Welcome back to the Word on Fire show. I'm Brandon Vat the host and the content director here at Word on Fire and today we're joined by the main man, the main event, Bishop Robert Barron. Welcome, Bishop.

And Muhammad Ali of evangelization.

I need to come up with a creative entrance theme like wrestlers come out with the smoke and the music and you got your special moves.

Get your big brain around that one. You could work out that.

A couple of exciting things happened recently. One of them is that your interview with Jordan Peterson finally went live and listen to all of our fans.

It wasn't our fault. It took so long. It was in Dr. Peterson's court to release it. We're sorry it took three or four months to come out, but it's finally here. You can listen to it at word on fire.org slash Peterson.

What are some of the early things you're hearing from people who have listened to the interview, Bishop?

Yeah, good. You know, I've gotten a number of emails and stuff. One thing that they all say is and it's typical of Peterson's podcast. It's long, you know, and it was his show that I was at. So I wasn't a control of that.

But it was a wide ranging lengthy conversation. People say, gosh, I needed so much time to kind of process all that. It should have been broken into two parts or whatever.

I said, well, I know that's his way of doing it. But I enjoyed that. He's obviously a super bright guy and we both have a sense of the Western intellectual tradition and a lot of it came out.

But no, I got a lot of good feedback on it. Well, I want to use that as a springboard into today's topic. We're talking about the odd extra strategy of you and word on fire. We're going to define that here in a minute.

But this is so important to what you do. You've from the very beginning of your evangelistic work. You focus not as much on internal church issues and debates and questions, but you've gone out into the culture to engage with people like Jordan.

Peterson and you know, we're going to talk through this interview about other things you've done. The interviews you've done the places you've spoken at. Why? Why is that your mission?

Well, it's an evangelical mission. You know, go out to all the nations and declare the good news.

We're about to distinguish between those three basic offices, right. The Petrine, the Paul line, the Joe Hanine. The Joe Hanine is more of the mystical contemplative, the prayerful life of the church.

Petrine is the official side of church's life, think of, you know, bishops holding office or a pastor in a parish. And the third one is the Paul line and Paul going out. Right into the Gregor Roman world and going out to meet the pagan society.

Speaking at the Ariapicus, crowds of Jews and Gentiles throwing stones at him. And that's the missionary side of the church's life, the evangelical, the intellectual, the one that engages the culture.

Well, I once I, the minute I read that in both of our thought, my life's been largely Paul line in form. That's been the form that my ministry has taken. So Paul was an odd extra sort of guy.

Think of the fact that Paul rarely stayed in the churches that he found it. He would found them, get them going. And then he go, he'd go and establish other ones. Now, right letters back to the ones he established, you know, but he wasn't going to just stay there now for the rest of his life and govern that church.

That's an evangelical kind of impulse is to be on the move. And also as I've spoke many times of act 17, Paul on the Ariapicus, that's the model in many ways. Go into the public space.

Of a culture where ideas are exchanged, where points of view that are very different from the one that you're proposing are dominant. And that's where you go. So that's the odd extra Paul line missionaries or

sort of focus. That's one that I've kind of naturally gravitated toward.

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