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The Charlie Kirk Show
America's Best-Kept Religious Secret? Learning About Eastern Orthodoxy with Fr. John Strickland
01:12:17
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- [00:00]
Charlie Kirk
Hey, everybody. Charlie Kirk here live from the Bitcoin.com studio. Father John Strickland joins the show about joining the Orthodox Church. What do they believe? I was just curious. I wanted to learn. A lot of people are joining the Orthodox Church. In fact, I know a lot more people that are joining Roman Catholicism and in the Orthodox Church than the Evangelical church. So I seek to learn, and I think you'll learn something, too. Very sweet man. Very godly man. I think you'll enjoy it. Email us, as always, freedomarliekirk.com and subscribe to our podcast, that is the Charlie Kirk show podcast page. And get involved with Turning Point USA@tpusa.com that is tpusa.com Buckle up, everybody. Here we go. Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
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Father John Strickland
Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.
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Charlie Kirk
I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk. Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.
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Father John Strickland
I want to thank Charlie. He's an incredible guy. His spirit, his love of this country.
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Charlie Kirk
He's done an amazing job building one.
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Father John Strickland
Of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point usa.
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Charlie Kirk
We will not embrace the ideas that that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are gonna fight for freedom on campuses across the country. That's why we are here. Okay, everybody. Welcome to this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show. So excited to be sitting down with Father John Strickland from St. Elizabeth Orthodox Church in Pulsbo, Washington. Is that right?
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Father John Strickland
Pretty close, yeah.
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Charlie Kirk
Or Pulispo. So the reason I wanted to have you on the program, Father, you are from the Eastern Orthodox Church, is that correct?
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Father John Strickland
Yeah.
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Charlie Kirk
And I know a fair amount about Catholicism, I know a fair amount about Protestantism, but admittedly very little about Orthodox. And it's getting a lot of play online, as you probably know. And I know a couple people that are Serbian Orthodox growing up or were Latvian Orthodox, but I don't know much about the theology or the history. So I told Blake, I said, blake, find me someone that can come on the show. We can just have a fun discussion. You can educate me and the audience. So first, great to meet you and welcome to the program.
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Father John Strickland
Nice to be here, Charlie. Thank you for inviting me.
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Charlie Kirk
So first, kind of your story, you're a parish priest, you grew up in Southern California in a Protestant background. Why did you convert to Orthodoxy?
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Father John Strickland
Well, I started studying history. They sometimes say I was raised Protestant, and I was Protestant. They say sometimes when a Protestant studies history, he becomes Roman Catholic. In my case, I became Orthodox. History goes further back. In that case, I Studied history at college and started studying Russian history. And the more I learned after living in Russia for about two years in the 1990s, which was an amazing time, Communism had collapsed, Putin had not come yet. There was this real kind of fluid character to her life in Russia, very positive toward the West. Everywhere I went, I was kind of greeted warmly, and people were really interested in learning about America and the west at that time. After the collapse of communism, I started attending an Orthodox parish there and just fell in love with it and realized God made me for this, and I decided to become Orthodox there.
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Charlie Kirk
So you were in Russia when you converted? I want to have a whole separate conversation about Russia. We're told during the Soviet Union, it was mostly atheistic, but it had an Orthodox core. What percentage of Russia is Orthodox versus more secular?
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Father John Strickland
Well, today, most people would identify as Orthodox. If they were to, you know, consider themselves a believer in a higher power, they'd say they were Orthodox. Of course, Russia or the Soviet Union more broadly, before the collapse of communism, was a very diverse place. There's millions of Muslims, for instance, many Roman Catholics, Protestants, you know, there were many people. But Orthodoxy is the preeminent, historically preeminent religion there. In the Soviet Union, of course, that was attacked, and they blew up churches and shot priests, persecuted believers and things like that, but they could never eradicate from their culture the strong sense that Orthodox Christianity, Christianity generally, is a necessary part of society and its foundations. There's a couple of funny little anecdotes about that. One joke is that Soviet school students were taught that there is no God and that the Orthodox Church is the only true church. So they got this sense that, like, you know, there is an Orthodox presence that's really important for our culture, but we don't believe in God anymore.
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Charlie Kirk
It's a cultural institution.
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Father John Strickland
Right, exactly.
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Charlie Kirk
So let's. Let's go through then, kind of a fast class, if you will, a spark notes, and we'll go deeper into Orthodoxy. So what, what, what would just explain Orthodox theology, similarities with Protestantism, differences, and also with Catholicism?
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Father John Strickland
Okay, well, I'll do what I can. I'll do what I can.
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Charlie Kirk
I'll interject where I feel.
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Father John Strickland
Sure, yeah, please do. And I want to start by saying, you know, there's a lot in common between the Orthodox and the Roman Catholics and the Protestants. And I want to, you know, recognize that and even kind of emphasize that, that there's a lot in common. I mean, Roman Catholics, Orthodox and Protestants all believe that Jesus Christ is both God and man. They believe that there's one God, three persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. They believe that God came into this world to save the world from sin and that the experience of salvation is a beautiful thing that lasts forever into eternity. They all have some very core important beliefs in common. The Orthodox see themselves, believe strongly that they hold the tradition that the apostles received from Jesus Christ at Pentecost. They hold that tradition. This is a key word in Orthodoxy, tradition. They hold that tradition, or faith intact, and it's never going to be changed, and they will never allow it to be changed.
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Charlie Kirk
What about the apostles? Can you say that again? They received the Holy Spirit. Yeah, so we believe that too, of course.
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Father John Strickland
Yeah, of course. Pentecost, Chapter two of Acts. All Christians realize that at that moment, the Holy Spirit.
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Charlie Kirk
50 days post Passover, right?
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Father John Strickland
Exactly. Exactly. Jesus has ascended into heaven after 40 days after his resurrection, or Pascha, and then 10 days later, the Holy Spirit is sent and it fills the church. It makes the church what she is. And so until the end of time, the Orthodox believe the faith is complete. There's nothing more needed, nothing to be added, and there could never be anything taken away from that faith. And so Orthodox today, 2,000 years later, believe very strongly that they hold to a tradition, the tradition, the holy tradition that was delivered to the apostles at Pentecost, and that that will never change. Acts 2:42, for instance, really important for Orthodox says that they, the apostles and those who converted on that day, 3,000 of them, continued steadfastly in the apostles doctrine, in the fellowship, in the breaking of the bread and in the prayers. And so they continued steadfastly. Like, that's a. That's an important statement. Like, they continued. They didn't stop. There wasn't a moment when they no longer, the church, no longer had that deposit of the faith, and they did so steadfastly. Unchangeably is another word, an adjective. For steadfastly is unchangeably. And so today, I think one of the things that's really remarkable about the Orthodox Church in America, where I, you know, where I do my ministry, is that this authentic witness to the faith of the apostles, an unchangeable faith, is really, you know, it's really capturing people's attention, and our churches are being filled, flooded, in fact, with converts. I mean, my church in very rural, kind of small church In Poulsbo, Washington, St. Elizabeth Orthodox Church, I think we've had, like, I think maybe we've probably grown by 50%. We've lost a lot of people moving out of the Area because so expensive to live there. Families have moved away, but. But we've grown by 50%. Lots of young people especially, which is remarkable that today young people, I mean, who would have thought a generation ago, are seeking not just faith in general, but the authentic Christian faith that stretches back, unchanged, all the way back to the apostles, with all of its doctrines about marriage, about sexuality, about who God is, and about fasting and about communion, about the sacraments, about the worship, about the whole thing. It's a way of life.
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Charlie Kirk
Thank you for that. So I have several questions. What your canon scripture, would it be the same as the Protestant Bible, 66 books, or with the apocryphal text as the Catholics would have it?
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Father John Strickland
Yeah. So our canon for the New Testament. Okay. Is the same. The same 27 books. Yeah, same. But our canon for the Old Testament is called the Septuagint. It's a Greek word.
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Charlie Kirk
Yes.
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Father John Strickland
And it originated about two centuries before Christ. And it was a translation of the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek, which was the. You know, the. The lingua franca of the ancient world. And by the time of the apostles, it was being widely used, this Septuagint, Greek translation. And it had more books than later Masoretic text, which is a later edition of the Jewish Scriptures in Hebrew. In fact, the Septuagint is really older in some ways, you can measure it this way, than that version that was later appropriated and used by Protestants during the Reformation. So that Septuagint is interesting because it's what's being quoted by the apostles in the New Testament. Like an Orthodox Christian doesn't follow a doctrine of sola scriptura, that there's just the Scripture, but follows a tradition in which there's a living. There's a living, that the Holy Spirit is a living presence in the church, guiding the church in her interpretation of the Scriptures, and that begins with the person of Jesus Christ. And so when the apostles wrote about the person of Jesus Christ in the Gospels, they quoted the Septuagint in the Greek. That's what they quoted. And so the Orthodox Churches always use that version of the Old Testament.
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Charlie Kirk
So the. Would it include, like, first and second Maccabees, books such as that?
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Father John Strickland
Okay. Yeah, yeah.
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Charlie Kirk
So similar to the Catholic.
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Father John Strickland
Yeah, that's right. Got it. Very similar.
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Charlie Kirk
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Father John Strickland
Yeah, there's several questions there. So inerrancy of scripture, that's a term used in more modern contexts like a sola Scripture or Protestant context, that the Orthodox typically haven't employed that kind of language. We do believe that the Scripture is the most important core of our tradition, but there's more to it than just the Scriptures. For instance, if you think about Scripture itself, let's talk about that 27 book New Testament. Nowhere in the New Testament is there a table of contents. There's no table of contents. I mean, of course modern editions will have a table of contents, but the Scriptures themselves were never written. The New Testament was never written with a table of contents. As a matter of fact, all the apostles Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, who wrote the Gospels are anonymous in those Gospels. We only know their names from tradition. And for a whole generation, Christians were being saved before any of those were written down. It's quite remarkable if you think about it.
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Charlie Kirk
And there were a lot of creeds that also predated the writing of the Scriptures.
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Father John Strickland
I don't know if there were creeds. Some of those kind of find their way kind of obliquely into the scriptures. But the one big creed, of course for the Orthodox is the Nicene Creed, which of course dates the 4th century, but back to that idea of scripture. So people are being saved. The Gospel is being taught before any of it's written down in what we call the New Testament. And then it took three centuries before that coalesced into 27 books. And we don't have 26 books. We don't have 28 books in the New Testament because there were bishops on hand being guided by that tradition, with a faith that the Holy Spirit is responsible for guiding that tradition, guiding them in all truth, as John's Gospel spoke, that could identify what's authentic and what's spurious. Gospel of Thomas, throw it out. Spurious.
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Charlie Kirk
Gospel of Judas, gone. Barnabas, gone, Throw them out. Barnabas was way less that.
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Father John Strickland
Yeah, yeah, we can't trust those, but we can trust these. But that took. That took three centuries to work out. And when it was worked out, it was worked out within the living tradition of the Church. And Paul himself speaks about this tradition in Second Thessalonians. He talks about how the. The people he's teaching are to hold fast to those traditions. Plural. The Greek word here is paradosis. It's not teachings, it's traditions. That's the only thing that paradosis means in Greek is that which is handed on in the form of tradition. Hold fast to those traditions. I've given you both in writing, like this epistle, but also by word of mouth where it's not written down. It's just part of the life of the Church. So that's a really big deal for us Orthodox and helps distinguishes us from, you know, from Protestants, some of them, anyway.
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Charlie Kirk
So now to Mary, what is the Orthodoxy view on Mariology?
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Father John Strickland
Yeah, so Mariology is always for the Orthodox Christology. Mary is always understood in relationship to Jesus Christ. For instance, we have a very rich tradition of iconography, of icons of Mary. In those icons, you almost never find. There are a few exceptions, always, that prove the rule. But you almost never find in an Orthodox church an icon of Mary by herself. She's always holding Christ. Always holding Christ. And the earliest icon we have, which dates back very, very far back into the past, has her gesturing toward Christ. It's called the icon of she who Points the Way. And she's gesturing as if to say, you know, you look at the icon and you see this dominant figure of Mary. She's the biggest one. But then the more you look at it, the more you realize she's saying, don't look at me, look at him. And you see that she's veiled you know, her beauty, her magnificent is muted. And Christ in her arms is wearing radiant clothing. He looks like a little adult because he's really God. So we don't just paint a little baby, like Renaissance style baby Jesus. We paint an image of an infant who nevertheless is powerful, strong, and in fact the creator of the universe and its judge. So Mary is a big important part, but she's always pointing us toward Christ.
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Charlie Kirk
Do you believe she was sinless?
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Father John Strickland
Yes. The Church typically teaches that Mary somehow lived out her life with such faith in Christ, such hope in his eternal salvation, that she did not commit any significant sins, any serious sins. Now there's a difference. This is. I don't know. I don't. There are varying opinions. Like when we Orthodox talk about what we believe, we don't just open the Bible and read and we don't just think ourselves or read philosophy. We look to what the Church has handed on to us. And some so called fathers of the Church, usually they were bishops from past centuries, wrote that Mary might have, you know, committed small sins. Like the time she leaves Jesus behind in the temple. Sure. Like why wasn't she paying closer attention?
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Charlie Kirk
In Orthodoxy, is there mortal versus whatever?
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Father John Strickland
There's a range of sins. Yeah, yeah, sure, yeah, yeah, yeah. So in that case, we could say that she was sinful like every other human being. As a matter of fact, in Orthodoxy, Mary is seen as the great example to us rather than the great exception. Like so, like Roman Catholicism has a teaching about her called the Immaculate Conception.
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Charlie Kirk
Well, that's what I'm asking. Right. So she was. There's churches that literally say, you know.
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Father John Strickland
The Church to the Immaculate Conception. Is it dogma?
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Charlie Kirk
Yeah, yes.
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Father John Strickland
We don't hold that, we reject that. Yeah, we reject it because it means that God intervened against her will without her saying Amen and working out her salvation along in cooperation with God. And he made it happen that her humanity was different than ours somehow.
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Charlie Kirk
Do you believe she was assumed into heaven upon.
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Father John Strickland
Yes, that is an orthodox teaching. Yeah.
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Charlie Kirk
Which, which also is a Catholic dogma.
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Father John Strickland
That's correct. Although there are differences there too. So in our orthodox teaching, inherited from way, way back in the first millennium, she died first. We call it the Dormition of the Virgin Mary in our icons. I have one in my back wall of our Church that shows her lying on her deathbed and then above it, Christ holding her in his arms in heaven. We believe she truly died. She had to die. She's human like all of us. She's not an exception. And then her body was Miraculously raised into heaven. Yeah.
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Charlie Kirk
So the. Thank you for that. That's very helpful. So now you obviously believe in the biblical account of Jesus. Life, sinless, virgin birth, perfect life without sin. As I say, sinless, died an unjust death, unsuffering, rose from the dead after three days. So basically the Nicene Creed, you know, we're in total harmony and agreement.
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Father John Strickland
Yeah.
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Charlie Kirk
Are there any exceptions about Christology that you would say are different between Protestantism and Orthodoxy? Or is that probably where we think it's a difference? The most agreement?
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Father John Strickland
I think we have a lot of agreement. Yeah. I mean, I think when it comes to. I mean, I think what we might find is that there are emphases that are different. So what happens is in the history of Christianity, in about halfway through that history to our present day, 1000 years into the history, or from our point of view, 1,000 years back, there's something called the Great Schism. Usually given the date 1054, it's just a convenience date. And what happens is there are two churches after that date. There's the Orthodox Church that as a member, I believe originated in the Apostles, as I've described, and then there's the Roman Catholic Church. And then from the Roman Catholic Church, 500 years later, come the Protestant Churches, which break away in the Reformation. From an Orthodox point of view, the Roman Catholic Church and the Protestant Churches are actually quite similar. You know, growing up in America, Orthodoxy is the best kept religious secret here. So we barely.
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Charlie Kirk
That's why I want to have you on the show.
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Father John Strickland
Exactly, yeah.
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Charlie Kirk
Because I know so little. Like, I know everything about Catholicism. Sure.
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Father John Strickland
I mean, who learns about Orthodoxy growing up in America? It's either Roman Catholicism or Protestantism. Those are the options. But from an Orthodox point of view, they are actually quite two sides of the same coin. And so what we find to your point about our common beliefs in Jesus as they're articulated in the Gospels, is that there's an emphasis in the west, if we talk about this as an east, west difference, east being Orthodox and west being Roman Catholic, Protestant. There's an emphasis in the west after the Great Schism, that emphasizes or over emphasizes from our point of view, the almost exclusive role played by Jesus on the cross, that his crucifixion exclusively is the only thing that has any real significance in the salvation of the human race. And that furthermore, on the cross, Jesus paid a penalty to a wrathful, angry father. Father and son, of course. And that Jesus was punished in a way that the Father would otherwise unleash upon the human race in his wrath against our sin. And we're all sinners, that's for sure.
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Charlie Kirk
So substitutionary atonement.
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Father John Strickland
There you go. That's the key word. That's the key phrase.
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Charlie Kirk
That would be the more technical academic answer.
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Father John Strickland
That's right. Very good. And so that's not foreign to Orthodoxy, but it's not the emphasis. And here we're talking about differences in emphasis rather than in content. So we believe in a substitutionary kind of role that Jesus plays on the cross, but we don't look at it that way. And the tragedy as we see it is the west, beginning with the Roman Catholic Church in what's called the Middle Ages, I don't use that term typically. And then later in the Protestant Reformation, that's carried on largely under the influence of Augustinianism. We don't probably want to get into his anthropology, his understanding of what the human being is, but it was a very negative one, imputing guilt to the whole human race for the fall of Adam and Eve. And then John Calvin picked up on that and spoke about the total depravity of the human race. And so in light of Jesus in the Gospels, the total depravity of the human race, the really wretched condition of the human being in his sin, is taken back to the Gospels and the role of Jesus on the cross in early Christianity for a thousand years before the Great Schism, and certainly still alive in Orthodoxy today. There's much more of a balance there, emphasizing not only the resurrection of Jesus and his ascension into heaven, where humanity is now on the throne of God, united to Christ, but to the Incarnation and the healing of the human being, whose sin is like a disease or a sickness that needs the healing of baptism and eucharistic communion and a regular ascetical life of communion and love in the Church. And so our view of Christ in the Gospels, then, is a broad view that sees a whole picture of the healing of the human race through the person of Jesus Christ.
- [23:03]
Charlie Kirk
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Father John Strickland
Technically, no, we don't.
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Charlie Kirk
So just so everyone knows, transubstantiation is the bread becoming literal flesh upon taking of the communion. Please continue.
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Father John Strickland
Yeah, so actually we should probably clarify that. So technically speaking, transubstantiation is this formal doctrine that was developed in what's called Scholasticism after the Great Schism I spoke of in the Roman Catholic Church that uses categories of logic taken from Aristotle that emphasize that there's a trans. A trans. A change of substance that takes place.
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Charlie Kirk
A metamorphosis. Right.
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Father John Strickland
Well, you might call it that, yeah. And so we have not accepted that logical, rational explanation of things. But to your point, and this really needs to be clarified, we do believe, as orthodox and always have believed, that that really is the body and blood of Jesus Christ. We really do believe that it's still bread and it's still wine somehow, but it's also truly the body and blood of Jesus. And he makes that clear. He says, take, eat. This is my body. Do this, all of you. This is my blood. John chapter six. He says, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Or if you eat his flesh and drink his blood, I will abide in him, and he will abide in me. And many disciples leave at that point. We're told in John 6, because that was a hard saying and they couldn't deal with it. It sounded scary to them. And Jesus didn't run after them and say, no, no, no. I'm just speaking symbolically. He didn't say, no, no, you didn't. You misunderstood me. He lets them go because he's really. He's. We interpret it. He's really saying, this truly is my body and blood. And that's why when we commune Eucharistically, as. As you asked earlier, we are participating in Christ. We are members of his body. You know, Paul in 1 Corinthians, chapter 10 likens the eucharistic Body of Christ with the ecclesial Church Body of Christ as being one kind of reality.
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Charlie Kirk
And so do you, in your services, walk us through a typical Orthodoxy service? Do you take communion every single Sunday? What is the liturgical, the normative liturgical process, calendar look like?
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Father John Strickland
Well, the calendar is really wonderful. The church early on transformed the world. I mean, it would be wonderful to talk about culture and the cosmos and how the two are related. We probably don't have time today, but what happened after Pentecost is the church sacramentally began to transform the cosmos by appropriating different categories of cosmic or world experience, like time and space. So space became centered on temples and churches that were oriented facing eastward. That's what orientation means. If you're facing eastward as a Christian, you're facing the kingdom of Heaven, you're facing the Garden of Eden. So, like, for instance, in the Book of Genesis, chapter two, I think it is, we're told that paradise was planted in the East Orient in Latin, oriens. And so Jesus says, the Son of Man will come again in glory as lightning flashes from the east. And so the early church always had Christians worshiping toward the east to symbolize that they are facing paradise. That is the purpose of being a Christian, is to enter into paradise. Muslims, interestingly, if they worship, you know where they worship, they face. They face a place on Mecca. Mecca, exactly. So if you're in America, like we are in Phoenix, Arizona right now, if you're a Muslim, you face Mecca, you face the east. But if you're in Indonesia, where there are a lot of Muslims face west, facing west, you're facing a place on earth. But whether they be in the west coast of the United States or in Japan, Christians face east. And that is a symbolic statement that they don't put their hope in this world, they put their hope in the kingdom of heaven. So that's a transformation of space, the way church architecture was designed. We could also talk about time. And that's to your point about liturgy. Time is transformed. Paul says at one point, redeem the time for the days are evil. Christians are called to recover the time that was otherwise wasted or misspent or killed. We have that expression in our English language I had a seminary professor always told me, never use that expression, killing time, because God made that time and the time is there for our salvation and life in God. And so the church took the calendar and she reorganized it. I mean, this is already happening in the Old Testament with a seven day week. Right. So the seventh day is the Sabbath day, the day of rest. Most European languages still have that built into them, like Sabado. I think in Spanish you can hear Sabado. Thank you. I'm terrible. I don't know Spanish, but it's okay.
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Charlie Kirk
Saturday, I think, is from Saturn, so we kind of messed that up.
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Father John Strickland
Yeah, like Sunday S u n day instead of the day of the Resurrection.
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Charlie Kirk
Exactly.
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Father John Strickland
So the whole weekly calendar got reorganized. Orthodox keep that calendar. So for instance, on Fridays we fast. We fast from dairy products and meat. Orthodox Christians do, of course. I mean, everyone's going to do it a little different. Some people don't keep that fast. But that is the standard expectation that every Friday we fast because of course, Jesus died on the cross that day. And so we just, we participate in that event by depriving ourselves of the comfort and pleasure of eating what we want. Same thing on Wednesday when Judas betrayed Jesus. We fast on Wednesdays and Fridays. And that, by the way, is an apostolic practice. There's a book called the Didache that was published or written about 100 a little bit later, maybe a couple of years later, and it says, we Christians fast on Wednesdays and Fridays. It's like right there from the beginning.
- [30:13]
Charlie Kirk
Wow.
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Father John Strickland
So we have this liturgification of time and space and it's all kind of bringing the whole cosmos back into its correct order, as it was in the Garden of Eden. And now the Church sacramentally, is it.
- [30:25]
Charlie Kirk
Like an attempt to sanctify? Sanctification.
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Father John Strickland
Exactly. Sanctification of the cosmos or world. And so our worship, you asked about what we do.
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Charlie Kirk
Yeah. Walk us through a normal Sunday.
- [30:34]
Father John Strickland
Okay.
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Charlie Kirk
I show up at your church.
- [30:36]
Father John Strickland
Yeah. We have what's called the Divine Liturgy. The Divine Liturgy, that's the service that culminates in Eucharistic Communion, which we spoke of earlier. In the west, it's known in the Roman Catholic case as the Mass. And then various Protestant churches, some of the more mainline Protestant churches, like the Episcopal Church, from which I came, for instance, I was once an Episcopalian. Lutherans, they will borrow from the Mass quite a bit and be very familiar to a Lutheran or Episcopalian. So it's something that was composed and organized over a thousand years ago. The Divine Liturgy. We do not worship In a way that appeals to our own kind of, you might say, temporal or contemporary tastes. So we don't have, like, bands. We don't have guitars playing, drums.
- [31:22]
Charlie Kirk
Smoke. Smoke. So smoke machines.
- [31:24]
Father John Strickland
We don't have smoke machines.
- [31:25]
Charlie Kirk
Lasers.
- [31:26]
Father John Strickland
We don't have a coffee counter out in the lobby and cup holders in our season.
- [31:30]
Charlie Kirk
So is it rather ancient and it's.
- [31:32]
Father John Strickland
Yeah.
- [31:32]
Charlie Kirk
So no. Yeah. You stand the entire service. Is that right?
- [31:35]
Father John Strickland
That's normative. Yeah. Again, we have benches at our church, many churches, even if you have to, of course, you should sit down if you need to, but if you can. In other words, I get the president. United States walked in this room right now. Would we sit here and just say hi? I mean, of course we'd stand up.
- [31:49]
Charlie Kirk
That's such a good point.
- [31:50]
Father John Strickland
Yeah.
- [31:51]
Charlie Kirk
So how long is your service?
- [31:53]
Father John Strickland
So in our church, it's about two hours long because my sermons are too long.
- [31:57]
Charlie Kirk
Wow. So they will.
- [31:58]
Father John Strickland
In other churches, they'll be about an hour and a half to hour 45.
- [32:01]
Charlie Kirk
They will stand for a couple hours.
- [32:04]
Father John Strickland
A couple hours. You get used to it. I remember when I was in Russia starting to attend an Orthodox church there. I remember standing and thinking, let's wrap this up. My legs are killing me. But after a while, you just get used to it.
- [32:16]
Charlie Kirk
Wow.
- [32:16]
Father John Strickland
It's like the fasting. You know, it sounds like I can't do that. But then you start doing it.
- [32:19]
Charlie Kirk
So what is the liturgy? Start with some music.
- [32:23]
Father John Strickland
Yeah.
- [32:23]
Charlie Kirk
So what instrumentation is allowed?
- [32:25]
Father John Strickland
None, 000 instrumentation. It's all the voice. You see, the idea here is deification. Theosis. The Orthodox Church believes that the Incarnation changed everything when God became human. In Jesus Christ, the human being was joined to divinity. And now the human being becomes the instrument. The human being becomes the source of all praise and all glorification of God. And so it's the human voice alone which is allowed in an Orthodox service. It's also called a cappella.
- [32:56]
Charlie Kirk
Oh, yeah, yeah, of course. And so I'm sure you learn very quickly who has the booming voice and who does not. So you have vocal singing throughout. And so you said sermon. That's in the Catholicism. It's called the homily. I don't know if that's similar or not.
- [33:15]
Father John Strickland
I use the word homily, actually.
- [33:16]
Charlie Kirk
They mean the same thing, but they're very short usually. And there's also, as you know, the iron law of Roman Catholicism. You can't go more than an hour. I'm kidding. It's like people get very mad. But so walk. So to Kind of go through the sequencing or an order of such service.
- [33:30]
Father John Strickland
Yeah, yeah. So it's. So first of all, the Orthodox liturgy is like, someone calculated this once. It's like 90%, maybe 80, maybe 90% scripture. So that's really interesting. I think, from a Protestant point of view, it's amazing because often the Orthodox reading of scripture. Yeah, reading or paraphrasing of scripture. So for instance, we sing certain psalms. For instance, we sing the Beatitudes from the Gospel of Matthew.
- [33:53]
Charlie Kirk
Beautiful.
- [33:53]
Father John Strickland
We sing other elements of scripture, but even that which is not literally scripture, we allude to scripture. You know, Paul tells us to pray for the, the authorities or Peter and, and, and pray for the authorities. We pray for the president of Timothy.
- [34:09]
Charlie Kirk
It says to pray for your leaders by name and. Yeah, exactly.
- [34:11]
Father John Strickland
Thank you. You got it. Yeah. So we pray for this country, its president, all civil authorities, and the armed forces everywhere. That's a, that's a phrase from our litanies. We pray for our bishops, we pray, pray for, you know, people who are suffering and in prison and, and hard labor and, and, and all sorts of needs and things like this. So we have litanies that list lots of petitions to God for our prayers in addition to just the scripture. But even those litanies are living out or alluding to the scriptures. Prayers said by the priest are full of scriptural allusions, full of them all over the place. So it's really a lot of scripture. But it starts off, as you asked about the order in two hours. It starts off with singing of saying a great Whitney. It starts off interesting. Before that, it actually quotes one of the psalms. It is time for the Lord to act. And we actually say that before the liturgy begins. Like, it's not like in our church starts at 10. It's not like, oh, it's 10 o'. Clock. It's time to start the liturgy. No, it's time for God to come from heaven and fill us by the Holy Spirit with his presence on earth, on the cosmos. And so it's time for the Lord to act is how we start the liturgy. And then. Yeah, litanies, psalms, other scripturally based hymns culminates in the first half of the liturgy with the reading of the gospel. And then after that is done, the priest gives, in most cases, the homily or sermon. Doesn't matter. Same word, really. And he will teach. So he will teach based on the scripture. Highly unusual. And certainly nothing that I've ever seen in an Orthodox church is for the priest to, for instance, like, talk about a film. He just saw. I mean, it's totally relevant to the.
- [35:57]
Charlie Kirk
Gospel for the day, but highly unusual.
- [36:00]
Father John Strickland
Highly unusual. He wouldn't just talk about spiritual, kind of psychological, moral, kind of, you know, kind of like inspirational stuff. He would hit the gospel. He would. If it's a saint's day, like if it's maybe Christmas, he might talk about. Of course, the gospel is about the, the birth of Christ. Politics have no place in our homilies, our teaching at the liturgy, because this is the kingdom of heaven. This is the eternal kingdom of heaven. Coming into this non eternal world and transforming the world through a metamorphosis. The word you used earlier, metamorphe. Yeah, yeah.
- [36:34]
Charlie Kirk
So then you do the Eucharist.
- [36:36]
Father John Strickland
Yeah. Second half is focused on the Eucharist. Yeah. And most people receive it. In my church, almost all people receive it. But I want to say that's historically not always the case. Like if you go to Russia or Greece today, Romania, something like that, Serbia, most people will not receive the Eucharist every time because of the great sense of unworthiness to receive the body and blood of Christ. And so there's a lot of piety centered around kind of getting ready for that and doing it rarely with a high level of preparation and respect.
- [37:11]
Charlie Kirk
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- [38:11]
Father John Strickland
Sure.
- [38:11]
Charlie Kirk
Are women allowed to be priests?
- [38:13]
Father John Strickland
No.
- [38:14]
Charlie Kirk
Okay. Are you allowed to marry?
- [38:17]
Father John Strickland
No. No.
- [38:18]
Charlie Kirk
Okay. You're not allowed to marry.
- [38:19]
Father John Strickland
I am married and I Have five children.
- [38:21]
Charlie Kirk
So how did that work?
- [38:22]
Father John Strickland
Because the way it worked is the Church, the early Church, allowed married men to be ordained, but not ordained.
- [38:29]
Charlie Kirk
You found the loophole.
- [38:31]
Father John Strickland
Some people see it that way, but it makes a lot of sense. Of course, the Roman Catholic Church changed this with time. It's really not until that 11th century schism that you really get the absolute categorical rejection of married priests. Peter Damian's an important Western father of the Church at that time, who said we really need to make sure that men are not married in order to be priests. Well, that is not the ancient practice. It's certainly not the Orthodox practice. It's good for a married man to be a father to a parish. How can a. I mean, the question is raised. I mean, there are many celibate Roman Catholic priests who are phenomenal priests, a lot better than I am. But there's a basic thing, though, and that is a man is equipped, better equipped to care for a community as a father, we're called Father. After all, if he really is a father and a husband of one wife, faithful to her, sacrificing himself. You know, I don't do enough of that for sure. I'm not talking about myself. I'm just saying if you're living in marriage and you're living out Ephesians chapter five, where we're dying for our wives. We're dying for our wives as our wife. The wife obeys the husband, the husband gives his life for his wife, loves her as himself. Exactly. So, so a priest should be. It's good for him to be married.
- [39:49]
Charlie Kirk
You're allowed to have children while you are a priest?
- [39:51]
Father John Strickland
Absolutely, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [39:52]
Charlie Kirk
How many do you have?
- [39:53]
Father John Strickland
Five.
- [39:53]
Charlie Kirk
Wow. And so how many of the other priests in your parish are married?
- [39:57]
Father John Strickland
Well, I'm the only priest in my parish. That's typically the case. I have a. If you, if you go to Roman Catholic Church, you can have thousands of people on the books. They don't usually show up on a given, but you might have hundreds in the Orthodox Church. That's pretty unusual. Some of the Greek Orthodox parishes have very large parishes, but again, a lot of that's rather nominal. They don't all come on the same day. It becomes very hard for an Orthodox priest to be a father. I mean, how can a father be a father to more than 100, 150 parishioners? So if you have hundreds and hundreds of people, you don't know who they are, you can't hear their confessions, you can't support them, call them on Their name day. You can't visit them. You can't do that. So our parishes tend to be smaller. And so about ours is about 150 people, a little bit less. About 100 people come on a Sunday, typically.
- [40:44]
Charlie Kirk
So then just again, I want to just kind of do greatest hits here. What is the view of the afterlife in Orthodoxy?
- [40:53]
Father John Strickland
So our view is that it's not an afterlife, strictly speaking. I've never thought that word really does honor to Christianity. It's like we have life and then we have an afterlife. You know, there are two lives. No, we have one life, and it's in Christ. Our life begins at baptism. We're all born blind, like that blind man in the Gospel of John. We're all born blind, as it were, and we need to be illumined and filled with the presence of Christ in our lives by the Holy Spirit. So from baptism, that's what brings that illumination. From baptism forward, we enter into a life that will continue beyond this world.
- [41:30]
Charlie Kirk
Do you do infant baptism?
- [41:31]
Father John Strickland
Yes. Yes, we do. Yeah, Always have.
- [41:33]
Charlie Kirk
So does the Orthodox Church believe that if, let's say, how was the average age of infant baptism?
- [41:41]
Father John Strickland
40 days after birth.
- [41:42]
Charlie Kirk
Are they saved upon infant baptism?
- [41:45]
Father John Strickland
So the question of salvation is different for Orthodox than it is for a lot of Protestants. For us, salvation is most often spoken of as theosis, a Greek word which usually is translated as deification or divinization. We believe that the Incarnation. We're going back to what you asked earlier about our understanding of the Gospels in Christ, going back to that the Incarnation enables us to participate immediately in the life of God, that His divinity, which is above us, transcendent, beyond this cosmos, this world, and inaccessible to us by itself, becomes available to us and offered to us through Jesus Christ, his Son, into whom we are baptized as a body and filled by His Holy Spirit. So we're back to the sacramental reality of Orthodoxy here, early Christianity. And because we participate in the life of Christ, we participate in divinity. So back to the question of are we saved? Baptism is a necessary part of becoming saved. But once baptized and given the gift of the Holy Spirit, we call that Chrismation. Wes calls it confirmation. Our infants are given that immediately, and they receive eucharistic communion at the moment they're baptized. They don't have to wait until they're older, age of discretion. We are saved in a sense, but we're still being saved. We have to live out our faith in cooperation with God. Yeah.
- [43:18]
Charlie Kirk
So then, do you guys. Are you more. Are you careful saying, who's able to go to heaven and who is not. And what is your view of Hell, Purgatory and heaven?
- [43:26]
Father John Strickland
So purgatory we reject outright. Okay, that was. That was something that was added to the Roman Catholic dogmatic tradition after the Great Schism, and it was never part of our orthodox teaching. Purgatory, of course, being a doctrine that those going to heaven and listeners need to realize. It's not something like, there's no ambiguity. Those in purgatory are going to heaven. This is the Roman Catholic faith. And Dante, for what it's worth, poetically presents it as being a joyful kind of suffering. But it is a suffering. It's a pain and a punishment. We've always rejected that we do not need to be punished and pay a price for every sin we've committed before we can get into heaven. That's not our. We don't have that economy of salvation that the Roman Catholic Church, with a more legalistic understanding of salvation, introduced after the Great Schism. So we reject purgatory. We do believe in hell and believe it's eternal, and we believe in heaven and believe that's eternal too. And to your first question there, we are very reluctant, although you'll find exceptions. And historically, there will be people who will speak differently in the Orthodox Church tradition. But we, and certainly as a pastor, believe very strongly. We have no business declaring who's going to heaven and who's going to hell. We have no business doing that. Christ has not revealed that to us. It would make us insane to know that. So we reject. Resist the temptation.
- [44:50]
Charlie Kirk
Can a person say confidently, I am going to heaven when talking about themselves?
- [44:56]
Father John Strickland
I think so. I think so. If it's understood as by God's grace and through my.
- [45:02]
Charlie Kirk
So for you, do you believe you're going to heaven?
- [45:04]
Father John Strickland
I believe I'm going to heaven if I live out the faith that's been given to me as a Christian and if I'm faithful to Christ. And that depends on repentance. Like, that's the center of the whole orthodox way of life.
- [45:16]
Charlie Kirk
Repentance.
- [45:17]
Father John Strickland
Repentance.
- [45:18]
Charlie Kirk
So tell me more. That is an awesome concept that is lost on the West.
- [45:24]
Father John Strickland
Yeah, yeah. I think it has been.
- [45:25]
Charlie Kirk
So. I love that. So tell me why that is a centerpiece and how does that work out practically?
- [45:31]
Father John Strickland
Yeah, yeah. Repentance. In the Greek, it's matannia or metaneia. It means a change of heart. So the classic biblical example of this is the prodigal Son. The prodigal son. And he takes. He basically sins against his Father splits, winds up with prostitutes, hungry and broken, and he resolves to return to the Father and that's a change of heart. And so what he does is he goes back to the Father. This is a paraphrase of the Gospel account. And you probably know the story. It's so beautiful.
- [46:01]
Charlie Kirk
He drops everything and literally runs to it with his robe on.
- [46:04]
Father John Strickland
Yeah, isn't that beautiful? Ring on the finger, fatted calf dancing.
- [46:08]
Charlie Kirk
As if he never left.
- [46:09]
Father John Strickland
Yep, that's. The Orthodox vision of repentance is we reject the sin that inevitably comes, overcomes us, the passions, the sinful passions. We realize that they're, they're not leading to life, they're leading to death. And we reject them and return to the Father and he rushes to give us his kingdom.
- [46:28]
Charlie Kirk
Yes.
- [46:28]
Father John Strickland
And he forgives. And so we have actually this is formalized in the sacrament of confession and absolution.
- [46:34]
Charlie Kirk
So. Yes. So do you believe it?
- [46:35]
Father John Strickland
Do you do have that practice? Yeah, we do have that practice. James says if you, you know, confess your sins and, and God and Paul and John says, you know, if you confess your sins, God is merciful and will forgive. So we do believe this. And repentance is a way of life. It never, it's not a one time thing like when we're baptized or something. And every year, of course, we have the great fast we call it in the west, it's just known as Lent because it's the only time it's done during the year. But we have actually four Lenten periods in fact, 40 days before Christmas, when the whole Western world is, you know, shopping and listening to Christmas carols and eating and overeating and, and partying and doing all sorts of watching fun entertainment on tv, their favorite Christmas movies and all that. We're actually, for 40 days, just like Jesus in the wilderness, fasting to prepare spiritually for the celebration.
- [47:26]
Charlie Kirk
And your Christmas is usually in January.
- [47:29]
Father John Strickland
It depends on the calendar follows. The Orthodox Church follows two calendars depending on which jurisdiction of this one church, one belongs to the jurisdiction I belong to. The Orthodox Church in America, or oca, follows what's called the new calendar for the most part. And so most of us, including my Parish, celebrate on 25th of December because.
- [47:49]
Charlie Kirk
Growing up, all my Serbian friends, they would celebrate in January.
- [47:52]
Father John Strickland
That's right, January, January 7th.
- [47:54]
Charlie Kirk
That's right, yeah. So that's very helpful.
- [47:58]
Father John Strickland
So the repentance thing, if I may just add a bit more there. But coming around to great Lent, we are increasing our services. We're fasting for two months from meat and dairy. If we're living out the fast completely, we're really trying to look into ourselves and the hymns that are being served in church and not just on Sundays. We have services every day of the week are calling us to repent, to turn away from our sins and to return to the glorious and beautiful kingdom that God has prepared for us and that the saints already occupy. And so that repentance is the way of life. That leads back to your question about salvation. We have to live a life of repentance and that's what leads to salvation, not just a one time decision. You know, Jesus, accept me as your Lord and Savior. That's a beautiful important thing to do. But then it means a life of continuous introspective looking at why I'm a sinner.
- [48:55]
Charlie Kirk
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- [50:02]
Father John Strickland
Yes.
- [50:02]
Charlie Kirk
Against abortion?
- [50:03]
Father John Strickland
Yes.
- [50:05]
Charlie Kirk
How about drinking alcohol?
- [50:07]
Father John Strickland
So there is no teetotaler tradition or element in orthodoxy. The ancient church used wine, fermented grape juice, wine with alcohol content to it. From the beginning. Jesus is clearly drinking that. One of the psalms says wine gladdens the heart of man. I mean it's right there in the scriptures. But the abuse of this like anything, of course any, any part of God's creation.
- [50:32]
Charlie Kirk
Even more warnings about drunkenness and, you know, man who drinks forgets the law.
- [50:35]
Father John Strickland
Exactly. And so drunkenness is always going to be a temptation if one is disposed toward that. But so it's considered a sin that needs repentance. But we do not ban alcohol. No.
- [50:47]
Charlie Kirk
Here is a big question, and I don't want to get too wrapped up on this. Do you in the Orthodox Church believe in original sin?
- [50:54]
Father John Strickland
Not as it's often taught and understood in the West. That's another interesting distinction. We do believe that there was an original sin. Adam and Eve, obviously, Eve first and then Adam ate that fruit of the tree, which, by the way, was a. Was a refusal to fast. God said, don't eat. Eat everything. I've got everything for you.
- [51:13]
Charlie Kirk
Except not that.
- [51:14]
Father John Strickland
Not that. No, I'm going to have that. Thank you very much. And so that's an interesting thing. That's one of the reasons why fasting. You know, fasting is so basic. Our eating, especially Americans with our restaurant culture and our weight problems.
- [51:27]
Charlie Kirk
Fasting is an underappreciated spiritual technology almost that God gives us.
- [51:32]
Father John Strickland
Yeah. And it's just built right into the life of the church, you know, with the fasting seasons and days, and Christ, our Lord, fasted.
- [51:37]
Charlie Kirk
So.
- [51:38]
Father John Strickland
Yeah, absolutely. And so, anyway, back to. I'm sorry, you asked about original sin. Original sin. So that had an impact on the human race. Every human being since then has been sinful. You asked about the Virgin Mary earlier. The fathers that say, you know, she, of course she was sinful in some sense, were saying that she's a human being that needs salvation from sin like every other human being. The emphasis about the Virgin Mary is she's just the greatest of all the saints. Everything that's taught about her is just. She was just so beautifully in love with Christ that she lived for him and didn't live for sins. So the overall teaching, I think, is original sin is a reality with an impact or a consequence that we're all disposed toward it and we're all dying, and we are dying. However, we don't teach original guilt. Now, this is something. St. Augustine, who's an orthodox saint, by the way, a holy, beautiful soul.
- [52:27]
Charlie Kirk
Augustine of Hippo.
- [52:28]
Father John Strickland
Yeah, Augustine of Hippo.
- [52:29]
Charlie Kirk
City of God.
- [52:30]
Father John Strickland
Wrote the City of God, the Confessions, Beautiful works. A really, really beautiful Father nevertheless taught things that have not been accepted and were not accepted in his time. And what he taught was that people are guilty of what Adam and Eve did, so that even a child that dies like a minute into its life has to go to hell because it was not Washed of original sin.
- [52:53]
Charlie Kirk
Most Protestants have a much more nuanced view than that.
- [52:56]
Father John Strickland
But yeah, so yeah, and I think so. And I think Roman Catholics.
- [53:00]
Charlie Kirk
Correct. Because there's a scripture that says God will gather the children to Him. But yes, that would be the extreme, you know, application of original sin.
- [53:09]
Father John Strickland
Yeah. And I think. Yeah, but to get away from that extremity and just to look at it more generally, that led to a kind of, well, technically I call it an anthropological pessimism about the human condition. A pessimism about the human condition, about what it means to be human. That again, to use Calvinist terminology, man is totally depraved. And that's just something that the early Church, the Eastern fathers, the Greek fathers and current fathers just never taught and don't teach.
- [53:41]
Charlie Kirk
So what is your, what is the orthodox view on free will versus God's sovereignty? Predestination.
- [53:49]
Father John Strickland
Yeah. So we do not believe in predestination. We reject that. Augustine taught that. But we reject that God is sovereign, absolutely sovereign. And nothing exists without Him. His sovereign grace creating the world, sustaining the world.
- [54:04]
Charlie Kirk
Yes.
- [54:05]
Father John Strickland
If he withdrew His Holy Spirit from this cosmos, you know, even if we're not aware of the presence of the Holy Spirit, the whole cosmos would just disintegrate.
- [54:11]
Charlie Kirk
Yes.
- [54:12]
Father John Strickland
You know, and as so he's, he's fully sovereign. But we also believe that man made in his image and likeness and then baptized into the body of his son Jesus Christ by the Holy Spirit, given the gift of the Holy Spirit, participates in and co operates with his salvation, his sovereign love and grace. So Paul speaks about this. He says, I am a co worker with Christ. The Greek word there is synergy, synergy and synergy means co, operation, sin, like with and energy, meaning action or operation. And this is a really beautiful and liberating vision of the dignity of the human being. That we're not just wretched passive receptacles of God's majestic sovereign grace, but we are raised up and made beautiful because the image of God within us and we are cooperating with God in bringing his holiness into our lives and the lives of people around us. And so we believe that the human being baptized into Christ has to live out his salvation. And that is part of it.
- [55:22]
Charlie Kirk
Somebody told me recently the Orthodox Church is more about what God isn't than what God is. Is that a fair characterization or what were they trying to say when they.
- [55:32]
Father John Strickland
I think I know what they were getting at. And it's fair as far as if they're trying to get to this. There is a Technical. Again, I'm sorry to dump a lot of Greek words on you, but there's a technical term in theology called apophaticism. And what this is, it's a way of talking about God by saying God is so beyond our categories of human knowledge, we can't even say he's good. We can't say he's kind or just or anything, because our understanding of what's good, kind, just. It just fails. He's so totally beyond us. We're a creature, we're not God. And so we can't even communicate and make statements about God that are really full. And so that's called apophaticism. It's a kind of mystical way of acknowledging the glory of God that's so beyond us. But there's a balancing element in Orthodox theology called Cato fatism. And this says we can make statements about God, we can say who he is, and because he became one of us, he became human in Jesus Christ, and He gave us the Holy Spirit. And so that the tradition of the Church, in fact, is saying a lot about God. And I would never feel comfortable saying we can't. Orthodoxy is characterized by saying we can't know God or can't say things about God. We're just doing it all the time. Look at the Nicene Creed, of course.
- [56:51]
Charlie Kirk
So why do you. Or why did the Orthodox Church think the Reformation happened? What caused the Reformation?
- [57:00]
Father John Strickland
Yeah, well, from an orthodox point of view, and I wrote a book series that included. This is a really key moment in the history of the West. It's called paradise and Utopia. The rise and fall of what the west once was. What I think a lot of us see, and certainly I tried to articulate, is the Protestant Reformation was a reaction to a Christianity that was itself no longer very healthy or had a lot of unhealthy elements in it. And of course, we all know that the Reformation, you know, if you want to find a date, it's 1517. Martin Luther nails his 95 theses to the church door of Wittenberg. Against what? Indulgences. Indulgences are the practice that depended on a papacy to issue escape from or freedom from the punishment of purgatory. And as I said earlier, we reject purgatory. We obviously, therefore reject indulgences. We reject a papacy. That was the reason why we no longer are part of the. The Roman Catholic Church is no longer part of the Orthodox Churches. We do not accept one bishop presiding over the whole Church. Peter was certainly first of the apostles, but he Never presided over the apostles. Look at Acts, chapter 15.
- [58:13]
Charlie Kirk
So you reject the idea of the.
- [58:14]
Father John Strickland
Papacy, the papal supremacy. Now, we always accepted the popes as Orthodox bishops until the Great Schism happened. The bishops of Rome were the first among all the ancient patriarchates or bishops that were, you know, kind of honored. But he. The pope, never had authority over the rest of the church in the way that follows the Great Schism. And so today, Roman Catholicism and for a thousand years has had a model of the papacy that we totally reject. You do not have universal supreme authority over the whole church. Bishops have local communities that they rule over, but they're in conciliar relationship with each other. And Christ is fully present in the whole church and does not require a single bishop who stands in his place as the vicar of Christ. We reject that.
- [59:07]
Charlie Kirk
So right now, this is a great segue. There's Eastern Orthodox, there's Serbian Orthodox, there's Latvian. Walk us through the composition of the Orthodox Church. This has always been confusing to me. What is the hierarchy, the structure? Who's in charge?
- [59:24]
Father John Strickland
Sure, yeah. Let me just. Can I just wrap one thing up about the Reformation? Then? Let's get into that. So the Reformation comes about because a lot of very biblically informed and smart Christians, you know, Luther was a professor of theology, Calvin was a lawyer, realize or reach the conclusion what we're seeing in Roman Catholicism circa 1500 is not right. And so they rejected Roman Catholicism and its many doctrines that actually are not even Orthodox doctrines. This is the remarkable thing, is the Protestant Reformation was a reaction against exactly those features of Roman Catholicism that came into existence after the Roman Catholic Church broke from the Orthodox Church. Papal supremacy, purgatory, indulgences. Protestants were saying that the Scripture should be written in the vernacular and understood by the people in the liturgy. We've always been doing that. We never had a doctrine that had to be in one language, like Latin or Greek. Priests should be married. That was a big Protestant thing. Of course, as we've talked about, priests are married in the Orthodox Church. So sadly, the Protestant Reformation was a reaction to something. And like any pendulum swinging back and forth, it went in the opposite direction by throwing out the idea of tradition and sacraments and things like that, because it perceived all of that as being Roman Catholic, and it wanted nothing to do with that. So it became a. In some ways, it became a kind of Christianity of minimalism. Solas faith alone, grace alone, Scripture alone. When Christianity is full, it's the fullness of life in Christ, not a limitation or a minimalism. Of just one thing at the expense of all other things.
- [61:05]
Charlie Kirk
That's very helpful. You know, one of the biggest lies being sold to American people right now is that you're in control of your money, especially when it comes to crypto. But the truth, most of these so called crypto platforms are just banks in disguise, fully capable of freezing your assets the moment some bureaucrat makes a phone call. That is not what Bitcoin was built for. That's why I use Bitcoin.com I just did a major transaction on it. They offer a self custodial wallet, which means you hold the keys, you control your assets. No one can touch your crypto. Not the IRS or not a rogue bank, not some three letter agency that thinks it knows better than you do. This is how it was intended by the original creators of Bitcoin. Peer to peer money. Free from centralized control, free from surveillance and free from arbitrary seizure. So if you're serious about financial sovereignty, go to bitcoin.com, set up your wallet, take back control. Because if you don't hold the keys, you don't own your money. Bitcoin.com freedom starts here. So let's go down to the orthodox kind of just technical structure here. Walk us through it. As if I know nothing about kind of orthodoxy or very little. How are you? What is the composition?
- [62:16]
Father John Strickland
Sure. And are you thinking again about the different jurisdictions?
- [62:19]
Charlie Kirk
Like jurisdictions, I mean. Yeah. Is there a, is there a head of. Who's the highest? For example, is the Russian Orthodox Church connected to the American Orthodox Church? How is that all structured?
- [62:33]
Father John Strickland
Right. Yeah, that's a good question. So our model of church life and governance dates from the apostles. It's recorded and documented in Scripture. In Acts chapter 15, you might remember there's this council of the Apostles in Jerusalem where they deal with a heresy, in that case circumcising gentile converts. And they say, no, we don't need to do that. They got together in that council, the apostles did. And at that time they're being called bishops too. The word for bishop in the Greek in the New Testament is episcopos. So that's where we get the word episcopal for instance. Yeah, so that's. The apostles functioned as episcopi or overseers is what that means, if you like. EPI means above. And scopos, if you go hunting, you put a skopos on your rifle to see your target. So episcopos means overseers. They all conferenced together, counseled together in Jerusalem. And in the end, one of Them stood up and said, this is what we're going to do. And you probably remember who that was. It was not Peter, first of the Apostles. It was James, because he was the local apostle of Jerusalem. So we've always believed that there are local jurisdictions of the Orthodox of the one church, and that these jurisdictions are all in communion with each other, accountable to each other, and that there's not a single bishop over all the others. So you asked about how things look today, 2000 years later. 2000 years later, over the course of time, as Orthodox Christianity spread throughout the world. We have very big jurisdictions, like the Russian Moscow Patriarchate of Russia. We have the Ecumenical Patriarch of Istanbul. It's called Constantinople, usually using the old name for the city. And then we have other local, smaller jurisdictions. The Romanian Orthodox Church is big and things like that. There's a big Arabic church in America. It's called the Antiochian Orthodox Church. There's a big Greek church in America. It's called the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese. I belong to the Orthodox Church in America, which is yet another jurisdiction. But we're all part of one church. We all go to each other's churches. We stand in the altar together, we receive, receive the same communion together, Eucharistic communion, serve together, all those things. That's how the Church is formed. And for an Orthodox, this is a sign that the Holy Spirit is the unifying element in our life together. It's not a single bishop with a juridical kind of legal understanding of submission to him or subjugation to him. One Roman Catholic pope of the Middle Ages named Boniface VIII issued a famous papal bull called Unum Sanctum that said, and I'm paraphrasing, but it's pretty close. It is altogether necessary for the salvation of every human being to be subject to the Pope of Rome. We've always rejected that. That course was issued long after the Great Schism. We believe that these various jurisdictions all work in harmony as one church. And you know what? I guess I could say this, Charlie. It's a remarkable thing. If we use this next to a kind of Roman Catholic model. You have this Roman Catholic model where there's a pope at top and everything somehow flows out of that. And externally, that all looks marvelously unified. But if you look inside the Roman Catholic Church today, there's all sorts of disagreements, there's all sorts of arguments, there's all sorts of sense of impending doom and things like that, and disagreements on how to do the Mass and whether gays should be blessed or even married. And Things like that. If you look at the Orthodox Church, you see what seems to be a kind of disorganized series or range of jurisdictions. But you look at the inside and it's the same faith, it's the same doctrines. There's no disagreement about dogmas of the Church. It's the same morality. If you go to any of these centers of Orthodox Christianity around the world, you'll find the same doctrines of marriage, the same understanding that there's only two sexes, male and female, and can't be any others. You'll find the same moral positions about marriage and everything else. And finally, the worship is almost completely universal. Same thing going on everywhere, same service. So it's really remarkably uniform and harmonious. And that's we believe by the Holy Spirit, not by a human being who stands in and says, I will create an order that kind of legally is defined by my headship over it. Christ is the head mystically in the Orthodox Church.
- [67:14]
Charlie Kirk
Let's close with this. And then I want you to be able to bring up anything that else is on your mind. You say your church is growing. Is the Orthodox Church growing in America? And tell us more about that.
- [67:23]
Father John Strickland
Yeah, it's amazing.
- [67:24]
Charlie Kirk
And why do you think that is?
- [67:26]
Father John Strickland
I think today, and it's growing, especially among young people, young adults are just flooding in.
- [67:32]
Charlie Kirk
Both young men and women are primarily young men.
- [67:34]
Father John Strickland
Primarily young men, in my experience, and I've heard this from other Orthodox pastors, it's across the board, every Orthodox pastor I talk to, and not just in Washington state, but I'm going to hear plenty about it. And we're right now meeting down the street at what's called the All American Council, where bishop, bishops and priests come together and talk about church life. And we're all talking about this now. People are flooding into the Orthodox Church today because they're seeking authentic spiritual life, something to ground their lives in. In an age of nihilism. I wrote a book called the Age of Nihilism as part of that book series I mentioned earlier.
- [68:09]
Charlie Kirk
I want to read that the final.
- [68:10]
Father John Strickland
Volume is about the past hundred years and how all sorts of projects to build a progressive world, a world where progress is inevitable and everyone just finds happiness in a secular kind of mode of existence has failed for so many people. And so many people see where this leads. It leads to, you know, transgenderism, it leads to divorce, it leads to abortion. On a scale of millions of people, it just leads to a nihilistic end. The great world wars are kind of symptoms of this nihilism. And I talk about all this stuff and a lot of people realize they're not going to find salvation and stability and anchor their lives in neo paganism or any of these progressive ideologies or any ideology at all. If an ideology is something made by men to create a sense of purpose in life, it's only going to be found in Christianity, in Christ and orthodox Christianity. You know, I hope I've been able to describe this a little bit.
- [69:13]
Charlie Kirk
You've done a wonderful job.
- [69:14]
Father John Strickland
You know, really stands for an unchangeable tradition that can be traced and documented all the way back to the apostles themselves.
- [69:22]
Charlie Kirk
What's amazing. So your method of worship. No music, same as the apostles, right? I mean, is it. It's pretty constant. I mean, that is as unchanging as it gets. Has anything changed? I mean, you have lights, electricity and air conditioning, I'm guessing, right?
- [69:37]
Father John Strickland
We do. Although we prefer to at vespers, our evening service at night, we prefer just to do it by lamplight and candlelight.
- [69:45]
Charlie Kirk
And so in some ways you guys look at yourself as an unbroken chain and you want to keep that.
- [69:52]
Father John Strickland
Yeah, I think that's very powerful for people today that see such disruptions.
- [69:58]
Charlie Kirk
Everything's changing. Their friends are changing, their genders. I mean, things are happening so rapidly. They want something to anchor them in, something to keep, keep them grounded and rooted in this chaotic world. Last question. What about orthodoxy that we did not cover? Do you wish people knew about that? You feel compelled to share?
- [70:21]
Father John Strickland
Best kept religious secret in America. The one thing I would love to share is just to a wonderful nation and a wonderful community of people that, that there's something really beautiful there. And Protestantism and Roman Catholicisms are beautiful too. And I think we, as I said when we started, there's a lot that we share in common, thank God. I think that as we go forward and we continue to see the disintegration of our society around us. Modernity, modernity, post modernity. Nihilism is my word for it as we see this disintegration, this nihil, this nothingness.
- [70:54]
Charlie Kirk
Yet. And describe your book one more time.
- [70:56]
Father John Strickland
So the book, Age of Nihilism, it's part of a four volume series of books that started with Pentecost and it ends with the culture wars. So it brings it right up to the present moment, really. Just published it, the last volume, a few years ago.
- [71:09]
Charlie Kirk
We're going to put what's up on screen right now.
- [71:10]
Father John Strickland
Oh, okay. Yeah, okay. Yeah, yeah. There it is, the whole series.
- [71:14]
Charlie Kirk
Age of paradise, the Age of Division, the Age of Utopia, the Age of Nihilism.
- [71:18]
Father John Strickland
Yeah. Yeah. And I think impressive work. Yeah, it took a While. It's about 25 years of teaching college, so about a quarter of a century. You're a college professor still? No, I write. I write books. I was able to get out of that and start just writing instead of teaching.
- [71:33]
Charlie Kirk
So impressive.
- [71:34]
Father John Strickland
But it was something I really cared about. Always loved Christendom, a Christian civilization, which is really what we have in the west. And I'd love to contribute to a restoration of its most healthy elements.
- [71:47]
Charlie Kirk
Amen.
- [71:47]
Father John Strickland
Yeah.
- [71:48]
Charlie Kirk
So the books are Age of Paradise, the Age of Division, Age of Utopia, the Age of Nihilism by John Strickland. I have a whole page of notes, as you can tell, and lots of things to follow up on. But thank you so much, Father, for your time, and I hope to visit your church sometime soon.
- [72:02]
Father John Strickland
You bet, Charlie. Come anytime.
- [72:03]
Charlie Kirk
God bless you.
- [72:04]
Father John Strickland
God bless you. Thank you.
- [72:05]
Charlie Kirk
Thanks so much for listening, everybody. Email us. As always, freedomarliekirk.com thanks so much for listening and God bless. For more on many of these stories.
- [72:14]
Father John Strickland
And news you can Trust, go to charliekirk.com.