© Global Look Press/ Hauke-Christian Dittrich
All institutions stagnate over time. But if the original inspiration contains enough universal truth, it can survive the centuries. This seems to be the case with Christianity. Despite millions of Christians who believe all they have to do is verbally profess their faith in their Lord Jesus Christ, a much deeper understanding of the human condition and each individual's capacity for transformation remains just waiting to be rediscovered. Troels Engberg-Pedersen is just one of the scholars of early Christianity to have mined Christianity's earliest texts - the letters of Paul - for insights into what they actually meant - and still mean - for those with eyes to see.

The shape of Paul's thought has much in common with the philosophy of Stoicism. Not only does it provide a pathway of transformation - it presents a vision of the world imbued with meaning and responsibility. In a time when identity politics is on the rise, perhaps it is time to rediscover the values at the root of our civilization. Paul's Christianity was the anti-identity politics of its time. His message was simple, practical, and effective: bear your suffering, act with responsibility and meaning, and consider others interests, not just your own. In short, crucify your old self so that a better self can be born.

Today on the Truth Perspective we look at the Stoic-like roots of Paul's thought and how it fits into a wider worldview where meaning is not only possible, but real.

Running Time: 01:28:09

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Here's the transcript of the show:

Elan: Hello and welcome back to the Truth Perspective everyone. My name is Elan Martin. I'm your host today and with me in the studio are Harrison Koehli,

Harrison: Hello.

Elan: And Corey Schink.

Corey: Hello everybody.

Elan: So today we're going to be discussing Paul, probably one of the most important figures in early Christianity to describe what real Christianity is and philosophically give us some kind of idea of what was intended behind the religion that has been so distorted, tweaked, appropriated, in the centuries that followed until today. He was an important figure that I'm interested in learning more about. He had very specific ideas about what it means to be a person or one with Christ in ways that I think many of our listeners will find refreshing and innovative in the types of descriptions and quotes that we'll be getting into today.

One of the things that has impressed me so far in reading Paul's writings and the analysis of Paul's writings is that he had a very specific outlook on what man's relationship is to god, to himself, and to others. So with that brief introduction I think we could get into it and maybe start off with some of those last points; what Paul felt was his contribution to the understanding of what real Christianity is and how that may differ from what we have come to know in popular terms of what Christianity is. So with that, does anyone want to take that?

Harrison: Yeah, I'll just start off by saying - great intro by the way. You introduced Paul as being like an exemplar of real Christianity and I think the main reason for that is that while a lot of people may not know this, Paul essentially invented Christianity. Now of course that idea would go against a lot of mainstream Christian beliefs for one reason. If you look at the way the bible is oriented, the way it's laid out, the gospels come first then you've got Acts and a bunch of letters and end with Revelation. That's kind of misleading because the gospels, while they are the longest books in the New Testament they are arguably the latest to have been written, second century at least for Matthew, Luke and John. The first writings in the New Testament are Paul's writings.

While many Christians will know that and accept that, they don't necessarily realize the implications of that because a lot of the research and scholarship that's being done, even among some believer-type Christian academics, like the guys who write scholarly books on Christianity but from a Christian perspective, will acknowledge that when you look at the gospels for instance, Mark was the first gospel written out of the four. There are several scholars making the case that the picture of Jesus presented in Mark is largely distilled from Paul's writings and even Luke seems to have been a Pauline Christian, or whoever the writer of the gospel of Luke was. The same with the author of the Gospel of John. There is a Pauline philosophy and theology that guides those books and around which they're written. Paul's philosophy forms the backbone of those books.

So Paul essentially did create what became known as Christianity through various forms. Sure, by the time the gospels were written things had already changed and it wouldn't necessarily have been a direct continuation of what Paul did but the philosophy is mixed in there.

The inspiration for the show we're doing today is one biblical scholar. Troels Engberg-Pedersen wrote a couple of books on Paul and his relation to Stoic philosophy, all of the overlaps in ideas and even in practices. He probably, at least in my view from the stuff that I've read, seems to get the closest to what Paul was actually doing.

So when you look at this, you realize that Paul actually did create the basic foundations of Christianity. If we look at what that actually was, naturally after 2,000 years it doesn't resemble very much at all what most Christians today practice. Of course some of the ideas are there and the words are there and you can even find what seems to me to be even a coincidental almost correspondence between what people are doing now and what it was like 2,000 years ago. But no one really talks about it in these terms or even in the terms as Paul would have understood it and his people would have understood it back then.

What was Paul's Christianity and what are the relations to stoicism and what were they really doing back then? Paul was an apostle to the gentiles so he was going and trying to convert pagans, not members of the Jewish ethnos nation. So the way I see it looking at this context is that Christianity, at least as Paul practiced it and preached it, was an anti-identity politics religion. This is the way I've been thinking about it recently. I mentioned an article I wrote on last week's show that I did on nationalism and in the end I had a section on nationalism and I think the subtitle of the section heading was something like What You Value Most Is Your God and this was a reference to something that Jordan Peterson says every once in a while, that what you value the most is your god.

I give the example of a drug addict. For the drug addict his god is drugs in the sense that getting high is the most important thing and it trumps everything else. That would mean given the choice between food or drugs, he'll choose drugs. When looking at the hierarchy of values, the ethics and morals that people utilize every day that motivate and delimit the choices that we'll make in our interactions with the people around us, ordinarily for instance, we wouldn't steal from our parents or our siblings unless we're a kid and we're still stupid and our brains haven't developed. Can you imagine a 30-year-old just going into his mom's purse and taking $200 and just not telling her? Some people do that, of course, but we don't ordinarily think very highly of them. We consider that a moral failing.

But of course that's what really poorly off drug addicts will do. They'll steal. They'll pawn items from their friends or their family to get money to buy drugs. So really, that is their god. Getting high is their god because that is at the apex of their hierarchy of values whereas for let's say an ordinary person who isn't a drug addict, he might have a slightly higher god than that. Who knows, maybe their god is their career so everything in their life is geared towards their career and they might mistreat their family members or neglect other parts of their lives in pursuit of their career.

You can look at anything in human life. What is the most important thing? And of course the kind of logical progression of this, if you look at the way the logic proceeds, then you'd think that the higher the value the better that person would be, just in terms of everyday people looking at each other and saying "Oh, that's a good person". What is it about good people? Well they seem to have a hierarchy of values that is so high that it includes values that override all of those things that are scene as less important.

So for a non-drug addict there will be thousands of things that are more important than getting high and for the person with their career, there will be more important things than just succeeding at your career. Succeeding at your career will be important but there will be things that are more important. If being a success and gaining prestige in your position or your career comes in conflict with something in your family life, you might choose to do something about it to preserve your family life and to preserve the relationships you're in. Basically there's a wider sphere of values that encompasses more and puts more people in a place of value as opposed to just yourself.

So in this article I was talking about how there are greater or lesser gods. Before we get into the correspondences with stoicism, one of the things about looking at it in these terms is that one of the things that Paul was dealing with, if you read the letters and you read about the societies of the time, was the same as today where people identified according to various arbitrary schemes just like today. There was a focus on your ethnicity, your ethnos, what group you were a part of and that had something to do with religion. Were you a part of the Judaic ethnos or were you a Roman? What gods did you worship basically?

Looking at it in terms of today it will be the same thing. What religion are you? What colour is your skin? Where are you in the class hierarchy? Are you a man or are you a woman? Are you an illegal immigrant or a full-blooded citizen. All these things get elevated to the extent that they are almost worshiped. Well in some cases they are worshipped. When you look at the ethnic nationalists, they worship the colour of their skin which just seems totally absurd. It makes sense because people do it so it makes sense, but it seems like they're missing something and most people would agree to that. Ethnic nationalists in any state are usually a minority and the majority usually look at them as peculiar and a bit off their rockers.

So Paul was dealing with something similar back then because if you think about it, when he was railing against idolatry, if we translate that into terms that we could understand, we could still use the word of a lesser god. You're surrounded by groups that worship a lesser god than the potential universal god. What would we mean by that? These would be people who identify within their groups based on some kind of earthly characteristics, so 'You're a member of my tribe. That means you're good. That means we're good and everyone else isn't. There might be ways in which we can let you into our tribe, but the borders are pretty high. There's a big beautiful wall around the borders of all these groups.'

What Paul essentially did was to try to create a new identity, a higher god to unify a different sort of group. So what he tried to do, arguably succeeded in doing at least during his time, was to create an identity based on what he would call spiritual features as opposed to the earthly, fleshly characteristics. He was looking at the more spiritual characteristics. What did he mean by that? What characterized the spirit? Well that was a mindset. That was a pattern of thinking, feeling and behaving.

So if you look at one of those tribal groups that worship a tribal god, everyone within the tribe is an equal member. If you break that down - which is what Paul did - take the subset of those tribal members that actually have a certain mindset, combine those with the members of every other potential tribe who have that same mindset, there you've got a new group that is united, that shares a common identity, not based on some kind of arbitrary feature of their biology or just their socialization, but it actually gets to something essential about them in the way they perceive themselves, the world, their place in it and the way that they behave in the world.

So he kind of took it to another level, created a new identity group but at the same time totally devalued all the identity groups previously existing. That's a famous quote in one of his letters where he says (paraphrased) 'There is neither freed person or slave, neither Greek nor Jew, neither male nor female. All of these are biological social categories that don't get to the heart of the matter, aren't very essential when it comes to who you are as a human being.' What there is, is a bunch of people 'in Christ' like you said at the top of the show Elan. 'There's a new category in which we can share identity that isn't related just to some features you were born with.'

He gives an example of this I think in Philippians where he's talking about how much he had to boast about, about his fleshly characteristics. He was born into a good tribe, was educated, was super successful at being a Pharisee and he had all these things to boast about. If you compare it to an ethnic nationalist today, they'd be from a good family, European or Asian or Chinese or Japanese going back hundreds of years, no blemishes in his genetic heritage and good, rich family, successful, all this stuff. Paul essentially said "Well all of that to me is now worthless. All of those characteristics, all of those things within the world that I have good cause to boast about, all of that is meaningless."

So he created a new hierarchy of values that was totally counter to the prominent common hierarchy of values of the day. I'd just say that that dynamic plays itself out in every age to the point where nowadays you can see that a lot of Christian churches have still fallen into the identity politics. They've inherited an identity that Paul created along certain lines, they've inherited as just another arbitrary category. 'You were born a Christian.' Well what does that mean? Well it's meaningless. Paul would say that's meaningless. It doesn't matter if you were born Christian. Are you really a Christian? He'd say probably not because what matters is if your mind has been reborn to conform with a certain model. Basically, what is your mindset? Do you have the mind of Christ? Chances are if that question were to be asked of many Christians today, they would be found wanting and that would go for everyone at all times.

Elan: Well when you mention the mind of Christ it gets back to your earlier mention of stoicism as a practice of training one's mind and being - not necessarily in the religious sense, although there probably are components of that as well - but of living a life that isn't subject to the whims of the passions, the emotions, the useless suffering of life where conscious suffering - to borrow Gurdjieff's term - was what we wanted to aspire to.

So if they're not Christian in how they would describe themselves necessarily, they did seem to be the intellectual and spiritual inheritors of Paul's ideas.

Harrison: The stoics?

Elan: Yes.

Harrison: So progenitors?

Elan: No, actually progenitors would proceeded Paul so if I said that what I meant was the people who had inherited or came after. Actually, they pre-date Paul.

Harrison: Predate.

Elan: That's right. So on that note, I wonder if we want to talk a little bit about stoicism? Do we know how their thinking and philosophy have possibly been of influence to Paul?

Corey: Well Harrison, you had written a little bit about that, about that overarching category that Paul had in mind, that overarching identity of the mind of Christ and living with viewing yourself through the eyes of Christ in everything that you do in your life as the stoics had a similar category that didn't reach quite as high though they had been blazing the trail over those preceding centuries with the idea of the difference between the rational versus the stupid or the fundamentally dumb person.

Harrison: The wise and the stupid.

Corey: The wise and the stupid. So that highest apex of the hierarchy of values was the rational man as rationality in general. Could you talk a little bit about that, how that philosophy could have influenced Paul?

Harrison: Yeah. I'll get to that second, but first just to get more to Elan's question, it seems like there's no direct evidence of course that Paul read stoics or had a stoic teacher. There are only clues, hints here and there in his letters, word choices that he makes. He'll use certain words that are stoic terms, but the way in which you can make the case and the way that Engberg-Pedersen makes the case is that when you look at not only these words and ideas but the totality and the total shape that Paul presents in his letters, the shape is pretty much identical with the stoic shape.

So that gets to Corey's question about this rationality thing because the shape is best shown in a diagram so I can't really show the diagram right now but maybe I'll include it as the picture for the show when I publish it. We'll see. But the idea with rationality is that when a stoic sage, someone who's studied in stoic philosophy, when he thinks everything through, he'll come to the conclusion that he is a rational person and that all people are rational. That self-identification has an effect of changing the sage's or the aspirigin sage's hierarchy of values.

So whereas at first the person will identify himself as his body, his individual self, he feeds it, he gets money, he survives, he provides for himself to provide for his body in the service of his body, when you see yourself in contrast to that as a rational person, you realize that everyone theoretically is rational or maybe everyone has the potential to be rational, but that expands the scope of your identity. So not only are you just an individual, you are a rational human and there are other rational humans. Those rational humans then become part of yourself so that not only are you important but every other rational being is important.

So the idea of a stoic community would be that all of these rational people get together - and maybe this would be Sam Harris' idea of a utopia - all these rational people would get together and they are a group of rational people all with the same ideals and theoretically they would all treat each other well according to rational principles and they would all have killed the "I" body identity in themselves so that the rational part of them is more important than the earthly bodily self.

You see this in examples from Greek philosophy, not even just limited to stoicism, the idea of this philosopher like Socrates who was willing to die for his principles rather than sell himself out just to get out of it, so the idea that there is something potentially more important than just your earthly life or avoiding suffering. The way that it seems to have influenced Paul is that he took that structure and just changed the terms around a bit. So the same dynamic plays out but with what he called Christ as opposed to rationality as the apex.

So the way this diagram looks at it is that you start out as this bodily self, identifying as a bodily self but then there's something higher than you, external to you. This would be rationality because the stoics saw god as rationality and vice versa. Again, like Peterson and Christianity both, the logos, the overarching universal organizing principle and that external thing would strike you. This might be through exposure to a real stoic sage for instance. He would tell you the principles of stoicism and you'd be like "Wow! Those ideas really make sense therefore I now think of myself as a rational person and therefore I am now a great person because I understand that and I live according to those principles".

Of course it's not necessarily as easy as that because the stoics realized that it wasn't necessarily just a road to Damascus moment where you're struck down and totally changed overnight but there are levels. So you could understand the principles, kind of put them in practice but you can never quite fully put them into practice. The next level would be you understand everything and you act really well but there's still always the potential for slipping because you still have conflicting desires. Then at the level of the sage there are no conflicting desires because you are totally identified with that higher thing.

So the higher external thing strikes you and then you work towards it. You grow towards it. Then as you grow towards it you then identify and become part of the group of the people who are already there or working towards it. That then creates a new set of rules so you have a new way of interacting with all of those rational people like you. So with Paul, Christ was the thing that strikes you and the way in which that happened, at least in those early Christians' experience, was through their encounter with Paul. Paul was kind of like the placeholder or the model for the whole process. He was the stoic sage but he was the Christian sage who had transcended all of these earthly passions to the point where he said in Philippians - let me read one of the quotes - he said, "For I have learned to be content with whatever I have. I know what it is to have little and I know what it is to have plenty in any and all circumstances. I have learned the secret of being well fed and of going hungry, of having plenty and of being in need. I can do all things through him who strengthens me."

There's another quote where he said that he was willing to die and it would actually be a joy because suffering doesn't mean anything to him. He goes so far as to say that he's being "Poured out as a libation over the sacrifice but he's still glad and rejoices". So his own earthly suffering - which would include beatings, arrests, death sentences and hardships, shipwrecks, all these sort of things - are meaningless because he's above all that. That's actually an ancient virtue-magnanimity, that is to see the things that happen to your body as beneath you.

So if you just encounter some bad circumstance, at least according to the ideal, the stoic sage or even the Christian sage, should have no effect on you or it would have no effect on you because that's just life essentially. You are so in touch with that higher principle that whatever happens to your earthly body is just of no consequence because for various reasons, one of which is there are the things you can't change and if there are things that you can't change, it doesn't make any sense to get worked up over them. So the stoic sage would just accept it and think, "Okay, I can see why that happens. There was nothing I could do about it and I'm in a lot of pain right now but I still feel joy because I know that and because there's probably a whole lot going on there too."

But that's kind of the overview for the relation. For Paul you start out in the flesh - and that's a word he uses repeatedly in his letters. We can give some examples. That would be a way of saying your bodily self, like the stoics would say or in your first two factors as Dabrowski would say, your biology and your socialization or the lower self. It's kind of like the NPC (non-player character) level of living and then there's something higher. This would be either god himself or via Christ and Christianity or through rationality and stoicism or through the highest value, according to someone like Peterson and through that there's a transforming effect that takes place that actually brings you closer to that ideal that then results in the creation of a community of people like that.

So like I said near the beginning of what I was talking about, this is anti-identity politics in the sense that it removes those arbitrary categories that we tend to identify with as humans and it has seemed radical to many people and probably still today it seems radical to a lot of people, the idea that you can look to another culture, another religion, another country, and find someone that you actually get along with and that you have similar ideals with and that you can identify with that person in a way that transcends the ordinary boundaries that categorize a lot of human interactions and human identities, someone outside of your religion, of a different race, speaking a different language. But if you can find some way to communicate first of all, then it transcends or breaks down the boundaries to find something essential that unifies you.

Like I said in my nationalism article, I think that this is actually the genius of Christianity but it's also one of its weaknesses in the sense that it has led to identity politics today where people just identify as Christian without really understanding what that means and actually create conflict with other groups as a result. But it still is in there in the foundational text and dogmas and I think that's the reason why a lot of people who would be considered good Christians are open to other people. They aren't totally closed to receiving a new convert. I think that's the positive impulse at least behind missionary work for instance, where you go to another country to try to convert other people. There may be something shady about going to try to convert other people, but there is I think a good impulse in a lot of the work that gets done in that area; but just the idea of "Oh I see all of you potential people and you're all could potentially be part my group" as opposed to "This is my group. We've got the members and we're not really interested in anyone else joining." There's this kind of openness in Christianity that seems to have been a new invention and that has lasted for all these years.

I'd like to make maybe just one more comment on one of the positive things is that even for Paul, it was a limited thing. So for all the people who joined his group, it was only when you actually identified as being in Christ and realized it and then therefore started to act in the manner becoming of someone who has that self-identity, that you really became a Christian. So it was still a closed group, right? It wasn't like Paul was saying everyone's a Christian. Paul was saying "Here are the characteristics that would make you a Christian."

So there's this tension between collectivism and individualism because like with the stoics, the transformation that occurs in an individual is away from the identification of the self as this bodily individual and towards a shared perspective as part of a group or a community that is directed to others. So it's kind of like you're getting away from individualism and forming a group but at the same time, by the nature of that group and the ideals that inform it, it actually forces you to see other people as individuals, not only within your group because you see all these other people and you then have to treat them in a certain way because otherwise you would be going against your own identity, but still in the largest sphere of things, the effect seems to have been to create, like Peterson points out, this very deeply rooted idea that there is the spark of the divine in everyone and that is why a lot of people have this idea of human rights, that every life is actually valuable in some sense and there are certain things you can't do.

So that requires seeing the individuals on the planet as individuals and that's the logical endpoint of this kind of world view; when you look around in the world and you see, for instance, non-Christians, you still see them as an individual with potential. They may have problems just like everyone else has problems, but that individual is valuable in the sense that just like anyone else, they have the potential to transform their mind and to transform their thinking, feelings and behaviours to come in line with this ideal. Like I said, it is, at its root, anti-identity politics. It can become identity politics through distortion and through misunderstanding but really at the root of it, it is this idea that every individual has at least the potential. Whether it happens in practice or not is another question but everyone has the potential of transforming themselves and becoming a better person.

Corey: I think what's interesting at the core of that philosophy, the stoic and the Christian philosophy that you've been talking about Harrison, is the idea of, for the stoics error and for the Christians the idea of sin. They're both really similar Greek words and it seems to me that at the core of that, the idea of identity politics like the kind that we see today, judging people based on whatever their skin colour or whatever, at the very heart of it you're committing a gross error. You're committing a sin in the sense of being able to judge somebody based on these arbitrary characteristics.

This universal philosophy or ethic system really shines the light on what somebody is, or what somebody could be, who people could be, the higher aspects of the potentials of human nature that actually make us unique, that make us individuals. Being able to view people through that lens is just a truly protective buffer against the kinds of gross errors that are committed when you have groups of people just behaving like animals, seeing everyone else like animals. You give them an ethic system. You tell them, not only is this the religion but this is how you have to act! This is real. It's not somewhere in the future. This is right now. This is viewing yourself and how you behave in this community with the idea that you have a an extremely heavy duty to protect, to honour, to practice the virtues, to strive to this extremely high ethical position that might not be possible for anybody in their lifetime. But giving people that tasks provides so much meaning and so much of the fuel I guess you could possibly say, for human transformation and human development that comes with suffering.

We waste that fuel in modern society. We waste the necessary fuel of suffering through all sorts of drugs and laziness, different new age philosophies like just be happy, the commandments of new age wisdom - just be happy, everybody's nice, be nice to everybody. But at the core of it, this Christian theology and ethics utilizes the suffering to propel you forward. You really can't have a human society without that. It's just wasting this huge resource that we all have. We all have suffering.

I don't know if you've mentioned it yet but the Christian/stoic sage view it quite differently than the normal person. So like you said, human bodily suffering is secondary. It's not important. What's really important is the aim, but at the same time, as we know through Dabrowski's work, those negative emotions, the shame, the guilt, of seeing yourself in relation to this hypothetical higher position, higher vantage point like the Christ, you get an internal vision of what you could be, how you should behave and this internal compass points you in the direction of a future that's worth living.

Elan: Well when you said that Corey I was reminded a little bit of our show on insight and perspective and the idea that when you're on this path to be a true Christian or to practice stoicism in some sense, part of your aim and the way that you go about living is to try and see yourself from a different perspective, from above, to take your own petty identifications out of the equations for just long enough to get a more objective view of your own behaviour, of your own real motivations towards things. This was something that was stressed quite a bit on our discussion on insight, that the most successful marriages, the most successful people in business were able to put aside their egos and their own ideas about themselves for long enough to see how they really were and to use that as a starting point from which to make things better for other people and for themselves. So there's always that 'keeping others in mind' as part of the calculus of why one chooses to do what one does.

Harrison: I want to get back to that idea of suffering that you mentioned because really that is one of the central themes of Christianity. The way that the stoics looked at it, it was a very mental, cognitive process. You gained a new understanding through thinking and those conclusions that you had would then change first of all your self-perception but then through your values, to your desires to the point where you only desired good things. You no longer had the conflicting desires. You no longer had the lower desires. So it was a matter of knowledge. You had to gain the knowledge of the true nature of the world and therefore your true place within the nature of the world so therefore you could then act within accordance with nature.

Now with Paul and with Christianity it's slightly different. So what's the knowledge in Christianity? For Paul it's not just accepting that certain statements are true, like Jesus was born, died and rose again. It is that, but it's also coming to know that those statements are true through actual personal experience and actually putting them into practice. So understanding Jesus Christ as lord, as Paul would put it in his letters, would actually encompass knowing what his Christ did so that Christ's actions, the things that happened to him and what it all means as expressed in Christ's own self-understanding, his own understanding of himself and his place in the story, in a word, his mindset.

So all this leads in Philippians to what Engberg-Pedersen calls Paul's maxim in this letter when he writes "Do not consider your own interest but that of others". That kind of distils the whole Christ story/myth because that is what Christ did as a result of his own mindset and his own self-understanding according to the story that Paul tells. I'll read just a few quotes from something that I wrote putting it together. So what does Paul want from the people around him? The people in his churches? He writes, "That your love may overflow more and more with knowledge or discernment and full insight to help you determine what is best so that in the day of Christ you may be pure and blameless, having produced the harvest of righteousness".

Notice there that 'your love may overflow more and more with knowledge and discernment'. So thinking is still an important thing for Paul and a lot of Christians don't really understand that either. They think the bible does all the thinking for them and a lot of Christians even denigrate the mind and the rational part of yourself as being somehow contemptuous. But it's actually important because you need knowledge in order to understand what is right from wrong, to be able to discern between the things in your environment which are positive and which are negative, which contribute to your own and your community's well being or not and vice-versa.

A bit later he puts it in these terms, "Live your life in a manner worthy of the gospel". So not, 'you've already been saved and you can do whatever you want and you don't have to think about any of this'. It's your duty to actually live your life in a manner that is worthy. So you actually have to do something about it. There's work involved. It's not like you just verbally proclaim 'I've accepted Jesus Christ as my personal saviour' and you're all of a sudden a Christian. No, for Paul you actually had to live the life. You had to live a life worthy of being able to say that and that was something in line with the template that he gives as the story of Jesus.

There's another place in Philippians where he kind of puts it all together. "Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests but to the interests of others." So again, put in this maxim is just a distillation of what Paul's Christ story was because that's essentially what his Jesus Christ did. His Jesus Christ didn't act from any ambition or conceit but in humility regarded others, humanity, as better than himself and looked not towards his own interests but the interests of others. How are you to understand this? The very next verse right after writing that he says "Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus".

So what's the story of Christ, right? Paul doesn't give a gospel story. He gives a very small, short story that can probably be written in a few sentences; that is that Christ was this divine being and therefore was worthy of all the glory and praise and good things that come with being a god because if you look at the time, not just in Judaism but in the Roman world at the time, the emperors were all considered gods and you were worthy of great things and the emperor's behaved as gods commonly conceived of. But no, Jesus wasn't just this figure that said 'oh I'm a god and therefore all praise me and worship me on my throne'. It was 'no, I'm going to go into the dirty world. I'm going to get stuck in the muck of it. I'm going to be executed in a hard way, in a very painful ignominious death and people are going to think that I'm a worthless human being but I actually did it for all of you people.'

What that essentially is, is the distillation of what I'd consider the highest virtue that you can find in humanity into one individual; that is the self-sacrifice for others. Of course you find people doing this all the time, whether on the battlefield or on the streets of any city whenever you have a person that is willing to put their own life on the line like a parent or an adult pushing a child out of the way of an incoming car only to get hit themselves. It happens all the time but it is distilled into the most perfect form, in a way that Jordan Peterson would say. So Jesus isn't only that person but he will be the most perfect and blameless individual who suffers the worst possible fate in the worst possible way and does it willingly and does it for everyone. So it just takes every aspect of that virtuous act and raises it exponentially to the ultimate level.

And not only that, but there's another important aspect of that which is the idea of lowering one's self to the level of the people that you are saving. The great thing about the story is that it acts as a type of archetype that can then be used as a template, as a model for your own behaviour and that's actually what you see Paul doing. Paul is actually adopting this story, this template as a model for his own life. So what he does in his letters - and you can see this - is that he lowers himself to the level of the people around him and he would do this no matter where he went.

Like you said, he was initiated into the secrets of great wealth and great poverty and so neither of them meant anything to him anymore because he could do either. Kind of like the story or character of Jesus in the gospels, he would hang out with anyone. He'd be on the streets. He'd be talking with soldiers and prostitutes and slaves and all of the 'lowest' people, but also with the highest people because he also had people in his churches who were city administrators and things like that, probably slaves or freedmen from even the imperial court. So he had interactions with everyone and no one was beneath him. Technically they were beneath him in spiritual terms, but he lowered himself to their level, developed friendships with them then through that interaction with them, he tried to raise them up, tried to make them slightly better than they were by getting them to then adopt that same model because when you read the letters you get the impression - it's impossible to know for sure because you're seeing his self-representation, the way he presents himself - but through reading the letters I think he probably was as close to a sage as you can get.

When I read the stuff he wrote it seems like he's being honest, that really he was practicing what he preached to the point where he was beaten repeatedly and it didn't seem to matter to him so much. He was willing to get beaten again and he was willing to get killed, but he was doing it all for this group of random people who, for the most part, were just nobody's that he just genuinely cared for and that care was his embodiment, his modelling of the template for them.

So not only did they have the story that he'd tell them about Jesus Christ, but he had his own story and his own interactions with them that they then had as a model to use and for them to copy. So that gets into what people have probably heard of, the imitation of Christ. That's basically the model. You have this template that you can then follow, you can then adopt for yourself and put into practice and as you put into practice it just so happens that that works out in a way that is ideal for getting along with the people in your immediate environment.

So it works. It's pragmatic. According to the pragmatic theory of knowledge, like Peterson might say, what does that imply? If it actually works, maybe it's true in a sense, not necessarily in the sense of 'oh so Jesus was actually this guy who did all these things'? No, the template works. Here is the template. Here is the story line, the script basically and when you follow that script it happens to work out so maybe there's something to it.

Elan: Well what's fascinating is that in a sense you have a - I don't want to say a repopularization - but there is a kind of resurgence of interest in stoicism. Christianity, even if it's been so distorted over centuries, for all of its flaws and how we've commonly come to accept its ideas and precepts, it's still around. You still hear people refer to western civilization and the loss of values in contrast to a Judeo-Christian value system. So there is this kernel of value that has been maintained or perpetuated through the ages. What's so interesting about this discussion I think, is getting to the very kernel, the very heart and spirit of what these idea were that they would last for such a long time, be embedded in people's minds, at least on an archetypal level and inspire a revisiting of these ideas in this day and age when I think most people are in sore hunger to hear it.

It also explains I think in large part, the success of Jordan Peterson. Who have we heard of that's come even close to his ability to make all of these ideas accessible. He is the modern day missionary in a sense. I don't want to say he's lowering himself necessarily but he's done 100 conferences and talks. He's gone on talk shows. He has subjected himself to abuse and ridicule and criticism that's been almost all of it completely unfair. So in a sense he is a little bit - I don't want to exaggerate things - but he is a little bit like a modern day Christ figure or at least a modern day sage.

Harrison: Yeah. I wouldn't put him at the top of the top. He'd admit he's still a work in progress. I think I'd agree with him there, but he is living out the model for sure. There was an interview with him recently where someone asked him given all the slander and libel and lies about him in the fake news media, doesn't that bother him? Doesn't that make him want to quit or something like that? He said no. It's annoying when it happens but he knew that it was a possibility that would come about and he just rolls with the punches essentially because what he's doing is more important than that. He can't do what he's doing without receiving criticism so the criticism is not a priority in his mind. It's not something that would influence him one way or the other, at least as it has been for the last couple of years.

So he has elevated his mission, what he is there to do, to a level that makes that more important than any arrows that can get slung at him. So in that sense he is living that out. And he does do the thing of lowering himself to the level of the people around him because he as a person is much more virtuous and has much more self-control and much more experience than the vast majority of the people that listen to him, right? He's got this principle of when he talks about abstract concepts he makes them as practical as possible. This is all stuff that he has gone through himself or already learned for himself but he puts it in such a way that some kid listening to him who hasn't done anything with his life can then hear that message, put it into practice and come a little bit closer to the level that Peterson has achieved in responsibility and getting stuff done within themselves and in the world. So he does kind of live out this model.

You mentioned two things, the resurgence of stoic ideas and just the fact that Christianity has lasted so long. I was reading this book and wondering to myself, if they're so similar why did stoicism essentially die out to the point where there's no stoic church with billions of adherents across the world? Were the stoics just not willing to take nations by force and convert them? I think there was actually something more to it than that and that comes to what did Paul do right to the point where it has gotten to this level? I was thinking about it and what seems to me is the stoic philosophy, while they are at least according to what I know, is the philosophy that most gels with my kind of view of the world and the 'world' as expansive as possible using that word. But relatively, compared to Christianity, they're kind of like the Sam Harris version, about rationality to the point where they're the egghead religious philosophy where you imagine this very smart scholar sitting down to think through all the logic of reason and all this stuff and it's really kind of like Sam Harris. Who is really like that? A tiny percentage of the population.

Whereas you look at a guy like Jordan Peterson and there was something he said recently. I hope I can get across the idea. I didn't think about it to find the quote. I'm not even sure where he'd said it but he basically said something like when you're trying to get across a value or something long lasting, what's the best way to do it? You don't just teach it. Like Moses you don't just say 'here are the rules'. You tell a story. And even though the laws in the Hebrew bible, just like the laws in Plato, Plato understood that to make laws work you have to embed them in stories. For Peterson he said you have to not just embed them in stories but you have to create a character, an individual.

So I think one of the reasons - and this isn't the only reason - but one of the reasons that Paul's Christianity was able to start the fire that led to this inferno - maybe that's not the best metaphor of Christianity in the world today - was that he embodied all of that into a character, like a Harry Potter or Aragorn, a character that actually has the traits that embody all of the principles that can then be followed because not everyone can read a philosophy book. Not everyone can read a stoic textbook but everyone can read a story with a hero who embodies certain ideals and then with a little instruction, apply that to their lives.

Elan: I think there's another component to this as. Harrison you mentioned that stoicism may have had this appeal to the egghead, which is in the minority, the intellectual. But what I think these stories do, what I think Paul accomplished in creating his value system around the figure of someone who made this ultimate sacrifice for the good of all, is that he was able to appeal to people's higher emotions. When Paul speaks about the flesh, the body, the needs of the I, what he's talking about really I think, is the lower emotions, the base emotions, selfishness, greed, avarice, all of the types of things we would seek to work on to better ourselves, to burn off.

But when he created the story about ultimate sacrifice for the good of all, it probably was designed in some way to strike people in a way that they haven't been struck before with a particular idea. In Boris Mouravieff Gnosis there's this idea that we do have a higher level of an emotional body, if you will, a lower emotional body and a higher emotional body. I would venture to guess that either intuitively or because he himself was struck emotionally in some form or another, that he wanted to and found, a way to transmit the idea of humility in the service of others, in the service of a higher value or aim through the emotions.

Corey: And I think one of the really alluring parts of Christianity is the fact that he added the big "or else" to that. That's what makes the morality and the religion so attractive, the sense that you get this picture of this perfect being who came to earth in order to improve the lives of mankind and all that he got was murdered. So right there you have this mirror on human beings and what they're like and something that I think everybody can relate to. Everybody on some level can relate to this sense of betrayal and our own low and dark and ignorant natures.

Harrison: Like the biggest injustice.

Corey: Like the biggest injustice that could possibly exist. And then not only that, but then he still gives of himself. He is still this high and perfect being that still forgives everyone for their sins, for what they've done. Then at the same time, there's still a reckoning for our behaviour. There's still this apocalyptic mentality that comes through in his letters. For example he says 'so that in the day of Christ you may be pure and blameless having produced the harvest of righteousness'. 'The day will come when you will be judged for what you've done on this earth. If you're found wanting then there will be a price to pay and it's a high, high price. You don't know how big it is.' I don't know if Paul ever described hell or if that was some later development or mogrification of different belief systems, Judaism and all these other systems.

But there is an idea that there is hell to pay for what humanity has done and people can see it. They could look around and they could see the next few centuries, Rome's collapsing, there's famine, there's plague. People could see that he was right. There was hell to pay because of our human nature and that when we screw up, we screw up big and everything that we've built can come crashing down. Everyone that we love could be sacrificed, like he said, like libations poured out on a sacrifice. That's been humanity for who knows how many centuries. There have just been centuries of suffering and pain and yet there's still this idea, this central figure of the Christ who is always there, always open arms. 'You can leave. You can return to heaven. This isn't the end of it. You're just stuck in this land of darkness.' And Paul, after being struck with this vision of the highest form of perfection, saw that there still is this forgiveness for humanity and that he said this is the way to achieve that.

Then you flash forward and you've got the inquisition. But still these people and the traditions still survive, largely I think because of that deep resonance on a level that we could never articulate and it had to have been a visionary experience to articulate this kind of truth because I think deep down we all understand in some way that it is true. When you read through history you can see the sacrifice of Christ and the loss of innocence, the fall of mankind, the badness and the waves of madness. But then there's still that way out.

Harrison: Well one comment on that about what Paul must have experienced, I think on a previous show I might have mentioned a book. Unfortunately I can't remember the title of it right now but it was about Paul and altered states of consciousness. The title might actually be something like that. It's by a woman who did this study on Paul in relation to all the psychological research on altered states of consciousness. That category would include things like out-of-body experiences, shamanic experiences, things like that. She argues through looking at certain passages in Paul's letters that he was talking from a point of view of someone who had experienced a profound altered state of consciousness, some profound spiritual experience.

The point she makes that I think goes against a lot of Christian theologians is that rather than Paul having this whole system set out like a systematic theologian who has thought everything through and has this airtight picture of what everything is, Paul is more grasping for the words to describe the experience. So he'll throw out metaphors here and there. They might even seem contradictory every once in a while but they're all in the service of trying to describe and account for and explicate this actual reality that he has experienced. At least that's the impression that comes across to me when I read him. It's like there is something deep here that he is trying to express, sometimes more clearly, sometimes less clearly, but there's something behind that, that is deeply profound and insightful.

Maybe to change gears a little, we have all these ideas and are wondering why these things have worked. I've mentioned the idea of the pragmatic truth of it, that it does seem to work. So what does that mean? I think one of the reasons that Christianity was so successful, primarily in previous epochs and previous generations, is because there was a world view, a cosmology that allowed for all these things to be true. So people believed in god. People believed in the spirit. People believed in the spiritual realm. They weren't materialists.

We've kind of lost that ground so the questions is, if these things are true in some way, if they actually work, if there's something behind it, what is the truth? What is the cosmological truth? What are the statements we can make about the way in which the world is structured that would allow these things to be true? Engberg-Pedersen's second book on Paul is called Cosmology and Self In the Apostle Paul. I think this is probably an even more controversial book that he wrote because he argues some things that sound outright crazy and he says them in his book. 'These ideas are pretty much crazy and we wouldn't accept them as true today'.

For instance, you wondered Corey if Paul ever described hell. Well he didn't describe an actual hell like the vision that we have in a doom game like a place of eternal fire with all these demons but he did describe what awaits the sinners and unbelievers on the day of judgment and that they would be burned up. They would go up in flames. Using that and several other passages Engberg-Pedersen argues that Paul had this idea of the spirit because the spirit is a word that comes up repeatedly in Paul's letters. Spirit is essential to everything that Paul writes about. It is through the spirit that we acquire the mind of Christ, that they're almost identical in a sense, that when we are infused with the spirit, that spirit is a new mind. When our mind has been piece-by-piece replaced by the spiritual mind we then have the literal mind of Christ in us. So we all share something of the same material. He argued that today we would say that Paul is a materialist in a sense, not the modern sense, but in the sense that the stoics were materialists. The same way that Gurdjieff was a materialist. They viewed everything as a certain type of material but that material did have aspects of course of consciousness of mind.

But for Paul, according to Engberg-Pedersen he saw the spirit as a sort of plasma, as being made of the same stuff that stars and heavenly bodies are made out of, comets. There are even hints in Paul's letters that what Paul might have been intending when he was saying things is that his understanding was that when he spoke to the people around him, to the churches around him, there was actually a physical spirit, a physical plasma exiting his mouth through his speech and entering into the nostrils and the ears of the people around him. That was almost like a divine insemination of their minds with the spirit so there was this physical thing that was being transferred from person to person and that that's essentially how the gospel was transmitted. Again, it sounds like a crazy idea. Also, the idea that the spiritual body which we would be reborn into, the resurrection, Paul's idea wasn't that we would be like zombies, our bones would be reanimated and we'd come out of our graves. It was that we'd be reborn in new bodies composed of spirit.

So again, if we wonder what the spirit was and he's saying it's this plasma, Paul was essentially saying that we would be reborn in bodies of plasma and we would be like heavenly bodies, literally like stars or like comets. Incidentally this was very interesting because, as we've said before, there are very many correspondences between Christianity, Christian ideas and the life and legend of Julius Caesar because the legend of Julius Caesar, based on actual things that happened, was that he, like Jesus, was betrayed, murdered, but then he was reborn and he was reborn in the form of a comet a year or two later during one of the games that were put on by Octavian at the time who became the Emperor Augustus.

So there was this template from Caesar of being reborn in a heavenly body and Paul seems to have perhaps been influenced by that in some way or adapted it or seen spiritually that there was some kind of truth to this, that there was some kind of higher form of matter, higher form of life into a future humanity that we could barely envision and this is how he saw it and how he tried to put it into words. 'The heavenly bodies, we will be reborn in this new matter in these new bodies'.

Elan: That's just very interesting because we don't know if Paul knew of Julius Caesar historically. Maybe he did, maybe he didn't.

Harrison: He would have to have. Everyone knew Caesar.

Elan: Everyone knew Caesar. But if he had, it seems as though he had taken the inspiration of Caesar's story, distilled it down to something that didn't turn it into a cult of personality but rather took the strength of the spirit of it and changed it into something that didn't become about this historical figure but about the being that didn't have all of this baggage necessarily.

Harrison: Yeah.

Elan: So that would seem to be the genius of it. I like the term you used - divine insemination because we all want to empty our cups and be fertile enough, if it's possible, be inseminated by the divine in some way or form. {laughter} Just bringing this around to taking away, what are the takeaways of Paul's message here? We obviously want to strive for knowledge of higher values and we want to seek them from places that discern higher values credibly from lower values. I wonder what that looks like for people on a personal level? I wonder how it is we go about doing that. Of course we could read these books and think on their ideas and think about Christianity in its true form. Do we have any thoughts on the process itself? On making ourselves open to being struck by intuitions, by knowledge, by things that would forward us on the road to a higher aim? To community? Towards thinking of others? Towards connection in the deepest possible sense?

Harrison: I think on the most simplistic level without getting into the Christian dogma and stuff, is that if you truly believe that there is value in the world, that other people matter to some degree, even if it's just one person in your life, or maybe it's your family, if that is true and that in principle other people do matter and are valuable in some sense, then is your behaviour in line with your belief? Are you behaving in such a way as if those people matter? And if not, if looking at yourself and if getting feedback from others, you find yourself wanting and that you are not living up to that ideal, then it is incumbent upon you to get your actions in line with your beliefs or to change your beliefs. At least be honest with yourself. If you don't think that other people have value at least be honest with yourself. But if you do, then there's really only one thing you can do and that is to act as if it is true.

That gets back to the second point I wanted to make about the whole idea of Paul's weird cosmology and plasma and stuff. If we look at that from the perspective today, maybe we can't go that far yet. We don't know enough about cosmic plasma and future conscious states of post-resurrection bodies. What struck me about that is that we do have a word and a concept that can maybe supplement this idea of spirit, however Paul understood it, and that is like we've talked about in previous shows, information. When you are speaking to someone, it's not just the airwaves that are hitting a person's eardrums. That can happen with just white noise. What is being transmitted along that physical medium is information, something that is immaterial, something that isn't intrinsically a part of that physical substance. It is another substance of some sort, or another thing, not necessarily a substance.

So that information is the spirit. The spirit is information. We can tie that in. We can develop a cosmology, a set of ideas about the way the world is structured in which this can make sense. So we can transmit information from one person to another and that information can be highly meaningful because it can be highly valuable because it can be highly true; true in the sense that a person hasn't realized until hearing it and then there's that moment of recognition. And what is the nature of that recognition? Well according to the stoic and the Christian model there is something external and higher than us. The model only works if that is true. We can act as if it is true but it only works if it actually is true in fact, that there is something higher and external to us, that matter is not all that there is to it, that there is something higher.

This gets back to our discussions on process philosophy and theology, that there is something in which we are contained, something higher and intelligent and meaningful and valuable. That would be a cosmic mind or the ultimate principle or the ultimate intelligence. So why does that truth strike us as valuable and meaningful? It's because it is in the grand scheme of things, in the grand order of things. That is like a message from god. It's like a revelation. When you have that experience and when you have that knowing and you are struck by the truth, you recognize it. Just like the stoic sage or the Christian sage, Paul has a constant experience of joy, what is that joy? Maybe we wouldn't use the word joy anymore. There is a positive dimension to it, but it is meaning. It is the experience and the feeling of meaning, of knowledge and knowing who you are and where you are and what you're doing and the significance of what you're doing and the significance of your place in the world. And the insignificance of your place.

Corey: Well just about whether there is something higher than us and whether that's true or not, I thought I'd read this interesting argument from Chrysippus - he's a stoic philosopher - on the existence of god. So he argues that "If there is something that man cannot produce, that which produces it is superior to man. But the heavenly bodies and all the regular phenomenon of the sky cannot be produced by man. Therefore the being which created them is superior to man but that which is superior to man is god. Therefore the gods exist."

I think we could go a step beyond that, based on the shows that we've done before on the DNA and the origins of life, that life itself, man trying to create novel lifeforms like the kind that we see spread out all across the planet that has evolved for however many billions of years, man can't possibly replicate that. But life itself, the universe itself has an implicate order that suggests some sort of intelligence behind it, some sort of an aesthetic that the ancients could take for granted I think. In their argumentation they could theorize about it and state without the pressures of I guess modern scientific materialist orthodoxy that says you have to be able to test it with a hypothesis.

But going back to this different way of seeing the universe and being able to think freely, just think freely, posit ideas freely about the universe, about the nature of the universe, about the nature of what is higher, is something that we need to do, on an individual level and as groups in order to come back to a moral system, a philosophical system, that's rooted in the higher, not just our ability to hypothesize which is something that even animals are capable of doing, little rudimentary hypotheses about how something's going to happen and if it doesn't work out they're puzzled or whatever. As living being we can do that but we also need to do something higher I think and by striving for the higher, I think that's an important step forward.

Elan: Well on that note Corey, I think we're going to bring this show to its conclusion. I want to thank you and Harrison for bringing all these ideas to the table today. It was just a great conversation and discussion and I think a very interesting part of our ongoing conversation on how we think about the world, cosmology, knowledge, among many other things. If you like this show, if you have ideas for other shows you'd like us to do, other topics you'd like us to discuss, you can always write in to We look forward to messages and feedback about these shows and how you think we're doing and what you'd like to hear.

And on that note, I'd like to remind everyone to tune in to the Health & Wellness Show. That will be next Friday morning, eastern standard time at about 11:00 and Behind the Headlines which is now NewsReal with Joe and Niall on Sundays at I believe it's noon. So on that note, thanks again guys and thank you listeners for tuning in and spending this little bit of time with us as we try to get to the bottom of some things. Take care.

Corey: Bye everybody.

Harrison: See ya.