Welcome back to the Word on Fire Show. I'm Brandon Vat the content director and with me is our favorite bishop, Bishop Robert Barron. Welcome.

I appreciate it and I'm glad about your favorite bishop.

I'm trying to give you creative intros and running low on material. I appreciate that. I appreciate that.

Today we're going to be talking about what I think is your most important book. That's saying something you've written about a dozen, but it's called The Priority of Christ toward a post-liberal Catholicism.

The book was originally published in 2007 by Baker Academic, but it was just re-released a new second edition just about a week ago.

It's now in a beautiful hardcover edition. The first edition was just a paperback book, but there's a beautiful new hardcover edition, so it's kind of being reintroduced to the world.

We wanted to spend some time looking at some of the major themes in this book. Let's start off by asking some basic questions. Priority of Christ, why did you originally write this book? Where did it come from? What's it seeking to do?

I remember very vividly where I was, the conditions when I began this book. It was in 2002, and I went to the University of Notre Dame on a sabbatical, and I taught a little bit when I was there.

But my purpose really was to write this book, and I intended it as a big, serious, academic book. I've written books in a lot of different registers, some much more popular, some kind of middle brow, but I've written a number of books that are high academic.

This is one that I wanted to gather in the most serious way what I was thinking about. What I was thinking about increasingly was the influence of liberalism on theology. Now let me just, as best I can, define that admittedly, slippery term.

When I say liberal, I mean a view and approach to theology that comes up out of the modern period that puts a huge stress on the primacy of subjectivity and human experience.

So reading revelation through the lens of human experience. The deepest roots of all this go back to people like Renee Descartes, who said, Kojito Ergo Sumi, I think they're for I am.

And then from the standpoint of that experience of the Kojito, read all of reality. So he reaffirms the world and God and everything else, but does so through the lens or at the adjudicating bar of subjectivity.

Now almost all of modern philosophy follows Descartes. You see it in Kant, where the operarity ideas in the mind determine what we know and how we know.

Think of Hegel, who in some ways opotheocizes the Cartesian subject, turns the Cartesian subject into God, absolute spirit coming to know itself through finite spirit, etc.

All of that is the tone of modern philosophy. Now modern philosophy then massively influenced modern theology. Now someone like Friedrich Schliermacher, the usually regarded as the father of modern liberalism in theology, would read all of revelation through the lens of the experience of absolute dependency.

Again, human experience coming first, doctrine being read through that lens. Schliermacher is imitated by a whole army of people. Think of Paul Tillich in the 20th century. Think of Karl Ranner on the Catholic side.

Three interesting, Ranner's great book is called the German Grunkurs des Glaubens, which means a fundamental course in belief.

Well, see the Germans being were a word of caught a reference there to Schliermacher's great book, which is called Glaubens Lerah, which means a teaching about belief.

See, rather than dogmatik, most Germans when they wrote dogmatic theology, dogmatik, Schliermacher said, no, no, I'm going to write a Glaubens Lerah.

And so Ranner, who's in many ways a Catholic Schliermacher, writes a Grunkurs des Glaubens and not a dogmatik. Anyway, I'm getting a little bit technical here, but it's all making the point that it's human experience that is the way in and the adjudicating bar for theology.

What I was proposing was an overturning of that.

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