What Bishop Barron Taught Me About God and the Bible
I finished Bishop Robert Barron's "God, the Bible and Humanity" last week. Five hours of lectures, and it was worth the time. This course is part of the first semester of the Peterson Academy. By the way, if you sign up via my affiliate link you get two months for free.
The idea that hit me first was how Barron describes God. Not as a powerful being sitting above everything else, but as the reason anything exists at all. When God says "I am who I am" in Exodus, that is not a name. It is a statement about existence itself. I had never thought about it that way. Giving God a name would actually hand some power over God to the person asking, which changes the whole dynamic.
The section on worship shifted things for me too. Barron's point is that God made the world out of love, not because he needed anything from it. The Abraham story lands differently once you understand that. Abraham was not proving his loyalty to get a reward when he offered his only son. His love for God stood on its own, apart from anything God had given him. That is a harder standard than most people are working with.
I came into the course thinking biblical law was mostly about restriction, though I was not fully sold on that idea. Barron pushes back on it. His argument is that the law is meant to free people, not hold them back. That connects to something Jocko Willink says: discipline is what creates freedom. Following the law means putting something bigger than yourself ahead of your own impulses. The stories of Hannah and Eli show how that actually plays out, through real struggle and failure and faith that does not quit.
The material on Jesus was interesting for a different reason. It has been a while since I engaged seriously with this kind of content, including the different ways people have interpreted what happened to him based on the available scriptures. The Sermon on the Mount asks you to love people who make it hard to love them. To stop measuring your worth by money or status. Barron does not make any of that sound easy. He presents it as genuinely difficult, and that honesty made it feel more real than most religious content I have come across.