, going the wrong way, and then they have everything changed.

00:42:05 Speaker_02
That can't be explained to me, just.

00:42:07 Speaker_00
Okay, now you said, okay, so two things I want to delve into. So I was curious, you were watching the Jesus preaching.

00:42:13 Speaker_02
You know, I've never been to see a psychologist or a psychiatrist, but I feel this is my first time in here.

00:42:21 Speaker_00
Well, it's very interesting to see how themes develop and to see what they imply, right? And it is, I mean, you also revealed something that's quite remarkable just in the last thing that you said, because, you know,

00:42:36 Speaker_00
You came from a broken home, but you had a marriage that lasted 50 years, right? So, you know, one of the things that foolishly psychological people, psychologically-minded people assume is that the past determines the future.

00:42:51 Speaker_00
And the thing is, is that many people who don't drink had alcoholic fathers. Now, many people who drink also had alcoholic fathers, but the reality of the matter is that there's a variety of lessons that you can learn from any teaching trial.

00:43:05 Speaker_00
And if you're bullied, you can learn to bully, but you can also learn to never bully.

00:43:09 Speaker_00
And one of the things that you apparently learned, both to desire and to enact, from the example of your mother was a counterexample, because you've had a 50-year relationship, was also something that you wanted.

00:43:21 Speaker_00
And so there was part of you that was searching for stability and purpose, and part of you that actually believed that that was possible as well, which is also interesting, because it begs the question why you would even think that was possible.

00:43:35 Speaker_00
Okay, so now back to the Jesus freaks.

00:43:37 Speaker_00
Now, you were watching them as a relatively young teenager, and you thought there was maybe something there, and so you got curious about that, but you were also skeptical, and you said something about praying, and that that was something that changed your life.

00:43:53 Speaker_00
So, can you relate that?

00:43:55 Speaker_02
Okay, here's what it came down to. This guy who was preaching, his name was Lonnie Frisbee, he said, come up here and I'll lead you in a prayer. And I walked up there and I thought, this isn't gonna work. Where were you?

00:44:09 Speaker_02
I'm high school, high school, it's high school at lunchtime in Newport Harbor High School in Southern California. and Newport Beach, California. So I'm at, it's lunchtime. I've walked forward in this public meeting that I was kind of attending.

00:44:24 Speaker_02
I was far enough away where I wouldn't be looked like I was a part of it, but close enough where I could kind of eavesdrop. No one invited me. Normally people become Christians because someone invites them to church or they share the gospel with them.

00:44:37 Speaker_02
No one did that for me. But I walked over to this evangelist and other kids were praying. He said, pray this prayer with me. And you know, Jordan, this is a prayer that I've led people in for over 50 years. And I've seen their lives change.

00:44:53 Speaker_02
And there's nothing magical in this prayer. It's just a prayer based on biblical principles. But all prayer is, is it's communicating with God. And I don't think it has to be sophisticated. I think it needs to be genuine and from the heart.

00:45:06 Speaker_02
And the prayer went something along the lines of, God, I know I'm a sinner, but I know Jesus Christ is a Savior who died on the cross for my sin and rose again from the dead. And I asked Jesus to come into my life. I didn't know what I was doing.

00:45:22 Speaker_02
but I believed it. And I didn't have an emotional experience, though people next to me did. One was laughing, one with joy, one was crying, maybe over their sins. I felt nothing, and I thought, if that figures, God rejected me.

00:45:37 Speaker_02
But I marked that day in 1970 as the day that Christ literally came into my life, and it changed everything for me. In fact, that weekend, we had planned to go out into the mountains and take

00:45:50 Speaker_02
and smoke, and I went out with my friends, and I broke away. I felt like being alone. I had this little baggie full of and a pipe, and it just dawned on me, I don't want to do this anymore.

00:46:03 Speaker_02
And I don't know why I felt that way, but I thought, I don't want this anymore. And so I said, God, if you're real, make yourself real to me. And I threw my pipe away. So that's a sacrificial gesture. Yeah. And there was no one talking to me.

00:46:21 Speaker_02
No one explained, like what we do when someone prays at one of our events. We're there to explain it. We give them a Bible. We're there to follow up on them. No one did any of this for me. But you know, God says, those that seek me will find me.

00:46:35 Speaker_02
And I think if we genuinely reach out to God, God will respond. You don't have to do anything perfectly. It just needs to be a movement of your heart toward God.

00:46:45 Speaker_02
And as much as I knew as a 17-year-old kid, I took that step of faith, and that is when my life began to change.

00:46:53 Speaker_00
And I've led people in this similar— Your thoughts do make themselves manifest to you in keeping with the spirit of your aim. So you can think about this.

00:47:04 Speaker_00
So there's a long history since the early 1960s of study into a phenomenon known as the orienting response. And the orienting response is a collection of psychophysiological responses that orient you towards a goal.

00:47:19 Speaker_00
Well, so imagine that when you envision a goal, you see a landscape appear in front of you in relationship to that goal. And it's quite straightforward to understand.

00:47:33 Speaker_00
I mean, if I want to walk across the room through an open door, the first thing I do is look at the door, right? So now I've oriented my aim towards the door. Now I can see a pathway to the door and I can see obstacles and pathways.

00:47:46 Speaker_00
I can see things that'll move me forward and things that'll get in my way. And that is the, landscape of perception. There's an aim and a pathway, and there's obstacles and facilitators, and you're always in that. Your thoughts work that way, too.

00:48:02 Speaker_00
So once you orient yourself towards an aim, the thoughts that come to you will have the voice of the spirit of that aim. This is technically how thought works. If I'm angry with you, And I want to have a fight.

00:48:18 Speaker_00
The thoughts that will come to me will be in keeping with that motivation, and the perceptions as well. Like, I'm going to transform your face even into a target, right? I'm going to allow the voice of anger to make itself manifest within me.

00:48:32 Speaker_00
So now imagine that I reconfigure my aim. so that I'm aiming, however imperfectly, for the highest thing I can conceive of, however imperfectly." Well, that's the voice that's going to respond to the inquiries. Like, that's technically true.

00:48:46 Speaker_00
Now, I'm not sure exactly what that means metaphysically, but it does imply that—this is a terrifying thing to realize—is that every aim is a prayer. And every spirit that responds to your aim responds in the voice of the spirit of that aim.

00:49:07 Speaker_00
And this is a terrible thing, because it means, for example, if you're possessed by resentment, it's the eternal spirit of vengefulness that will make itself manifest in your heart. That's exactly what happens.

00:49:21 Speaker_00
Well, there's no reason to assume at all that that wouldn't happen on the positive side. Okay, so now you made a gesture.

00:49:28 Speaker_00
You know, you had decided somehow that the hedonistic pathway that you were pursuing, even if there was some search for enlightenment in it, say with the, you weren't gonna go down that route.

00:49:41 Speaker_00
And you can imagine that, you know, you'd learned your lesson to some degree by watching your mother and her boyfriends, that there was some real danger in that, the Timothy Leary danger, right? enlightenment without wisdom, let's say.

00:49:53 Speaker_00
So you made a gesture, you cast that aside, and then you opened yourself up, and the opening would be, well, I'm operating under the presumption that something better could appear, whatever that might be.

00:50:04 Speaker_00
Okay, so now you said the first time you did that in the schoolyard, there was no real response. But you believe, in retrospect, that something nonetheless changed, and then the next part of the story was this. Right?

00:50:16 Speaker_00
So, you're out with your friends, and you decide to do something different. Okay, so now that's a prayer. That's a humble prayer. You're on your knees saying, there's got to be more. Okay, so then what happens?

00:50:27 Speaker_02
Well, you know, so I go back to school, and the Christians there saw me and said, hey, Greg, come to our Bible study. and okay and I went and I felt kind of uncomfortable there.

00:50:39 Speaker_00
So did you have friends outside that circle?

00:50:42 Speaker_02
I had a bunch of low-life friends. I was going to one school called Coronadomar High School that was kind of a a school attended by a fluent kid. So I was not an affluent kid. We lived in a little apartment in that area. And so it was very different.

00:51:00 Speaker_02
I literally transferred to this other school, Corona De Mar High School, to Harbor High, to change my identity. I said, I want to become a different person. I don't want to be the preppy guy that everybody knows and, you know,

00:51:14 Speaker_02
trying out for the football team, I was ultimately rejected, but I hung out with those kids because my grades were too low. But anyway, so I wanted to be a different person and I thought the drug culture had the answers.

00:51:26 Speaker_02
So what happened ultimately was I transferred to another school where I had relative anonymity because people didn't know me like they knew me at the school I transferred from.

00:51:36 Speaker_02
But in reality, I ended up becoming a different person, just not in the way I expected.

00:51:41 Speaker_00
So I look back in retrospect and I think... So you transferred to this new school so that you could get away from the preppy image and hang around with the more drug-oriented? And that isn't what happened.

00:51:52 Speaker_00
You ended up in the clutches of the Christians instead.

00:51:56 Speaker_02
Yeah, I did. But there was a time I was in the drug culture there, very much so, every day as a matter of fact. But then when this transformation happened—so here's an illustration.

00:52:08 Speaker_02
So I'm walking across the campus, and one of these Christians says, Hey, Greg, here's a Bible. And they gave me a Bible. And I'm like, Wow, I'm not going to carry this Bible around.

00:52:17 Speaker_02
So I shoved it in the pocket of my coat, and I went over to my friend's house, which was a stone's throw from our high school, because we would literally get high there every day at lunchtime. So I walked over there.

00:52:28 Speaker_02
I hadn't seen them since I'd prayed this prayer with these Christians. So I looked around and said, I'm not going to walk in with a Bible. So I took the Bible and put it in the hedge in front of my friend's house.

00:52:38 Speaker_02
And I walked in and they said, Hey, Laurie, where have you been? I said, nowhere. Hey, we're going to get high. You want to get high? He said, no, I don't want to. Really? They kind of looked at me, what's wrong with you? Like, what have you been doing?

00:52:49 Speaker_02
I said, nothing. I wasn't going to talk about this. Suddenly my friend walks, mom walks in, holding my Bible. I'm thinking, what is this woman? Check her bushes when she comes in her house?

00:53:00 Speaker_02
And then the thing that struck me, he says, who does this belong to? I thought, lady, kids are doing drugs in your house and you're concerned about a Bible in the bushes? She holds it up. Who does this belong to? It's so funny.

00:53:11 Speaker_02
Every eye in the room went to the Bible and they looked at me. They knew there was a connection. And I said, that's mine. And one of my friends said, you're reading the Bible? I said, yeah.

00:53:23 Speaker_02
And they said, oh, are we going to be nice little Christians now and follow Jesus? I said, no, maybe I'll hit you in the mouth.

00:53:29 Speaker_00
I don't know.

00:53:30 Speaker_02
I hadn't read 1 Corinthians 13 or anything at that point, and so they all started mocking me. So it kind of helped me, because I thought, these are not good people, and I don't need to hang around these people anymore.

00:53:44 Speaker_02
They made it easy to make a break with that crowd.

00:53:47 Speaker_02
So I thought, I'm gonna give the Christians another try, and I went back to their meetings and ended up at this church that was in the middle of a spiritual awakening called Calvary Chapel, filled, packed up with people of all ages,

00:54:00 Speaker_02
And then Chuck Smith, who I mentioned earlier, this older man who is the pastor, opened up the Bible and suddenly this book came alive to me. And suddenly I found truth. I never had any absolute truth in my life. I was just looking for something.

00:54:15 Speaker_02
I remember we were in school and Ray Bradbury, you know, the well-known author, came and spoke. And we thought, he's gonna give us truth. We were just looking for someone to give us some truth. And he didn't have anything for us.

00:54:29 Speaker_02
And all of a sudden I find that truth I've been looking for in the Bible. And so then you can't keep me away from the place. So I was like a sponge wanting to make up for lost time and just absorbing these things. And then my life was changing.

00:54:45 Speaker_02
And it wasn't long after that that I started talking to people about this because I wanted to talk to people that were like I used to be, cynical, closed off, and I wanted to say, if God could change someone like me, he can change you too.

00:55:03 Speaker_02
And fast forward 50 years, I'm effectively still doing the same thing.

00:55:08 Speaker_00
Right, the scales changed. Well, so let's walk through that story, and maybe you can tie it in for people who are listening to the movie, The Jesus Revolution. Okay, so this church that you attended and this pastor—flesh that out a bit, if you would.

00:55:23 Speaker_02
Well, it's funny, because this young hippie evangelist—he was kind of cool, we all looked up to him. And so... That was Frisbee. That was Lonnie Frisbee. That's hilarious that his name was Frisbee.

00:55:34 Speaker_00
I don't know when you were a kid, but all the stoners when I was a kid, they all played Frisbee. Frisbee. Yeah, yeah, definitely. Right. So... I think that was one of those games that you could still understand when you were stoned. Exactly.

00:55:49 Speaker_02
So we kind of came for Lonnie, but this older man walks out. I had a problem with older figures, authority figures, because all of the adults in my life I didn't respect.

00:55:59 Speaker_02
And then I was always being sent to the principal's office for misbehaving in class. So I just had a chip on my shoulder for all adults. Like, there's nothing you can tell me.

00:56:08 Speaker_00
There was a- Oh, you know, a lot of these, a lot of the claim that's popped up among young women and young men, I think I'll concentrate on young women for a moment, is that, you know, the patriarchy is nothing but authoritarian power.

00:56:21 Speaker_00
That is what you think if you've never had a good relationship with anybody in a position of authority, you know. And so if you're, you know, a lot of young women who are trapped in progressive hell are trapped there, not least because

00:56:34 Speaker_00
They've never had a good relationship with anyone male. Not a brother, not a father, not a friend. Yeah, so all they see is... And then it's a worse conundrum, too, because imagine that you regard the opposite sex as a power-mad enemy.

00:56:49 Speaker_00
Well, then the ones that are better at that are going to be more frightening. So what you want is... If someone's your enemy, you want them to be weak. Right, okay.

00:56:58 Speaker_00
So these young women who are confused like this are in a terrible conundrum because if they ever meet a competent man, But their history, you know, tilts them towards interpreting any manifestation of competence as power.

00:57:12 Speaker_00
They're going to be anti-competence because they're going to assume that that's nothing but a manifestation of power.

00:57:17 Speaker_00
So then they're in an absolutely brutal position because nobody who's competent, they're going to be maximally distrustful of anyone who's competent.

00:57:28 Speaker_00
Okay, so you're kind of in the same situation, because all the people of authority, so to speak, in your life had—well, you just saw the hedonistic and exploitative side of that. Right. Right.

00:57:40 Speaker_00
Well, you could also imagine that even your misbehavior, such as it was, would be—that's a limit testing approach, because what you're kind of hoping for is that— You know, you'll push and you'll hit a wall that actually is there, right?

00:57:55 Speaker_00
And not one that's arbitrary, not one that's just based on power, but one that comes along and says, you know, no, that's actually enough. Enough of that. Not least because it's not good for you, right?

00:58:06 Speaker_00
And the way people search for that isn't merely by asking, they search for that by misbehaving and watching what happens. That's limit testing. It has to happen that way.

00:58:15 Speaker_02
Well, actually, to illustrate that, during my mother's wild adventures—I lived with my grandparents for a time—she sent me to military school on two separate occasions.

00:58:24 Speaker_02
Where, like, I lived on campus, we were cadets, we wore our little uniforms, we had barracks, we had a housemother. And it's funny, I hated it, but I flourished there. Because if you mess up, you get discipline, and we're talking corporal discipline.

00:58:41 Speaker_02
They had something notoriously known as the cheese paddle, which was a large paddle with holes drilled in it, and it'd swat you with that thing. And suddenly I went from delinquent kid to honor roll and good grades.

00:58:53 Speaker_02
And so when I was pulled out of military school and went back to public school and realized how much I could get away with, I returned to my old ways again. So it shows when absolutes were in my life, I would respond. I needed that.

00:59:06 Speaker_02
But this is different, though, because that was a very strong authoritarian thing. But I think in many ways it was actually kind of good for me at the time.

00:59:14 Speaker_00
Well, the thing, you know, the more disagreeable a child is, you know, and that would be associated with that tendency limit test, the higher the walls have to be to hem them in. You know, and there's advantages and disadvantages to that.

00:59:29 Speaker_00
I mean, the disadvantage is if you're a disagreeable kid and you're let run free. wild, you're kind of like an attack dog that isn't trained. And well, that's just not good. But an attack dog that is trained, that's a really useful dog. Right.

00:59:43 Speaker_00
But it takes some, you know, some real work to socialize. The more aggressive a child is, the harder it is to socialize them. But if you can socialize them, they're hyper-useful. Yes. Right, right. So it's a high-risk, high-return strategy.

00:59:57 Speaker_00
Okay, so you went to this church, and you were first attracted, and the other kids around you, by Frisbee, who was kind of charismatic and young, and there was an older gentleman. This is also all laid out in the movie, right? In Jesus' Revelation.

01:00:11 Speaker_02
It is, yeah. Kelsey Grammer plays Chuck Smith. in the film. And I think Chuck came out on one service and I looked at him and, an adult, I don't want to listen to an adult, you know, it's going to be boring.

01:00:24 Speaker_02
And he opened the Bible up and he began to speak in such an understandable way. So he's like a father, but a benevolent father, but strong. And so he was somewhat, I'd never met anyone like this before, apart from Oscar Laurie, who adopted me.

01:00:41 Speaker_02
And so this was, what I needed—a father figure to help me and to be a model for me. And sometimes it's not just in theology. It's just in the practical things of life. You know, he was kind of a salt-of-the-earth guy, hard-working guy.

01:00:58 Speaker_02
Like, for him, a day off was actually building things. So he was like a classic dad. I think they call him trad dads now, you know. But kind of like, wow, this is what a father—I've never seen this before. How interesting, you know?

01:01:11 Speaker_00
Wow, that's a terrible conundrum to be in, too, because you'd be longing for that, and also the distrust would build in proportion to the longing. You know, you see people who are really hurt sometimes.

01:01:23 Speaker_00
It's a terrible thing to watch, because what they'll do when they meet someone, they're hoping they can trust them. They're so afraid of opening themselves up to betrayal one more time that they'll ramp up the misbehavior.

01:01:37 Speaker_00
And some of them, these are the borderline types, some of them will ramp up the misbehavior past the point where anyone can tolerate it. And then they get rejected. And then they think, oh, well, that's what I expected.

01:01:47 Speaker_00
But they get in this terrible loop so that they misbehave so badly that it's beyond the can of any one human to tolerate it. Yeah, then they're in a permanent betrayal trap. Oh, it's really bad.

01:01:58 Speaker_00
But you still had enough residual trust, apparently, so that you could... allow this connection to occur. You had that guy that was your father.

01:02:07 Speaker_02
Maybe because there was one bright spot there. So looping back to him again. So I got married and I'm a young pastor. I've started my own church now that grew out of a little Bible study of young people. I never intended on becoming a pastor.

01:02:23 Speaker_02
I kind of thought I might be called to be an evangelist and travel around and speak to people, but a little Bible study was developing. So, This was in that church to begin with?

01:02:32 Speaker_02
No, this is another church, about 45 minutes away, in a community called Riverside, that I went and established this little Bible study.

01:02:39 Speaker_00
Oh, yes, I'm remembering pieces of the movie now as you tell the story. Right, so you established your own—how old were you when that happened? I was 21. Right, so, well, young by today's standards. Yeah.

01:02:53 Speaker_00
There were battle commanders who were 21 not so long ago. That's true. Yeah. Okay, so you established your own church, and what sort of people came to begin with?

01:03:01 Speaker_02
Young, very young. So, we were all young kids, and I had no intention of starting a church. You know, today we have what we call start-up churches. They pop up all over the place—not unusual to see.

01:03:13 Speaker_02
Back in 1973 or 1974, you didn't really see start-up churches. They were traditional churches that had been there for a long time, and then the pastor would die or retire, and someone new would come.

01:03:25 Speaker_02
But you didn't see, oh, we're starting a brand new church. And especially a church of young people and especially a bunch of hippie kids. You know, you could quickly dismiss it as almost cultic.

01:03:36 Speaker_02
But one of the good things that Chuck Smith did for us is he got us studying. He got us into great, books, and we built our library, and we built our messages on the Bible.

01:03:46 Speaker_02
It's called expository Bible teaching, where you go through chapters of the Bible and let the Bible speak for itself as opposed to imposing your view on the text. Let the Bible be the Bible. It's alive, it's powerful, and it impacts people.

01:04:02 Speaker_02
So, coming back to Oscar, so I thought, I would like to see him again." So I was speaking in New York City, and I reached out to him. I found him through the Bar Association. A lady that went to our church worked for the Bar Association.

01:04:17 Speaker_02
I didn't even know if he was alive. This is before Google, right? And so we found his office, and I called it, and I said, hello, is Oscar Lurie there? And the secretary said, no, he's at lunch. who is calling. I said, Greg Laurie.

01:04:31 Speaker_02
She said, how do you spell your last name? I said, well, the same way he spells his, it's his son calling. He calls me a half hour later. He says, Greg, it's so good to hear from you. And I said, dad, I'm going to be in New Year.

01:04:43 Speaker_02
I don't know if I called him dad at that point. Maybe it was a bridge too far at that moment. I just said, I'm going to be in New York City. I'm going to be speaking. Maybe we could have lunch.

01:04:53 Speaker_02
Because he'd remarried, had a new family, and I didn't want to interrupt his life. And he said, no, Greg, come and spend the weekend with us. We want to see you. So I went there with my wife. Well, that's a good thing to have happen. Right.

01:05:06 Speaker_02
So I went with my wife and our oldest son, Christopher. So the first night we caught up. And I told him what happened to me in my life. And he said, I tried to get custody of you.

01:05:17 Speaker_02
But even though your mother was living this crazy life, she fought me and would not let me get custody. Because I would have lived a very different life if I lived with him. So we had dinner the next night.

01:05:29 Speaker_02
And his wife, Barbara, made a great Italian meal. She said, Greg, tell us how you became a Christian and a minister. So I start telling my story. And my dad, he's an attorney. and he's sitting at the other end of the table.

01:05:43 Speaker_02
He says his hands up to his face the whole time like this. I felt like I was in a courtroom. I was giving my testimony and I wasn't doing a very good job because he was not reacting in any way, just staring at me. This isn't going well.

01:05:56 Speaker_02
Barbara's very emotional, reacting. This is wonderful. And so after the meal was over, he said, Greg, I'd like to, would you walk with me in the morning? He had to walk every morning. One thing I left out, he was older.

01:06:12 Speaker_02
He blacked out behind the wheel of his car and almost died. He was having heart issues. So he said, Greg, I'd like you to walk with me. So the next morning he knocked on the door of my bedroom, it's three o'clock.

01:06:25 Speaker_02
California time, six o'clock, East Coast time, and we start walking, and he said, I listened very carefully to what you said last night. I said, right, and I'm calling him dad at this point.

01:06:36 Speaker_02
Yes, and he said, I would like to accept Jesus Christ into my life right now. And I said, well, Dad, let me go over that one more time. And I explained it again. He goes, I want to do that right now. I said, well, he says, what do I need to do?

01:06:50 Speaker_02
I said, well, we need to pray. And he drops to his knees. We're in a park at this point. Now, I wasn't going to get on my knees, but he's down there on his knees, so I get down on my knees with him.

01:06:59 Speaker_02
And I put my hand on his shoulder and I lead him in that prayer I was talking about, similar to the prayer that I prayed. And he said, Craig, pray for my heart. Pray God heals my heart. Okay, let's pray. So we prayed for his heart.

01:07:13 Speaker_02
And he gets up and he was so excited. And he said, Greg, I wanna go to my doctor's office and I wanna have him do a check on my heart. I believe God has healed me. I said, well, I don't know if God's healed you. And so we go to his doctor's office later.

01:07:31 Speaker_02
And he's a nice Jewish gentleman. And my dad introduces me. He says, this is my son from California. He's a preacher. And I just accepted Jesus into my life. And I'm thinking, oy vey, this is like, this doctor's going to think this is crazy. And

01:07:46 Speaker_02
And so they ran tests on my dad, and his heart condition was gone, and he lived 15 more years. So I lived in California. I left, and I got him a Bible, and I came back, oh, maybe three weeks later, and I started saying something from the Scripture.

01:08:03 Speaker_02
He'd read the entire Bible already. Because he was always reading, reading, reading. Read the whole Bible, he's quoting it back to me. His life was radically changed. And so, you know, it was really a great thing for me to be able to— Right, right.

01:08:17 Speaker_00
That's a nice completion for that story. Yeah, it was.

01:08:20 Speaker_02
To go back and—you know, the Bible says that God can bring beauty out of ashes, right? So, and we, you know, we've had to deal with this because our— Another story about our oldest son, Christopher, died in an automobile accident 16 years ago.

01:08:36 Speaker_02
So we've dealt with severe pain and suffering. But we've seen how even in tragedy, God can still do amazing things. And you know, we're all dealt a hand in life, so to speak.

01:08:51 Speaker_02
We don't determine what that hand will be, but we have everything to say about how we will react to it, what we'll do with it. You know, we can harbor bitterness and anger. We can also choose to forgive. And, you know, so I was able to do this for him.

01:09:07 Speaker_02
And I felt when I said, return the favor, I felt like I was able to say, thank you for being a dad for me when I didn't have one.

01:09:15 Speaker_02
And now let me introduce you to your Heavenly Father, coming back to your original theme of fathers and the importance of fathers. And so that was a beautiful... That's what happens in the Pinocchio story.

01:09:29 Speaker_02
Why would Gepetto—I mean, the puppet turns into a boy, and the next thing you know, he sends him off to school. Yeah. It's like, maybe you want to nurture him a little, teach him— Well, he'd give him a foundation, right?

01:09:40 Speaker_00
Because he was a maker, and he was a builder of things. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right? Like the gentleman who started the church. Yes. on break, he'd just like to build things. And so that kind of takes up the Christ as carpenter motif.

01:09:53 Speaker_00
And so Geppetto is a craftsman, but he's also a craftsman who serves the adventurous spirit in children, because he makes children's toys. And he makes this boy as well as he can. And the next thing to do, that sacrifices him to the world.

01:10:10 Speaker_00
It's an economic— Never thought of it that way. It's exactly it. And, you know, we can return to that. Now I understand. Well, the thing is, is that God is the voice that calls Abraham to sacrifice himself to the world.

01:10:22 Speaker_00
He says, leave your comfort and have the terrible adventure of your life, right? But then that's echoed with the Son. And you might say, well, why would God call upon you to do that?

01:10:31 Speaker_00
And it's really amplified in the Abrahamic story because Isaac is not only Abraham's son, but in a sense, his only son and his only unlikely son, right? Promised after decades. So, not only son, but like special son.

01:10:47 Speaker_00
if you're a good father, you do sacrifice your child to the highest possible goal. And in doing that, you get him back, right? That's the moral of the story. And of course it's the case because

01:11:01 Speaker_00
If you're a father and you encourage your son to go out in the world, to leave you, let's say, to go out into the world, even the prodigal, to go out in the world and to suffer the consequences, which is also what a mother has to do when she encourages her child, then the child will be grateful for the support and the faith and maintain a real relationship, say, between adults in adulthood.

01:11:25 Speaker_00
And so, I really figured this out by by concentrating on Michelangelo's Pieta, which is also in St. Peter's.

01:11:35 Speaker_00
And I've always thought about it as the female equivalent of the crucifix, because it's a portrayal of Mary, and she's holding the broken body of her son.

01:11:44 Speaker_00
And she's offered him to the world, which is what a mother has to do if she's actually performing the role of being a mother. She can't protect. And women have to struggle with this. This is part of the reason that we're having an antenatal crisis,

01:12:00 Speaker_00
Women think, well, could I bring a child into a world such as this? And the question is, could I bring a child into the world, given all the pain and suffering that that child will have to undergo? And it's the mark of the faith of Mary

01:12:14 Speaker_00
the archetypal faith of Mary, because she's rewarded, so to speak, with the knowledge of her son's destiny and says yes to God anyways. That is the spirit of the courageous mother. And that's a sacrificial spirit.

01:12:26 Speaker_00
And you think, well, why would God call upon a mother to make that kind of sacrifice, or a father, or yourself, for that matter? And the answer is, well, you have to—Christ says this—you have to deliver everything up to God. Family, friends.

01:12:41 Speaker_00
community, wealth, everything has to be subordinate to the highest unity, and that's a sacrifice. It's like, well, of course that's the case, because the lesser has to serve the greater, or the lesser becomes

01:12:55 Speaker_00
Well, a satanic usurper, essentially, something like that. And so, well, in the Pinocchio story, of course, Pinocchio disappears and is lost. But then Geppetto's lost because he no longer has his son.

01:13:08 Speaker_00
And so, Geppetto goes on a search to reestablish a relationship with his son. And in doing that, plums the depths, that's down into the abyss. Yes.

01:13:17 Speaker_00
And reestablishes the relationship with his son, and then they're both united with the Absolute in consequence of that. Right. Right, that's exactly what happens in your story.

01:13:26 Speaker_01
Yeah.

01:13:26 Speaker_00
It's so interesting because he tried to get custody of you, and that failed, and you went and had your catastrophic adventure in the world.

01:13:34 Speaker_02
It would have been a different life with him.

01:13:36 Speaker_00
Right.

01:13:36 Speaker_02
And in a way, even though I wouldn't wish my childhood on anyone, all of those things through process of elimination brought me to that crisis point where I made that step of faith.

01:13:46 Speaker_02
And if I'd been raised by Oscar Laurie, it would have been a better life. It would have been a safer life. an easier life, but I don't know that that is what would have happened to me.

01:13:56 Speaker_02
So you can look back into the Bible, it says, God cannot cause all things to work together for good to those that love God. And that doesn't mean that everything that happens will always lead to something better.

01:14:08 Speaker_02
There are things that happen in life that are just awful things, like coming back to my son. You know, that was, I never have thought, wow, that happened so this good thing will happen. I see that more as this horrible thing happened to me,

01:14:22 Speaker_02
I wish it had not happened. If I could bring him back, I'd do it in a heartbeat. However, despite this, now my life has changed, and now I want to help other people who are maybe suffering something similar.

01:14:37 Speaker_02
You know, the Bible talks about comforting with the comfort that we've been comforted with. It's been said, you know, if you preach to hurting people, you'll never lack for an audience. And I think it kind of broke me in a new way.

01:14:51 Speaker_02
And it made me want to help other people who've lost loved ones, especially children, because when it happens to you, you wonder if you can survive it.

01:15:01 Speaker_02
I mean, even though I'm a pastor, and I have been for 50 years, and I've done the services of many children, which are the hardest to do, by the way, And I believed everything I said to those parents.

01:15:12 Speaker_02
I would say as I would leave that service, I hope that never happens to me, because I don't think I could handle it. And it did happen to me. And instead of being behind the pulpit, I'm sitting in the front row as the grieving father and my wife.

01:15:27 Speaker_02
as a grieving mother, but I found, interestingly, that when I helped other people, it helped me.

01:15:35 Speaker_02
And even when I was closer to the event, when our grief was still very fresh, when I would meet some of them, maybe it just happened to them, they lost a child. Because people that lose children somehow find each other very quickly.

01:15:50 Speaker_02
And I would find when I would tell them, you're going to survive this, you're not going to get over it, but you will get through it, and life will be better, and it'll take a lot of time, and it's okay to cry, and you should cry, because the depth of your sorrow is an indication of the depth of your love.

01:16:07 Speaker_02
But I would find as I would say those things, I'd kind of be speaking to myself a little bit, because you can be okay, relatively speaking, you get your head above water, you get a gulp of air, I'm going to survive this.

01:16:20 Speaker_02
And then you go into a deep time of grief, and you're turned upside down. And you just need to be reminded over and over again that, as a Christian, I believe I'll see my son again, because he believed in Jesus.

01:16:35 Speaker_02
So he won't be in heaven because I'm his dad. He'll be in heaven because he put his faith in Christ, and he had that relationship with God. So I know he's not just a part of my past. He's a part of my future as well. So that gives me hope.

01:16:49 Speaker_02
But also I realize that God can allow these things in our life. I don't know why. I can't explain it. I don't even try to explain it.

01:16:58 Speaker_00
But I do know— Well, I think it's partly because we're made in the image of God. Yes. So—and we have a— Adam is, um... granted the right and the responsibility to subdue and to name and to put everything in its proper place, right?

01:17:18 Speaker_00
And Eve to bring to Adam's attention the things that remain outside his purview. And those are real things. So human beings have something real to do. And so then you might say, real and important, and you might say, well, what makes something real?

01:17:34 Speaker_00
Now, this is a hard question. And the materialist answer is, well, let's say, sensory evidence. But I don't think that's right. I think what makes things real is death and limitation.

01:17:48 Speaker_00
Like, if you're playing a game, if you're playing a video game, a first-person shooter game, it's a game because when you get killed, you're not dead. It's not a game when death is in the offings. And what we're doing as human beings is real.

01:18:06 Speaker_00
And the price we pay for reality, it looks to me like the price we pay for reality is death. And it's real. And so that's going to have these consequences.

01:18:15 Speaker_00
And I think, you know, you highlighted the most, at least arguably, the most painful of those consequences. You know, people think there's nothing worse than death. I think, well,

01:18:23 Speaker_00
You have a limited imagination, first of all, because there are many things worse than death. And one of the things that might well be worse than death is the death of a child.

01:18:32 Speaker_00
I think it's a very rare parent who wouldn't happily substitute themselves in a contest of death with their child. You know, in a heartbeat, even. And so, now why does God demand that price of reality?

01:18:49 Speaker_00
I think it has something to do with the fact that we do actually have something important to do. You know, we're supposed to be establishing the kingdom of heaven, of God on earth. And that's hard. Like, actually hard. And the eternal enemies of that...

01:19:07 Speaker_00
are sin and death, and those are real, and fighting them is real, and when you're in a real battle, there's real death, and there's real evil, and that's brutal, but that's the price of reality.

01:19:23 Speaker_00
Now, then the question is, well, under what conditions is that price worth paying? And I think that's what the biblical stories actually attempt to explicate. You know, the offering to Abraham, It isn't a life of ease.

01:19:34 Speaker_00
It's not a life of comfort and it's not a life of hedonistic gratification. It's something like a life of adventure. And I would also say there's probably no adventure without death.

01:19:45 Speaker_00
You know, if you think about the movies that people watch, people will go watch super agents, secret agent movies and superhero movies. The secret agent movies in some ways work better because the person is mortal and

01:20:00 Speaker_00
The depth of their commitment is measured by their willingness to put their life on the line. So, I don't know, it looks to me like without—this is a very weird thing—but it looks to me like without death, there's no reality.

01:20:12 Speaker_00
And then you might say, well, that's a price not worth paying. That's an understandable argument. Especially, that's the sort of thing you ask yourself when a child dies. But then you think you said something also that bears on that.

01:20:25 Speaker_00
Well, you said the depth of your grief is proportionate to the magnitude of your love. Yes. And so, you might say, well, how could God constitute a world made such that a child could die?

01:20:36 Speaker_00
And then you think, well, if you have a child and the child dies and you grieve, the grief is an indication of the magnitude of the loss. And so, the fact that you grieve, that's a testament to the value of the life, even though it was truncated.

01:20:50 Speaker_01
Yes.

01:20:50 Speaker_00
So, your grief is the proof of the value of the life.

01:20:54 Speaker_01
Right.

01:20:55 Speaker_00
And so, what that means, as far as I can tell, is that grief itself is the justification of life in the face of death.

01:21:03 Speaker_02
But then there's the afterlife. And I believe in the afterlife. And I believe in heaven. And I believe in it more than I've ever believed. I've always been a student of heaven as a Christian. And the Bible speaks so much of heaven.

01:21:18 Speaker_02
But when my son went to be there, I wanted to know more about it. And as you read the Bible, you realize that heaven is a real place for real people to do real things. You know, Jesus said, I go to prepare a place for you.

01:21:33 Speaker_02
And heaven in the Bible is pictured as a city, it's pictured as a country, it's pictured as a paradise.

01:21:41 Speaker_02
The Bible tells us we'll eat in heaven, we'll be reunited with loved ones in heaven, we'll be active, and then one day heaven comes to earth in what we call the millennium. Heaven and earth become one. So I believe very strongly in that.

01:21:55 Speaker_02
Now, can I prove it?

01:21:57 Speaker_00
Well, I think— What do you think that means? So let's delve into that. That's such a hard question. topic. Let's delve into that a little bit. So, Christ tells his followers to be perfect, like, His Father in heaven is perfect.

01:22:11 Speaker_00
And there's continuous injunctions in the Gospels to bring about the kingdom of heaven on earth. That's central to the Lord's Prayer. And there's an idea that lurks in the opening chapters of Genesis about the reestablishment of the eternal Eden.

01:22:28 Speaker_00
And so it looks like, to me, it looks like there's an insistence that the goal of the true religious striver is to established paradise on earth, something like that.

01:22:40 Speaker_00
And I mean, that can take some vicious utopian spins that are very counterproductive, but that's the underlying idea. Now, I don't know how to reconcile that with the idea of, so that's heaven.

01:22:52 Speaker_00
That's the heaven that people are striving to bring about when they aim upward properly and walk up Jacob's ladder. And I don't know how to reconcile that with notions of the afterlife with regard to death.

01:23:03 Speaker_00
We have the strange insistence on the part of Christianity, too, that Christ defeated death and evil. in spite of the evidence that death and evil continue in this world unabated. And so, there's a paradox there.

01:23:19 Speaker_00
Like, how do you reconcile in your own mind the insistence that part of the Christian moral pattern is to perfect the world and to raise the material up to the heavenly with the notion of the the afterlife and immortality?

01:23:35 Speaker_00
I know that's a terrible question, but I'd like to know your thoughts on it.

01:23:39 Speaker_02
Well, I think, coming back to the statement of Jesus, be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect. Bottom line, nobody can be perfect. We fall short. So, the point of that to me is, is we sin against God.

01:23:53 Speaker_02
Now, some of us sin more than others, but we all sin. We had a little Halloween event at our church, and we had one of those, you know, the bell where you hit the thing with the hammer? And so I've hit that and hit the bell in the past.

01:24:07 Speaker_02
So I got it out, and I hit it, and I got so close, but I never got it. I think I spent a half hour trying to ring that bell, and I fell short. So God has said, perfection, that's the standard for humanity. Well, who can be perfect? Answer, no one.

01:24:21 Speaker_02
That's where Jesus comes in, because the Bible says, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. So, going back to the Garden of Eden, our first parents sinned.

01:24:31 Speaker_02
And because they ate of the forbidden fruit—which, by the way, the Bible never says was an apple. I don't know where the apple came from. But, you know, it was something that was very attractive.

01:24:40 Speaker_02
If you ate of it, it would give you this supernatural wisdom, knowing good and evil. Supposedly, that's what the lie was. They ate of the fruit, and sin came into the world. So, if Adam and Eve had not eaten of the forbidden fruit, we wouldn't die.

01:24:56 Speaker_02
If they had not eaten of the forbidden fruit, we wouldn't age and get sick. If they hadn't eaten of the forbidden fruit, I'd probably have hair right now, right? So these are the effects of aging. But here's the thing.

01:25:09 Speaker_02
The earth, life on earth, is not everything. This is the before life, then there's the afterlife. C.S. Lewis, what did he call it? He had a phrase for it that he used often in his writings about shadowlands. That's right, shadowlands.

01:25:28 Speaker_02
So the idea of Lewis was, that what we're seeing now at its very best—take the greatest moment of your life with your friends, having a meal, enjoying life together, maybe a beautiful sunset—it's a shadow of greater things to come.

01:25:44 Speaker_02
It's not like earth is the real thing and heaven is the imitation. It's actually, according to the Bible, the other way around. Heaven is the real thing.

01:25:52 Speaker_02
See, going back to Abraham, he was looking for a city that had foundations, whose builder and maker was God. He was looking for something he never found in all of his journeys. And I think it was a longing for the afterlife.

01:26:06 Speaker_02
And we all have that longing. And one day when we get to heaven, I think we'll see that the greatest experiences of earth were only a shadow of greater things to come. So I believe very firmly

01:26:21 Speaker_00
in a real heaven, where I'll do real things, and I'll be reunited with my Son, and we'll— Well, it's clear that when you have those great experiences, that they're—first of all, the fact that we can have a category that's

01:26:35 Speaker_00
great experiences indicates that there's some commonality between those experiences, right? The peak moments of your life when you're at the apex, right? It's all the same symbolic language.

01:26:46 Speaker_00
And that obviously is emblematic of something that unites all of those episodes, right? And you could call that heavenly and you could think about it as an echo of a place.

01:26:56 Speaker_00
I mean, I still don't understand the relationship between that, and I think that's all true, by the way.

01:27:01 Speaker_00
I mean, I've seen, too, that Jacob's Ladder, that God is the ineffable pinnacle of this endless upward spiral that's Jacob's Ladder, and He's ineffable in part because maybe you have an ideal and you take 10 steps toward it, and now you're

01:27:21 Speaker_00
near it, but then you see that the true ideal is yet farther than that. And so, you reconstruct your vision of the ideal and you progress towards that, and then when you get there, you see that that's only a shadow of the true ideal.

01:27:33 Speaker_00
I don't think, like I don't think there's any bottom to the abyss, so to speak, on the malevolent side. I don't think there's any pinnacle to upward.

01:27:41 Speaker_00
And there is a vision of heaven in that, but I still struggle to understand the relationship between that and the moral requirement of people to aim towards You know, one of the things my wife and I have been practicing, we got much better at this.

01:27:56 Speaker_00
She just about died three years ago, and so did I, and like close enough so that as far as we were both concerned, we were either dead or wanted to be, like it was... and for a very long time. And anyways, that didn't happen.

01:28:09 Speaker_00
And so we were pretty happy about the fact that each other were around before that, but much happier afterwards. And that's, we've really never forgotten that, you know, even moment to moment. And one of the things that we've decided to practice

01:28:22 Speaker_00
is to notice when we're interacting with one another in a manner that's optimal. And it's interesting because it's also, I've known her since she was eight. So we were childhood friends and we were good friends.

01:28:35 Speaker_00
And I can remember what she was like when she was a little kid and she was an excellent little kid and she was very popular and very much fun to be around. And I can see in her that spirit coming back to life, like very frequently.

01:28:49 Speaker_00
And so, one of the things we've learned to do is to notice when that's happening, right? And first of all, to notice, second, to appreciate it, but then to see if we could practice extending the amount of time that we're in that state.

01:29:04 Speaker_00
And you can get much better at that if you practice, just like you get better at everything that you practice. And that is something like, I used to counsel my clients as well to do this, is if they were depressed, is, you know, to monitor their mood.

01:29:15 Speaker_00
And then to see times when they were less depressed, because someone who's even quite depressed still varies. So you say, well, sometimes you're going to be on the brink of suicide, but other times you're going to forget that you're depressed.

01:29:28 Speaker_00
You've got to see what you're doing when things are better, and then you have to start doing those things more. So you can practice that. And so you can take these little visions of paradise that you get in life, and you can expand them with practice.

01:29:42 Speaker_00
And then I think, as you do that, inside that window, then another window opens up, or another door. That's the door you knock on, right? Another door opens, and then you can expand that. And I don't think that is a paradisal vision.

01:29:55 Speaker_00
I don't think there is any end to that. But I still don't understand the relationship between that, even theologically, and the idea of life after death.

01:30:06 Speaker_00
that it means life eternal, because what happens in those moments of transcendence is that you do get a sense of the value of life that's eternal, right? So, you're living in eternity.

01:30:18 Speaker_00
But as I said, I still don't understand the relationship between that and post-death existence, and I haven't found anything biblically that's helped me Help me clarify that. It's still a mystery to me.

01:30:30 Speaker_00
It has something to do with heaven descending and the material world ascending and some vision of the ultimate unity of those things, but I can't make any more heads or tails of it than that.

01:30:42 Speaker_00
How did that become clearer to you, say, in the aftermath of your son's death?

01:30:46 Speaker_02
Well, that's one of the biggest questions of all. You know, what happens after we die? You hear of these near-death experiences, and they're hard to quantify because How can we know really what happens?

01:30:59 Speaker_02
But we hear certain similarities that people say, I went up and I looked down and I saw my family grieving over me. So I prefer to go to a reliable source, which is the Bible.

01:31:13 Speaker_02
And there actually is a story in the Bible of a man who died and came back to life again. I'm not talking about Christ, that's obvious. But it was the apostle Paul. And he was beaten many times, and on one occasion he was stoned. and left for dead.

01:31:28 Speaker_02
They thought he had died. And so Paul, in the book of Corinthians, writes about being caught up into the third heaven.

01:31:35 Speaker_02
He says, I knew a man in Christ, whether he was in the body or out of the body, I'm not sure, but such a one was caught into the third heaven, and he heard things he can't describe.

01:31:45 Speaker_02
You know, it's interesting, because people write entire books about their experiences in heaven, but the apostle Paul, who actually had this happen, didn't write a book, but he did write a little bit of a chapter on it. But he says, it was paradise.

01:32:00 Speaker_02
So the word paradise is translated like the royal garden of a king. So I don't know if we would have even a parallel to this today, but if you go to some of these incredible British estates where these gardens go on endlessly,

01:32:13 Speaker_02
Maybe that gives us a sense of what he was talking about. But he just used the word paradise.

01:32:17 Speaker_02
And that's the same word that Jesus used when he hung on the cross and the thief said, or probably guilty of a worse crime than stealing, but the criminal next to him said, Lord, remember me when you come into your kingdom.

01:32:30 Speaker_02
And Jesus said, truly, truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise. Same word. So Paul went there and he came back. And then after that, he said, I have a desire to depart and be with Christ, which is far better.

01:32:46 Speaker_02
So I think ever since that moment in his life, he had a homesickness for heaven. So coming back to my son, I can't explain it, but I would say this. When he went there, I feel like a part of me went there, too.

01:32:59 Speaker_02
And your first inclination is communication. And I understand why people are so desperate to communicate with their loved ones. But according to scripture, we can't communicate with them and they can't communicate with us. David lost his son.

01:33:14 Speaker_02
He said, I will go to him, but he won't come to me. So I think that that is something that's futile. But after my son died, I had his phone number with a recording still attached to it that he had made. And I would call it over and over and over.

01:33:29 Speaker_02
Just to hear his voice.

01:33:30 Speaker_00
I've been doing that with my mother because she died in May and my father like two weeks ago. Wow, I'm sorry. So I can still phone home and have her voice. Yeah.

01:33:38 Speaker_02
So there's a longing for communication. And so it really just kind of opened up something in my heart. where I thought, wow, I'm 72 now, how much longer am I gonna live?

01:33:51 Speaker_02
I don't know, but I'm not afraid to die because I know that I, too, will go into God's presence. In the book of Luke, there's a story of a man who died.

01:34:03 Speaker_02
He's called a beggar, and he went into Abraham's bosom, coming back to Abraham, and he was carried by the angels. So I believe when my son left this world for the next world, and that tragic automobile accident.

01:34:17 Speaker_02
that he was taken by angels into God's presence, and I believe that I will go there, too.

01:34:23 Speaker_00
And I will— Why do you believe that?

01:34:25 Speaker_02
Well, it's just faith. You know, it's faith. I mean, how can I explain it? It's faith that's in my heart, but the Bible says faith is the substance of things hoped for. It's the evidence of things not seen. I believe this firmly.

01:34:39 Speaker_02
Now, I have indications of why my faith is worth having, because I've seen the change that's happened in my life over the years. I've seen the change that's happened in other lives. So that's sort of like a down payment on greater things to come.

01:34:53 Speaker_02
God said, listen, you follow me, and here's what I'll do for you. I'll forgive you of your sin. I'll give you a peace that passes human understanding. I'll give you meaning and purpose in your life. I will guide your steps."

01:35:06 Speaker_02
Okay, God made a lot of promises. I've put those promises to the test, including the worst thing of all, to lose a child. And I've seen how God came through for me. Because if He didn't come through for me after my son died,

01:35:23 Speaker_02
I would have given up preaching for sure. Why carry on? But he did come through for me. He came through for me because I've seen what's happened to other people. I've seen how their marriages have unraveled.

01:35:36 Speaker_02
I've seen how they've turned to drugs and alcohol. I've seen how they've become bitter, angry people. And that didn't happen to me. And that's not because I'm some virtuous person.

01:35:46 Speaker_02
That's because I believe the promises of God, and I leaned into them, and I found them to be true. And I continue to find them to be true. And there's no human explanation for getting through something as awful as that apart from faith.

01:36:01 Speaker_02
Faith is, you know, you say these things, but when you have to walk across the bridge for real, it's different. It's not theory now. This is, like in Job, after all of his suffering,

01:36:12 Speaker_00
I was thinking of Job when you said that.

01:36:13 Speaker_02
Yeah, he said, I heard this with my ears, but now I've seen it for myself. You know, so it's one thing when you believe something, but then you put it to the test and you find it's absolutely true.

01:36:26 Speaker_02
Therefore, if all of these things that have been done in my life up to this point have been true, which they have been, therefore I accept God's promise of the afterlife.

01:36:35 Speaker_02
And I accept what God says about heaven, and there'll be no more pain, and no more suffering, and questions will be answered. And so, I get little glimpses of heaven, and the great moments of life, which I appreciate.

01:36:50 Speaker_02
And I think you tend to treasure those things more. Because it seems like the great moments of life are the in-between moments that we take for granted. You know, we're always waiting for the big event—Christmas, or this, or that.

01:37:02 Speaker_02
this trip, but a lot of times it's the little things in between. You treasure those, but then I know I'm going to have new memories to create with Him in the future, and I'll be in God's presence.

01:37:15 Speaker_02
And I want to tell other people that, because ultimately, when everything's said and done, what's more important than the afterlife? And what's more important than where we spend it?

01:37:25 Speaker_02
And according to the Bible, I believe there's a literal heaven, a literal hell. And I believe we choose in this life where we will spend the afterlife.

01:37:35 Speaker_02
And the reason I'm gonna go to heaven is not because I've lived a good life, because I've failed in many ways, but because Christ laid his life down for me on the cross coming back to Abraham. I mean, what a picture.

01:37:47 Speaker_02
The son was willing to go and be sacrificed by the father. He knew what was going on. Hey, Dad, where's the sacrifice? My son, God will provide for himself a sacrifice. But Isaac made that sacrifice too.

01:38:03 Speaker_02
The son, Jesus, made that sacrifice for us because he knew there was no other way that we could reach God, no other way we could satisfy the righteous demands of God. So heaven isn't for good people, as it's often said. Heaven is for forgiven people.

01:38:21 Speaker_02
That's how I see it.

01:38:23 Speaker_00
That's a good place to stop. I think what we'll do on the Daily Wire side, as all of you watching, many of you watching and listening know, I follow up these conversations with an additional half an hour for Daily Wire subscribers.

01:38:36 Speaker_00
I think what we'll do is I'd like to walk through the growth of your movement. Okay. I'm interested in it. Maybe we can draw. So one of the things I've written about in this new book,

01:38:49 Speaker_00
is that Abraham is the archetypal individual, and so the Abrahamic pattern is the pattern of the adventure of the individual. Moses is the pattern of the leader.

01:38:58 Speaker_00
Abraham is the individual, and it's an expansive pattern of adventure, right, that really never ends. Well, it ends with death in Abraham's case. But, you know, your life expanded as you followed the golden thread.

01:39:12 Speaker_00
And I'd like to lay out some of the practicalities of that. So I think that's what we'll do on the Daily Wire side. And so join us there. And to the film crew here in Nashville, thank you guys all for helping us out with this. It's much appreciated.

01:39:26 Speaker_00
Great, very much. Thank you very much for coming, and it's so nice to be able to do this in person. Great to be with you. Yeah, yeah. Thank you for asking me. You bet. Yeah, my pleasure, my pleasure. And to everybody watching.

01:39:36 Speaker_02
Thank you for explaining the Pinocchio story to me.

01:39:39 Speaker_00
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That bears endless explanation. I write about why he's in a whale, too, in We Who Wrestle With God. Well, because that's a mystery, right?

01:39:47 Speaker_00
It's like the movie's going on, all of a sudden Geppetto is in a whale, and everybody goes, well, that's no problem. It makes perfect sense. It makes no sense, right? He's looking for a puppet, and he ends up in a whale, right? Why does that make sense?

01:40:00 Speaker_00
Well, I described that in We Who Wrestle With God, and it's ridiculously fascinating. So anyways, yes, thank you very much for coming, sir. For everybody watching and listening, thank you very much for your time and attention. It's much appreciated.