Antichrist Devil's Children

Summary

The Lord of Spirits — "Antichrist Devil's Children"

Episode Date: June 10, 2023
Hosts: Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick (B), Fr. Stephen De Young (C)
Producer: Ancient Faith Ministries
Theme: The Seen and Unseen World in Orthodox Christian Tradition
Focus: Eschatology Series Introduction—The Antichrist: Historical, Scriptural, and Liturgical Perspectives

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Episode Overview

This episode launches the Lord of Spirits’ new eschatology series, with a deep dive into the figure of the Antichrist as understood in Orthodox Christian tradition. The Fathers clarify common misconceptions, trace the origins of the Antichrist motif to pre-Christian Jewish traditions, and reveal the scriptural, historical, and archetypal roots of this most infamous eschatological figure. They connect the Antichrist to the concepts of lawlessness, apostasy, archetypes, and ultimately, the ongoing spiritual battle between the Body of Christ and the forces of evil.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Origins and Misconceptions About the Antichrist

[00:59–09:40]

• Pop-culture ideas of the Antichrist (e.g., horror movies, Left Behind, rapture scare films) are modern, often sensationalized, and miss crucial theological depth.
• The term "Antichrist" isn’t unique to Christianity, nor is it a late invention—it finds deep roots in pre-Christian Second Temple Jewish literature.
• Antichrist = “anti-Messiah” (literally "[one] instead of" not simply "against"), an ancient role, not just a Christian novelty:

  “The idea of an anti-Messiah figure predates the birth of our Lord...and was a firmly established idea within Second Temple Judaism, where the messianic hope also had an adversary whom the Messiah would face and defeat in his coming.” (C, 09:04)

2. Defining 'Antichrist': The Meaning of 'Anti-'

[10:27–12:33]

• "Anti-" in Greek primarily means "instead of," indicating usurpation or attempted replacement rather than mere opposition.
• In Christian eschatology, the Antichrist is framed as an archetypal usurper:

  “This is a role. This is an office. This is to...place oneself into a role instead of someone else—implies antagonism.” (C, 11:44)

3. Scriptural Traditions: More Than Revelation

[13:12–16:21]

• While Revelation is the popular “go-to,” the core biblical discussion about the Antichrist is in 2 Thessalonians 2 and the letters of John.
• St. John references an established tradition of the Antichrist (1 John), likely sourced from St. Paul, highlighting early intra-apostolic continuity:

  “You have heard that an Antichrist will come. So he’s saying this, you know, they've already heard this…” (C, 14:50)

4. Biblical Exegesis: The Man of Lawlessness in 2 Thessalonians 2

[17:23–62:10]

• Focus on the “man of lawlessness” (anthropos anomias) as the archetype, not simply an individual, but the embodiment of lawlessness in the line of Adam and Christ typology.
• Anthropological exegesis—Paul uses “anthropos” to invoke the concept of archetype (e.g., Adam/Christ, collective humanity).

  “...not just about these two individual men...but ...archetypal men...whose decisions and actions affect more than just an individual person.” (C, 38:08)

• Lawlessness (“anomia”): More than “illegal,” it is a rejection of the God-given way of life (nomos/Torah), embodied in figures like Belial (“the yokeless one”), the archetype of Torah rejection.

  “This is someone who has thrown off...the way of life taught by God they have rejected.” (C, 45:59)

• “Apostasy” (apostasia): Carefully explained as military language—defection, not simply intellectual heresy. A “failure to stand,” the concept is returned to throughout the discourse.

  “Apostasia ...generally used as a military term...means a defection or a retreat.” (C, 27:44)

5. Titles and Archetypes: Man of Lawlessness and Son of Perdition

[29:44–62:10]

• “Man of Lawlessness” = archetype, using Pauline and Jewish Second Temple literature (Belial, Adam Belial).
• “Son of Perdition/Destruction”: Title linked also to the Nephilim, Judas, and ultimate figures of apostasy. Archetypal, not just literal.
• St. Paul invokes military and priesthood language (“restrainer,” “garrison”), applying Aaron and Melchizedek traditions to the notion of what holds back the revelation of the Antichrist—the “restrainer” or “katechon.”

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Archetypes:

  “St. Paul is setting out Adam and Christ as not just individual instances of human nature, but ...embodying human nature in a very particular and special way.” (C, 39:05) [38:30]

• On Lawlessness as Archetypal Rebellion:

  “Not just someone who breaks rules...but this is someone who has thrown off...the way of life taught by God they have rejected.” (C, 45:54) [45:54]

• On the “Restrainer” and the Liturgy:

  “The impediment here, or the restrainer, is priestly sacrifice. It’s Christian worship. Put a fine point on it: it’s the Eucharist. It’s the offering of incense, just like it was with Aaron...What is keeping the world going, keeping the end from coming? …the worship of God.” (C, 98:29) [98:29]

• On Negative Typology:

  “...The Antichrist is not someone who humbles himself and then is exalted, but someone who exalts himself...with the most hubris possible.” (C, 78:23) [78:23]

• “Mystery of Lawlessness” as a Present Reality:

  “The mystery of lawlessness is already at work. This force is sort of impeding it from taking effect, but eventually it will retreat and then the mystery of lawlessness will have its way and this figure will emerge.” (C, 83:08) [83:08]

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Key Segment Timestamps

• [01:09] Episode introductions, series announcement—eschatology and pop-culture references
• [09:03–13:47] Pre-Christian roots of the Antichrist/anti-Messiah idea in Second Temple Judaism
• [20:37–29:10] Detailed exegesis of 2 Thessalonians 2, apostasy/apostasia unpacked
• [32:19–41:04] Anthropological/archetypal language, Adam/Christ typology, lawlessness
• [51:32–56:10] Jewish archetypes—Belial, Nephilim, Sons of Perdition, typology in Jewish apocrypha
• [62:05–92:06] The Restrainer/Katechon: priestly, liturgical, military imagery established; connection to the ongoing Eucharist and the world's fate
• [94:53–98:29] Numbers, priesthood, and the restrainer’s significance in Orthodox liturgy
• [121:53] Third half: The theology of Antichrist in Johannine texts
• [143:09–146:05] Modern academic misunderstandings—on hypothetical “theologies,” New Testament unity, and the real process of canon formation

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“Third Half”: The Antichrist in Johannine Literature

[125:41–176:06]

• Book of Revelation: The “beast out of the sea” as archetypal Antichrist (typhon, Leviathan, Roman Imperial cult).
  • Gematria of "666"/"616" points to “Nero Caesar” but is more than just code—he’s an archetype, just as Julian the Apostate later became an icon of the Antichrist for the Fathers.
• First John:
  • 1 John 2:18: Many Antichrists already at work.
  • 1 John 4:3: The spirit of Antichrist is already in the world.
  • Not a “single villain,” but an archetypal, recurring reality and a spirit at work in every age.
• Negative Typology:
  • Antichrist figures are “types"—inverted parodies of Christ—usurping, exalting, aping Christ’s work, but ultimately opposed to God.
  • “If someone is a positive type of Christ, that doesn't make them a saint; just as Adam was a negative type but is a saint.”

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Modern Misconceptions, Moralism, and Practical Advice

[177:03–194:26]

• Millenarianism and Cultural Panic: Dispensationalist tendencies and “every age is the end” mindset have always existed.
• Rules Don’t Change for the End Times:

  “The rules have not changed. The life of faithfulness is still the same because it was formulated in the time of Antichrist.” (B, 185:37) [185:37]

• The Liturgy Sustains the World: The ongoing celebration of the Eucharist and faithful worship is what “restrains” evil and delays the end.
• The Call to Christians:
  • Stand (“stikhita”): Stay engaged in spiritual labor, do not defect.
  • Meet the spirit of lawlessness with worship, prayer, and genuine kindness—not panic, retreat, or a "culture war" based on superficial markers.
  • Be present, build, bear witness, transform the world (not just insular safety).

  “We need more time to repent...There are people out there who are still lost, who need to come to know Christ. And so I don't want the end to come yet. But to do that, we're going to have to stand in the midst, not off in a corner, not hiding.” (C, 193:12) [193:12]

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Questions and Memorable Listener Calls

• [100:42–105:51] Janine's multi-part question:
  • Are signs of evil in the world (violence, manipulation, etc.) Antichrist at work? Do the scriptures say it will get worse?
  • Frs. clarify: Yes, the spirit of Antichrist is active; the tools of offense are prayer, worship, almsgiving, and standing firm.
  • “There’s not a distinction between liturgy and spiritual warfare. Those are not two different things.” (C, 104:05) [104:05]

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Final Take: Faith, Liturgy, and Hope

• Modern vigilance does not mean panic or exceptionalism: Every generation faces its "Antichrists." The Church's answer—especially through liturgy—remains the same.
• True resistance = Faithful participation in the Eucharist, prayer, and unselfish engagement with the world:

  “We are now, as we have in every other age, been living in the spirit age of the spirit of Antichrist... But we've been called to be this garrison. We've been called to stand and to fight to ward that off, not to ward that off from our small insular community...But for the world. The earth, the world. That’s what we’re called to do.” (C, 191:03) [191:03]

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Useful if You Haven't Listened

• Historicizes the Antichrist, showing its roots in pre-Christian Jewish thought and depriving modern hysteria of novelty.
• Dives into Scriptural Language, unpacking Greek and Hebrew terms to clarify what “lawlessness,” “apostasy,” and “Antichrist” mean in context.
• Debunks Modern Fundamentalism, advocating for a calm, Orthodox approach: Christian virtues (prayer, worship, engagement, beauty, kindness) are the way of standing firm against evil, whether in the “last days” or not.

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Additional Resources

• Recommended for further reading:
  • Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs (Second Temple Jewish background)
  • Fr. DeYoung’s book "Apocrypha"
  • Orthodox liturgical texts (for understanding the practical outworking of the Church's eschatological hope)

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Next Episode: The series will continue exploring eschatology, millennial themes, and the practical implications for Christians today.

Transcript

[A]

He will be a staff for the righteous with which for them to stand and not to fall. And he will be the light of the nations and the hope of those whose hearts are troubled. All who dwell on the earth will fall down and worship him. And they will praise and bless and celebrate with song the lord of spirits. First Enoch, chapter 48, verses 4 through 5. The modern world doesn't acknowledge, but is nevertheless haunted by spirits, angels, demons and saints. In our time, many yearn to break free of the prison of a flat secular materialism, to see and to know reality as it truly is. What is this spiritual reality like? How do we engage with it? Well, how do we permeate everyday life with spiritual presence? Orthodox Christian priests, Father Andrew Stephen Damick and Fr. Stephen DeYoung host this live call in show focused on enchantment in creation, the union of the seen and unseen as made by God and experienced by mankind throughout history. Welcome to the Lord of Spirits.

[B]

Good evening giant killers, dragon slayers and everyone who is as jet lagged as I am. You are listening to the Lord of Spirits podcast. My co host, the Very Reverend Almost Double Doctor, Father Steven DeYoung is with me from Lafayette, Louisiana. And I'm Father Andrew Stephen Damick in Emmaus, Pennsylvania. If you're listening to us live, you can call in at 8.55-AF-RADIO. That's 855-237-2346 and we don' have Matus Katrudi tonight. Instead we have Elijah. He's going to be taking your calls tonight, but you guys are not allowed to haze him. That's our job this evening. It starts with an earthquake. Birds, snakes, airplanes. You guessed it, folks. It is the start of our new series on eschatology. This evening's eschatological marvel is the Antichrist. Is it Antichrist time again already? Is he alive right now? How would we spot the signs? I don't know about you, but when I'm looking around for the Antichrist, I always ask for myself. Is Lenny Bruce not afraid? What do you think, Father? Is he afraid or not afraid? How is the Lenny Bruce meter?

[C]

He was arrested many times.

[B]

It's old hat to him.

[C]

Clearly not afraid of restaurant. I liked that. We by happenstance, of course, people listening to the recording won't know this, but we had that Armageddon lead in.

[B]

I know. Like the first thing when, when, when it comes on live. The first thing we heard, and it was Dr. Edith Humphrey, we just heard her say one word, Armageddon. And then she continued talking on about eschatology. Or something like that. So I was like, yes.

[C]

Yeah. So I've At Armageddon question.

Is it really easier to teach an oil driller to be an astronaut than to teach an astronaut to run a drill?

[B]

I don't know.

[C]

I mean, that seems counterintuitive to me. Seems to be like the astronaut could figure out how to run the equipment.

Whereas being an astronaut, kind of tough.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

I mean, you might need to have. Know something about rocket science.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

You know, I'm suddenly realizing that, well, since we have a series on eschatology, I can bring this in next time maybe. But I'm suddenly realizing that I did not stock up a bunch of references to A Distant Thunder and all those rapture scare movies from the 70s and 80s. You remember those?

[C]

Yeah. Well, the real classics are the Jack Van Impe ones, like Mark of the Beast 2.

[B]

Right.

[C]

And Mark of the Beast 2. What makes it so great is that Jack Van Impe went meta. Because part of the plot of Mark of the beast 2 is that the rapture happens and someone finds a copy of Mark of the Beast one. Nice. And watches it and figures out what happened.

[B]

Oh, man. I. I've never seen it. I have to have to look this up now.

[C]

Yes. So, like, Jack Van Impe appears speaking in a Jack Van Impe movie. In a Jack Van Impe movie.

[B]

That's so wonderfully layered.

[C]

Yeah. Then you hear that. That.

Sound in the background that. You know, it's an inception.

[B]

When I was a kid and still kind of going to Baptist churches.

My family took us to. I can't remember. It was some other church than our own. Took us to see one of those. Those. I. I think it was A Distant Thunder, not Thief in the Night. But there were, like, several of these. And these were made by the guy who made the Blob, whose name is escaping me off the top of my head. But the original.

[C]

Not the.

[B]

Yeah, the original Blob.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

Is there a new one?

[C]

Carpenter remake. Yeah.

[B]

Oh, yeah. Not to be confused with Gelatinous Cubes.

Yeah. Yeah. And it scared. I mean, it really scared the hell out of me. I couldn't. I couldn't hardly watch them. But now I'm gonna go watch them again because they're super campy.

[C]

Yeah. Unfortunately, with. With orthodox eschatology, there are fewer easy pranks to pull.

[B]

It's true.

[C]

Like waiting till your sister goes to the bathroom and then, like, leaving your clothes laid out in the chair. You were.

[B]

No, she won't get it. My kids wouldn't get that. Joke. If I tried to pull it on.

[C]

Them.

They would just think anyway.

[B]

Yeah. Yeah. Well, all right. The Antichrist. Who is that guy?

[C]

Yeah. Who is the anti. Well, contra one. John Lydon. He is not an anarchist.

[B]

Oh, yeah. I mean, he's kind of lawful evil.

[C]

Right.

[B]

That's the whole deal is he's lawful evil.

[C]

Yeah, yeah. And.

You know, in movies he always has a cool name. Right. Like Damien Thorne. Yeah. You know, in the Left behind books.

[B]

Is in Left Behind Books. Isn't he Romanian?

[C]

Yeah. Because I think they're going for a whole Dracula thing. I don't know.

[B]

Oh, nice.

[C]

Their vibe.

[B]

Nice.

[C]

So, yeah, but that would make it an easy tip off. Right. If you just had a like really evil sounding name.

But yeah. So we, of course, as always, are going way back into the long ago time to talk about the Antichrist. So.

The Antichrist, the way it's presented, at least the way most people are probably familiar with it from like movies and TV shows. Other than Good Omens, which Good Omens is, I think, just a documentary about eschatology. Spoilers. You could just watch Omens or read the book. Better than watching it. Read the book.

And not listen to the show.

But if you're going to still listen to the show anyway.

The idea of the Antichrist as sort of popularly.

Presented would. And even the term Antichrist would sort of firmly make you think this is a Christian thing. Right. This is, this is some kind of novum that this is.

And there are other things here we'll be taking apart as we go forward in this series. Right. But there are, there are a whole series of assumptions that, for example.

Before Christ's ascension into heaven, everybody had thought that the Messiah was only going to come once, and then that once he came that would be the end and that's it. And so when he didn't, this is, it's often presented this way, even. Yeah. Scholar. We'll have more to say about them later. But scholars will say, oh, well, the, the, you know, the, the apostles were intending.

They firmly believed Christ was going to return within their lifetimes. And so then when he didn't, they had to, you know, figure out, oh, no, what, what do we do? We need institutional structures.

[B]

Lo I will be with you always to the end of the age, but.

[C]

Not actually the end of the age, which is going to be very short this time. Right, right.

[B]

Super short.

[C]

All the previous ages have been hundreds, if not thousands of years, but this one, 30 years and out.

Yeah. So that, of course is a silly assumption that we'll be taking apart that more later. But so because of that sort of assumption, everybody assumes that any detailed element of Christian eschatology, including the Antichrist, must be something that sort of showed up somewhere in the 2nd 3rd century at the earliest. At the earliest. Some of our listeners may have the impression that this is something that showed up with dispensationalism or something like in the 18th or 19th century. Not. So the idea of an anti Messiah. Because remember, Christos is just the Greek word for messiah.

[B]

Right.

[C]

The idea of an anti messiah figure.

Predates.

The birth of our Lord. It goes well back into the centuries before Christ and was a firmly established idea within Second Temple Judaism, where the messianic hope also had an adversary who the Messiah would face and defeat in his coming. And.

And.

Some idea, at least of what that would look like. And the idea that that adversary would represent in some way the demonic opponents of humanity in some.

Way. In some way similar to the way the Messiah represented God. Right?

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

Talking about the pre Christian era, a lot of this is fuzzy. There's different, Right?

[B]

Yeah. I mean, there's prophecies about a Messiah.

It makes sense that there's going to be this oppositional figure also prophesied.

[C]

Yeah, right. Who sort of sums up human sin and demonic power to some kind of final. Right. Crystallization of that. Who the Messiah will face. So.

As you may have heard, technically the prefix anti, Right. Or anti does not mean against.

Right. It means instead of.

[B]

Which can. Can imply against.

[C]

Right. That can imply opposition. But for example, St. Thomas Sunday in the Orthodox Church is called antipasca.

[B]

Yes. Often confused with antipasta, which, you know, like, if you order antipasta, it's instead of pasta.

[C]

Yes. And I am anti pasta because you are anti pasta.

[B]

You're just against pasta.

[C]

It's wet bread.

It is wet bread and they charge you a lot of money for it. Olive Garden is a racket. Anyway. Wow.

[B]

Calling out Olive Garden.

[C]

I'm calling out soup, salad and breadsticks. Okay, okay. The overpriced pasta, it's wet bread. It's a racket.

[B]

Is there not Dutch pasta? Is that not a thing? Dutch pasta?

[C]

No. Grilled cheese sandwich. Same ingredients, tastes better. Anyway.

So yeah, it technically means instead of. Right. Not in opposition to, but right. Often opposition or antagonism is being implied. Right. And in this case, where we're talking about the Messiah and see our episode of the Messiah, where this is a role. Right. This is an office. This is to. To. To place oneself into a role instead of someone Else. Right. Or to try to replace someone who is supposed to have a particular role. That implies antagonism. Right, that's where that implied antagonism is.

[B]

Yeah. There's a usurpation.

[C]

Yeah, yeah.

So when it comes to the Scriptures. Right. So there's a lot of other. We're going to reference some of it. There's a lot of Second Temple Jewish literature where you could see elements of these traditions taking shape. But the place where.

The, the concept of the Antichrist or Anti Messiah is most crystallized in the Christian Scriptures is not where probably most people would guess. Probably most people would guess the Book of Revelation.

[B]

Yeah, right. That's, that's that book that's all about things that are totally in the future. Right.

[C]

Anyway.

We will be talking about the beast in the Book of Revelation later tonight. But that's not the passage where really this, this stuff is crystallized. And.

In the place where it's most crystallized, the term Antichrist does not actually occur. Right, Yep. There are other terms that are used to describe this figure, but it is this figure. So the place where this really gets laid out and broken down is actually in the second chapter of Second Thessalonians by St. Paul.

And this is.

The other two texts that really speak directly. I mean, substantive texts that speak directly in the New Testament of the Antichrist are written by St. John and are written later than second Thessalonians. So this is the first canonical Christian text that talks about the Antichrist. That's one of the reasons why it's important. It's important because it's kind of a systematic drawing together of the pre existing Jewish traditions by St. Paul. And it seems to be, I mean, we can't prove this, but it seems to be referred back to by St. John. So beside the book of Revelation in second Thessalonians, the other text that really talks about the Antichrist that actually uses that term is first John. Yeah. St. John's first epistle. And in that at one point he says, you have heard that an Antichrist will come.

So he's saying this, you know, they've already heard this. Right?

[B]

Yeah. So he's referring to something might be this might be from St. Paul, but might also just be, you know.

[C]

Right.

[B]

Second Temple Jewish traditions.

[C]

But the reason why I think there's good reason to believe it might be from Saint Paul is that number one, Saint John doesn't say, you remember I told you this, or as I have taught you. Right. He just says you've heard meaning, implying it's from someone else. And number two, if you think about where St. John was active in and around Ephesus in western Asia Minor, these are churches that were planted by St. Paul.

Right. So I think there's good reason to believe that the teaching St. John is referring back to is St. Paul's teaching. How likely it is that any of those churches had the text of Second Thessalonians is open to question. Yeah, right. We're talking about very early. Right. But it's not impossible that they did. And even if they didn't have access to the text, of course, if they had St. Paul saying the same thing directly to them. Right. They're receiving the same tradition, the same teaching that we find recorded in writing in 2nd Thessalonians 2.

So it's reasonable to believe that St. John is referring to what is outlined by St. Paul in 2nd Thessalonians.

So.

As with 1st Thessalonians and 2nd Thessalonians, one of the major themes that St. Paul is after is.

Christ's quote, unquote, second coming or return. He uses language here of his appearing.

The term parousia is used that usually gets translated as return. I'm sure I've said this before here on the show. I'm not super partial to the translation of Return for Parousia because, number one, it's not a great translation, but number two, it's very misleading because it kind of implies that when Christ ascended, he went away somewhere, and then he's going to come back.

And, you know, lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age. Right. Like, right before he ascends. So that kind of implies he didn't, like, depart for parts unknown.

Where the ultimate warrior came from, by the way, anyway.

And then, you know, someday he's going to come back. So parousia literally means, like, presence.

So you could say, well, if someone isn't present and they become present, that's where the return translation comes from. Right?

[B]

Yeah, yeah.

[C]

But.

The way St. Paul, for example, here in Second Thessalonians 2, uses that interchangeably with appearing.

Means that the idea is more like appearing. Right. The idea is more like, yes, Christ is here, but he is not currently here with us in the way he was with his apostles before the Ascension.

[B]

Yeah. Sort of manifestation.

[C]

Right.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

But the time will come when he will appear again and he will be present with us in that way. Again. Yeah.

And so in First Thessalonians, St. Paul was really trying just to get at the idea of, like, this is a thing that's going to happen, and people are going to rise from the dead when it happens.

And the reason for that.

Is we have to remember he's writing these letters to Thessalonica. So this is a Greek city.

[B]

Right.

[C]

The majority of the population of this city is Greeks, meaning they're former pagans. Pagans had no concept of a physical resurrection.

Right. They thought it was kind of silly and ridiculous.

[B]

Right. Why would you want to come back in your body?

[C]

Yeah. And even in Jewish circles, this was a controversial idea at this time. Right. So the Pharisees very much believed in the body resurrection, but like, the Sadducees and some other Jewish sects did not.

Right. So there's that famous episode where St. Paul is in front of a bunch of Jewish leaders in Acts. And so he says he's there because of the resurrection and gets them fighting amongst themselves.

Over the theological issue. Right. But so the idea that sort of the nascent Christian community that has this converted Jewish core and then a bunch of Gentiles.

This Jewish core, they're a bunch of Gentiles. The idea that he would have to reinforce the idea of the resurrection in first Thessalonians makes perfect sense. Right. Like. Yeah, no, this is. This is the teaching. I know some of the Jewish Christians there may not have subscribed to this in the past, and I know you pagans are clueless about this. Former pagans. But right, here it is. And so in Second Thessalonians, he's sort of digging a little deeper into that, beyond just the fact of it, beyond just the fact of Christ appearing and the resurrection of the dead and the judgment. Right now he's going a little deeper. And so he's going to talk about this Antichrist figure.

And so in the first couple verses of chapter two, he sort of calls them back to the topic, right, of Christ's imminent appearing of the. The parresia. And then in verse three, he talks about an event that is going to happen first.

[B]

Yeah. So here's how that reads. Let no one deceive you in any way, for that day will not come unless the rebellion comes first and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the Son of destruction.

[C]

Right. So there is this thing, right, that has to come first.

[B]

Right.

[C]

Rebellion. And the word in Greek is literally apostasia, in which we get apostasy.

[B]

Apostasy, yeah.

[C]

And so this has been referred to for a long, long time as the great apostasy.

And has been identified with a bunch of different things.

[B]

Yeah. I mean, especially like in the Reformation, you get this idea that.

Especially in the radical Reformation, you know, sort of the second layer of Reformation of. Of that the Church itself has fallen away. Like, I remember. I can't remember which one of the radical reformers it was, but he talked about, you know, the Church and all her sacraments and everything sort of disappearing up into heaven for centuries and being completely gone. And now it's back, you know, that there was this time that the whole church fell away and. And they rediscovered it. I mean, it's. That's where that. That notion comes from is that second generation of the. Of the Reformation.

[C]

Yeah. But even in the less radical reformers, they tended to treat. They were facing this problem where, from their perspective, the Church had become corrupt.

[B]

Yeah, right.

[C]

We know the Eastern Church was over there doing its thing. Right. But these are Western European.

[B]

Yeah. And I mean, and at the same time, like, there was a lot of millenarianism going on. Like, a lot of people believed with all the wars breaking out in Europe and stuff, that it was the end of the world.

[C]

Yeah, yeah. You know, although that's been it. That's been a constant.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

The year 1000, everybody thought it was.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, it was. Yes. Just the latest in people thinking the world was ending.

[C]

Yeah. This has to be it. Plagues, you know, the whole shot.

But, yeah. And so even somebody like Martin Luther, right. Is gonna. Look. Look at the world, said, oh, yeah, look, the whole Church has become corrupt. This is the apostasy. Now the man of lawlessness is revealed. The Pope's the Antichrist.

[B]

I'm trying to remember which confession is it that you.

[C]

It's the belgic confession.

[B]

Yeah, the belgic confession. Like, if you adhere to it, you have to say that the Pope is the Antichrist.

[C]

You sign off on the fact that the Pope is the Antichrist, not as they will be quick to distinguish, not the person, the office.

I don't think that's actually better.

[B]

So you can be elected as Antichrist by the college of Christ.

[C]

Yeah, exactly. Right. Is Antichrist.

Yeah. So that idea. Right. That was their sort of mode of interpretation. And this gets carried over in a lot of different ways by different Protestant groups to this day.

You will have you get this narrative that hopefully we blew up a lot on our St. Constantine episode where, you know, Constantine founds the Roman Catholic church, right.

In 325 at Nicaea, you know, and suppresses.

[B]

So goofy. It's amazing how those things still keep going around on the Internet.

[C]

Burns all the Baptist churches.

And these kind of things. Right.

And that this really is what it's kind of based on, on a biblical thing, this idea that there's going to be this apostasy. Right. And.

Later groups that emerge just kind of extend the period of the apostasy. Right. So it goes from, oh, hey, St. Paul's gospel was lost and then Martin Luther recovered it to, if you're a Mormon, the true religion was lost from the world. And Joseph Smith recovered it in the 19th century. Right.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

Which.

Plenty of folks who hold to the former view about Luther think is silly. And it's only sillier by three centuries. That's all. I'll say.

So. Yeah. Just this idea that this is something that has already happened. Right. Is sort of one mode of interpretation of this.

The other common mode today would be that this is something that's going to have a particular event that's going to happen in the future.

So this is this sort of particular great apostasy. But it's not something that's just happened here in our lifetime, but it's something that's going to happen. And Luther, Joseph Smith et al just misidentified it. Right.

And that view is just that at some point in the future.

Most of the church will fall away.

And that's sometimes very vague and ambiguous as to exactly what that means. People will appeal to Christ saying, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith upon the earth? Right. Just to say it's going to dwindle down a lot. Right.

But St. Paul is going to go on to define a little more what he means. But if we just look at the word apostasy. Right. I know we now use apostasy to mean.

Someone.

Leaving.

A religion. Right?

[B]

Yeah. And there's various shades of what that means within Orthodoxy. Like some will say it only applies if someone becomes a non Christian. Others will say you're apostatizing or I can never. I'm never clear. I've looked this up whether it's apostatizing or apostasizing. Could be both, that you're apostasizing if you simply leave the Orthodox Church for some other Christian group. I don't know that there's an official conciliar definition for it.

But maybe there.

[C]

Is no I'm right in any more than there is for heretic.

[B]

Yeah. Right, Right.

[C]

Like it's a word that's used in a certain way.

So. But apostasia.

If you look at its. As a Greek word, if you look at its preceding Greek usages before St. Paul. Right.

Is generally used.

As a Military term.

[B]

Yeah, right.

[C]

Literally means to stand away from. Which doesn't really help. Right. But what was used to refer to the stasis is to stand. Right, right. And so it was used to mean a defection or a retreat.

Right. Military unit was stationed somewhere. They were supposed to stand somewhere, hold the line, and either they retreated or they defected to the other side. They left their post.

Right. They left their stand.

And that's going to become very important here as we go forward in this passage. And what St. Paul is talking about, the fact that that had a military use. But when you get to the end of chapter two of Second Thessalonians, where St. Paul sort of gives his exhortation to the Christians in Thessalonica, he uses stikhita, which means. Which is the.

The command. Right. It's the imperative, stasis. Telling them to stand.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

Right.

[B]

Verse 15. Stand firm, hold firm, fast.

[C]

Right. Don't retreat, don't surrender.

[B]

Right.

[C]

Never retreat, never surrender.

And so.

The fact that he uses both terms here, right, in the passage shows you, again, sort of what he has in mind here. Right. So.

And he's going to develop this more. But you can already see here in verse three, that this retreat or defection. Right. This failure to stand is what is going to end up revealing the person he's talking about.

And in verse three, he calls this person by two different titles.

[B]

Yeah. You've got man of Lawlessness and Son of Destruction, which, you know, both excellent band names.

[C]

Yeah, yeah. They can open for Theophanic Glory Cloud on the.

[B]

Yeah. I mean, And. And, like, the great thing is they could take one of these titles as the band name, and then the other could be the debut album, you know, man of Lawlessness, first album, Son of Destruction.

[C]

Yeah. The podcast that launched 15 metal bands. I don't think we could launch a thousand, but maybe.

[B]

Was this the show that launched a thousand bands?

[C]

That Our sights medium.

[B]

That's the first time I got to quote Marlo on this show or reference him anyway.

[C]

Sorry, I assume he's Thomas, not Philip.

[B]

No, no, Christopher Marlowe. Christopher Marlowe, the. The playwright who's a. Yeah, that line. Was this the face that launched a thousand ships? That's from Faustus by. By Marlowe. Yeah. Referring to Helen of Troy.

[C]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[B]

Sorry.

[C]

If you found a way to reference Philip Marlow on this podcast, I would be way more impressed.

[B]

Oh, well, it's not. That's not a reference I normally would.

[C]

Make because that's a tricky one. I know. I set these goals for myself. Like making all those Public Enemy references a couple episodes ago harder than you think.

So now it's gonna be Philip Barlow time. Anyway.

So the first of those titles is the man of lawlessness who is sort of revealed by this retreat, this surrender, this apostasy that happens. And so the man of lawlessness. Right. He's clearly. St. Paul is clearly identifying a person. Right. He's got an article there. Right.

So this isn't just a. Just a general type. So this is referring to a particular person who will be revealed eschatologically. But it's not just that one person either. And we could. That. That's going to become plain as we go on in the chapter. But it's already kind of plain in the language St. Paul uses here in verse three. So.

First of all, the word he uses for man.

And yes, we're going into this level of excruciating detail. If you listen to my other podcast, you should be used to it by now.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

The term that he uses for man here is anthropos.

So for those not super familiar with Greek, there are two words that get translated as man. One of them is anir, which means a man, or can also mean a husband.

[B]

Yeah, I mean, it's very literally a male person.

[C]

Male. Human.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

Right. And then there's anthropos, which means man in sort of a broader sense. And the way we used to say man or mankind.

Which is now no.

[B]

Longer politically correct, you could say humankind. We can still say that.

[C]

Don't we have to say, like, humankind and Hugh womankind then?

But. So.

[B]

I held back a whole bunch of old English. Right. Then you should be very proud of me.

[C]

These zoomers. Anyway. No, so. But it's Ed. Thoropos. It's. It's man. It's human in that sort of broader sense.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

Right.

And so. But it's not always just used to mean humanity.

It's an interesting word in that regard. And there's not a good.

There's not really a good, easy one word way to make this distinction in English.

[B]

Yeah, I mean, it really kind of follows the, you know, the slightly more archaic usage of man, as in, you know, at the dawn of man. So there's ambiguity there in English, just as there is with anthropos.

[C]

Yeah, yeah. And by the way, you have the same thing in. In Hebrew, you have adama and ish. Yeah, right. And both of those are used, for example of Adam in Genesis.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

Obviously his name is one of them. Right, right. Man.

Because he came from the ground and the. And ish. He's also referred to as his name. And he says, and Eve's name is not Eve until after fall. Before that, it's woman, which is Isha Eshanisha.

[B]

Woman. Whoa. Yeah.

[C]

Yes. You know, I was super excited that a 4K Blu Ray of that movie is coming out. And then I saw that it was the 30th anniversary edition, and my bones turned to powder. Oh, no. And I started to decay. I know. So.

So, yeah. So anthropos can. Is one of these great Greek words. I know we've mentioned before on the show.

That biblical authors like to use because it can have two different shades of meaning. And so they can use the word imply both. They can kind of use the one word and do a porque no los dos.

I mean, my usual example of this is. And St. John does this all the time, but is what St. John does when Christ is talking to Nicodemus, St. Nicodemus in the Gospel of John, and he says, famously, you must be born again or from above.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

Depending on how you read anothan.

[B]

Right.

[C]

And.

Seems like he means both.

[B]

Yeah, right, Right.

[C]

Like he's deliberately using that word to convey both ideas.

And St. Paul makes use of this theologically. And a. A prime example of this is in Romans chapter five.

And don't get too excited, Calvinist friends, because this isn't going where you want it to.

[B]

Do you think we have any Calvinist listeners left?

[C]

I think we do.

[B]

Okay.

[C]

I think we do. I don't know if they still want to listen, but it's foreordained that they will.

[B]

They feel compelled somehow.

[C]

They must.

So.

If you look at. In Romans 5, particularly verses 12 and 15. Right. This is where St. Paul makes this. Does this comparison contrast between Adam and Christ?

Right. And he says, through one man, Right. Sin enters the world, and through sin, death. And then contrast that with through one man. Right. And this being Adam and Christ. And the word he uses for man there is anthropos. Right.

[B]

Yep. There.

[C]

Because. Yeah. Not a near. Because these are not just. It's not just about these two individual. There being two individual men.

Right. One who did one thing and one who did another thing. You could make that contrast all kinds of ways, Right. Like Cain and Abel. Right.

Canaan, Abel. You have one man who was obedient and one man who is disobedient, one man who was righteous and one man who was wicked. Right. You could make that all day long. But those comparisons are kind of irrelevant to everyone else.

Whereas what St. Paul is very clearly doing in Romans 5 is talking about how these two men, Adam and Christ, are archetypal men.

Right.

These are men whose decisions and actions affect more than just an individual person.

Yeah, right. That affects humanity. Affects what we would call, using a little later terminology, human nature itself. Right. Humanity itself is affected by the actions of these two men. Right.

And so, in a unique way, St. Paul is setting out Adam and Christ as not just individual instances of human nature, but as embodying.

And hypostatizing. Right.

The human nature in a very particular and special way.

Beyond the way like I do. Right.

And so Adam. Right. By virtue of that, what he does brings death to all of humanity. What Christ does brings life. Right. To all of humanity.

Yes, all of humanity. Because remember, everyone is raised from the dead on the last day.

[B]

That's right.

[C]

Doesn't say anything about what happens after that.

But we will, in a future episode, soon be talking about what happens after that.

Eschatology series, everybody.

[B]

Which doesn't mean it's the end of the podcast, by the way. I mean, it could be, but eventually.

[C]

There will be a last podcast.

[B]

There will. That's right.

[C]

Right.

[B]

But not today.

[C]

And I mean, it would be ironic if last podcast on the left was the last podcast, but I think we can outlast them.

So they're like Hollywood types. So, I mean, they're going to get mad at each other and break up at some point.

[B]

Oh, totally.

[C]

So when St. Paul talks about the man of lawlessness here, and he uses anthropos and he uses this language, he is similarly trying to set up this man of lawlessness as an archetypal figure.

Right. As a figure who. Right. There is a person, but that. That person.

Embodies lawlessness. And we're going to get into what that means. Right. Embodies those things in a unique way. And it has effects beyond just himself.

[B]

Yeah, because that's how archetypes work.

[C]

Yes.

So having covered the man part, now the lawlessness part.

So the word lawlessness is anomia, which nomos is what gets translated as law in English, that's not a great translation, but you add ah to the front like a. That means without, right? Without.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

It's a privative.

[B]

They can't call him the illegal man.

[C]

Alpha privative. No person is illegal.

So, yeah, you. It's the alpha primitive. You put it on the front, it means right, not right. So we have to remember that, as I mentioned, law. Not a great translation, of course. The original word is Torah. In Hebrew, which means teaching.

Nomos in Greek really means, refers to like a way of life. It includes ideas, modern ideas of culture, religion. Yeah, mores.

[B]

That's their way.

[C]

Yeah, yeah.

[B]

I mean that, that, that colloquial phrase in English which has a lot more to it than just the particular thing you're talking about. It's. That's their way.

[C]

Right.

[B]

You know.

[C]

Right. And the Greeks were cosmopolitan enough to realize that different peoples in different parts of the world had different ways.

[B]

Oh yeah.

[C]

A different nomi.

And so there's a nomos of the Greeks, there's a nomos of the Egyptians. Right. And they would have philosophical debates. One of the big philosophical debates in the 1st century among Greek philosophers was about which things are by feces, by nature and which things are by nomos.

Right.

What are the things that are, for example, Naturally. Right. What are the things that just we hold to be right within our nomos. Our way.

[B]

Yeah. Man made ideas versus sort of laws of nature.

[C]

Right, right. Because what is by nature would affect everyone in the world. Right. Whereas nomos would be variable in these different places and times.

And so using nomos, the nomos of the ud. Right. Of the, the people of Judea. Right. They're nomos which was summed up in the Torah. Right. This is their way of being in the world. This is their way of life. Right. This is the Jewish way of life, including religion, culture, dress, all of those things. Makes sense, right. As a word to translate Torah. Right.

And then.

The.

It's. St. Jerome translates it as lex and lex. At the time St. Jerome used it to translate nomos had a broader meaning the way nomos does. It included all of those things. Yeah.

[B]

And. And I mean, even now, you know, there's that very famous phrase that we like to use as orthodox lex orandi, lex credendi, which we don't mean by it. The legislated law of prayer is the legislated law of, you know, like that's not what we mean by.

[C]

Right.

[B]

That's the way.

[C]

Right, right. The practice, the way the. Yeah, yeah. And so again, it made sense. The lex romanos was not just the Roman law code. Right. It included that, but it included a lot of other things too, whereas law, and I've been told that even in its original English form, law included more than just like statutory law, the way we think about it.

[B]

Well, yeah, I mean, a classic example, of course is the phrase the Dane law, which was the whole area of northeastern England that was for a while ruled by Vikings.

[C]

Yeah, yeah.

[B]

And it was actually, it referred to the area. It was called the Dane law.

[C]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So what we're talking about is not just.

Someone who breaks rules.

Right. They're breaking the law. Right. But.

This is someone who has sort of thrown off it, especially in the context that St. Paul is using it. Right. Where the nomos, when St. Paul talks about it, is talking about the Torah. This is someone who has thrown off.

Like that way of life is opposed to that way of life.

Right. The way of life taught by God they have rejected.

And so we have to account for. Why does St. Paul choose this word here? Because he could have just use the word sin. You could just call this the man of sin.

Right. And sin and lawlessness do in other authors, other Jewish authors get used as synonyms. A good example is in first John 3, 4, St John says all sin is lawlessness.

[B]

Yeah. He just makes them synonyms.

[C]

Yeah.

So. And St. Paul is not speaking.

In terms of second Thessalonians to a particularly Jewish dominated group.

[B]

No. Probably mostly Greeks.

[C]

Right. So in some ways sin might make more sense. Right. But there's good evidence here that this is a place where St. Paul is using the word lawlessness because he's bringing in some of these traditions, these second Temple traditions about the anti Messiah to bear. And that's chiefly in the figure of, when you look at, if you do just a broad survey, as is my want of second Temple Jewish literature on something like this.

When they give a name to. We've talked before on the show how there are all these different names of different, like devil or Satan figures in second Temple literature and stuff that we've talked about.

[B]

Yeah, we should do an episode on that.

[C]

Yeah, I think we've covered a lot of them, but we can always revisit things. Yeah. But you know, obviously the devil, Satan, but also Azazel.

Samuel.

Mastema in Jubilees. But the one of those that most commonly gets used in reference to the anti Messiah, to the Messiah's eschatological opponent is actually Belial or Belial. It's pronounced different ways by different folks.

I think the accepted English translation or pronunciation is Belial.

[B]

That's the norm is Belial.

[C]

Yeah. And so there's some debate as to the etymology of Belial.

It's not Belial.

It's not somebody talking about bail in the Deep South.

It's. But so there are different, there are different ideas. But I think the strongest case is that it comes from Belly Oliver in Aramaic because of the time at which we start seeing this Name used in this context, we start seeing it used in this context in Aramaic literature.

It is a term that gets used before that, but that's where we start to see it. And if it is from Belial, it literally means yokeless.

Right. Not having a yoke. And that yoke is a common metaphor for nomos or Torah. Right. All the way up through.

Ben Sirach uses it. And then Christ basically quotes Ben Sirach, it looks like when he famously says, take my yoke upon you, for my yoke is easy and my burden is light. Right.

So the idea that this is the yokeless one. Right. Sort of would establish lawlessness as his defining. His defining character. Right.

And so.

In second, just to give Some examples from Second Temple Jewish literature, Jubilees 15, verse 32.

Describes uncircumcised Gentiles as the sons of Belial.

Which, I.

[B]

Mean, I would say that would make a great biker name. Well, and also metal band.

[C]

But yeah, another metal band, Sons of Belial.

The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, which, for the record.

I think most people who are interested in my book Apocrypha.

Think that first, Enoch is the most important thing in there, and it's not the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs is the most important thing in there. Anyway.

[B]

The author, man, who cares what you think?

[C]

It's true. But the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs is the most important Second Temple Jewish text for Christians to read.

Especially if you want to understand St. Paul and most of the rest of the New Testament.

But in the Testament of Twelve Patriarchs, the term sons of Belial is used to refer to idolaters and the sexually immoral, who also are probably uncircumcised Gentiles for the most part, from the perspective of that book, at least.

In the ascension of Isaiah 2, verse 4, in the Ascension of Isaiah, Belial is kind of the devil figure in general in opposition to Isaiah, but he is described as the angel of lawlessness, who is the ruler of this world, Belial.

And St. Paul actually references. Actually uses the name Belial, transliterates it in one place.

[B]

Yeah, yeah.

[C]

And that's in second Corinthians 6:15.

[B]

Yeah. What harmony is there between Christ and Belial?

[C]

Right. And so Christ being again, the Greek word for Messiah. Right. Messiah and Belial obviously are opposed. Right. Definitionally by this time in terms of the tradition. But so the thing that really clinches the deal that man of Lawlessness is talking about man of Belial is that in Proverbs 6:12, 15, it talks about Adam Belial. The man of Belial.

[B]

Yeah. So here's what that says. The man of Belial, a wicked man, goes about with crooked speech, winks with his eyes, signals with his feet, points with his finger, with perverted heart, devises evil continually sewing discord. Therefore calamity will come upon him. Suddenly, in a moment, he will be broken beyond healing.

Yeah, he's like flashing gang signs or.

[C]

Yeah, clearly that's what it is.

Yes, Gesticulations are the deepest form of sin.

No, these are actually referring.

To ideas of seduction, of ideas of.

Scoffing and mockery, of plotting secretly and conspiring. But you can see in the language there in Proverbs, the man of Belial, he here is being referred to in this archetypal. These archetypal terms. Right. That's why it's Adam Belial. Right.

That Adam here is being used for the same kind of general sense. And so when St. Paul applies this to this particular person, who's going to emerge eschatologically again, he's using it archetypically to say this is going to be sort of the ultimate instance of this type.

Right.

But not the only instance of this type, but this is going to be sort of the ultimate embodiment, the ultimate encapsulation of. Of this type. And so then. So man of lawlessness, which I'm saying is he's. He's applying these man of Belial traditions is the first title by which St. Paul refers to this figure. The second one then is the Son of Destruction in the translation you read sometimes. Son of Perdition is how it's translated in English that Fr. This phrase occurs one other time in. In Scripture, in St. John's Gospel 17, verse 12, to describe. Christ uses it to describe Judas.

When he says in his prayer that he hasn't lost anyone except the Son of Perdition. The Son of.

[B]

Yeah, which it's not super obvious in English that it's a pun because perdition literally means to be the state of being lost. So, yeah, I haven't lost any except this lost guy over here.

[C]

Except the Son of being lost. Yeah. And of course, Son of Lost boys. Yeah, Son of. Remember, as we've talked about, I know several times on the show, this phrase son of is a common idiom to refer to. Right. The Son is the image of the Father. Yeah. Right. And so being the Son of something means sort of being the embodiment of that thing.

Right. So Bar Nabos, Barnabas. Right. The Son of encouragement. Right. So he's sort of an embodiment. Right. Of.

Poor, poor Barabbas on top of everything else.

Bar Abbas means son of his father.

[B]

Right. He's his father son.

[C]

Yeah. Which seems obvious, but has that meaning. Like that you just implied. Right, right. That he's the image of the embodiment of his dad. Right.

[B]

Chip. They could call him Chip.

[C]

So if you are the son of right, being lost for this, the son of right, you're the embodiment of.

Right. Sort of destruction, damnation. Right.

[B]

By the way, we just heard from a listener that Sons of Belial is a metal band from Cleveland.

[C]

Oh, they already exist.

[B]

Already exists. And there's apparently two different bands named Sons of Perdition, Ohio.

[C]

I'm about to alienate a lot of people, including probably many people who work for ancient faith because they live there. But I. I recently saw that a priest who's a friend of ours has been sent to a church in Indiana. And again, I don't care about getting canceled. Indiana is the poor man's Ohio.

[B]

Oh, wow.

[C]

I said it.

[B]

Crossroads of America.

[C]

I said it. Anyway, they have.

[B]

They have the RV hall of Fame.

[C]

Trying to get out of town.

Wow.

[B]

My brother lives in Indiana.

[C]

Man, we just lost a whole swath of Indiana.

[B]

Listen.

[C]

Calvinists gone. Indiana gone.

[B]

Anyway, I mean, you know, our producer is sitting in Indiana right now.

[C]

I know. Like, I've had it.

[B]

I'm out.

[C]

This is. How little I care. This is.

Well, you know what else is in Indiana? Gary. Okay. Gary, Indiana, is a city in India.

[B]

Anyway, birthplace of one of them of the Greek Orthodox Metropolitan of Pittsburgh. He's from Gary.

[C]

And he got out of there and went to. Yeah, that should tell you.

[B]

Anyway, he's a Yinzer now.

[C]

So unexpected.

[B]

Indiana. He's a hate mail.

[C]

Yes. Address your hate mail, Indiana to Father Andrew at Easter faith. I actually have an uncle who lives in Indiana, so.

Went to Notre Dame, relatedly.

So all that aside.

Being this being the. The son of destruction or damnation means being sort of the embodiment of it. Right. And this term, well, that's the other place that occurs in the New Testament is used, for example, in Second Temple literature in Jubilees 10, verse 3, where the Nephilim are referred to as the sons of perdition or of destruction. Right. And these are the Nephilim before the flood. So that is in some ways literal.

[B]

Anti.

[C]

And hey, we're talking about giants, folks.

So.

This brings us back to, though, not just, you know, thinking about giants and the Nephilim, but to that whole narrative that Jubilees a lot of Jubilees is sort of an expanded retelling of Genesis.

And so this is bringing us back to the whole story that unfolds in the genealogy of Cain with Cain is sort of the archetypal sinner who teaches and sort of his evil continues to snowball down, down the generations to culminate in Lamech, to culminate in the. The Nephilim. Who are these mighty men? Who are these God kings. Right. Or so they claim.

And so this title calls us back to that idea. Right. In terms of referring to the Antichrist. St. Paul referring to the Antichrist by this title calls us back to those figures.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

In, in the Genesis narrative.

[B]

Yeah. You can be like one of these great ancient demonic, demonized humans.

[C]

Yes. And I predict that someone right now is getting ready to dial and call in. You can call in, but if you're calling in to ask, does this mean that the Antichrist will be literally a giant, like from the ritual and everything? Right. Not necessarily.

[B]

Yeah. Like it's not about some kind of special formula.

[C]

So that. Yeah. So this is a comparison that St. Paul is making. Yeah. Right. Of the type of person is going to be. Could be. Right. Maybe he's going to be a demon worshiping cannibal. Right. But there have been a fair number of those down the ages. But.

That'S not necessarily what St. Paul is getting at here. Right. If that was what he was getting at, he could have just said it.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

The fact that he alludes to it means he's alluding to it. Right. He's sort of calling that to mind without actually making the statement that. Yes, this is exactly because of course Judas wasn't.

[B]

Right.

[C]

Literally a Nephilim.

[B]

That would have been mentioned.

[C]

Yes, yes. That would have been noticed by the other disciples a lot earlier than him stealing from the money box, I think. Right. Why is this guy 15ft tall and he. Anyway.

[B]

Oh no, you're gonna reignite that for everybody.

[C]

Yeah, I'm gonna get that all started up again. I told you, I don't care. I'm just whipping it up.

Yeah. So. So he, he is alluding to that kind of evil, Right. That kind of archetypal evil, that kind of embodiment of, of sin and of rejection of God's teaching and his law. Right. But not, not meaning to give us and make any detailed kind of statement, at least in verse three.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

And yes, we have just spent the first half of the program on one verse.

[B]

Hey, your, your doctoral dissertation is like what, 900 pages on a third of a verse?

[C]

Five like five, five Greek words, two of which are and in the.

[B]

All right. Well, on that colossal.

Demon worshiping, cannibalistic note, we're going to go ahead and go to our first break and we'll be right back with the Lord of Spirits.

[A]

Father Andrew Stephen Damick and father Stephen DeYoung will be back in a moment to take your calls on the next part of the Lord of Spirits. Give them a call at 855-23723.

That's 855 AF radio.

[B]

Greetings podfathers. So my greetings podfathers.

[C]

I'm Robin Phillips, the Gnostic Buster at Ancient Faith.

Did you know that God's kingdom is of this earth? Did you know that the resurrection totally changed history?

[B]

Did you know that because of Christ's.

[C]

Substitutionary atonement we can build for God's kingdom?

[B]

Do you know that as we participate in God's kingdom building work, we make the world a better place?

[C]

If any of these questions surprise you, it could be because you have been unconsciously tinctured with some form of implicit Gnosticism.

But that's okay. I used to be a Gnostic. And in my latest book, Rediscovering the Goodness of Creation, I have shared my.

[B]

Journey from Gnosticism to orthodox Christianity. It's a journey I invite you all to travel with me.

[C]

Rediscovering the Goodness of Creation is [e-mail] faith.com we're back now with the Lord.

[A]

Of Spirits with Father Andrew Stephen Damick and Father Stephen DeYoung. If you have a question, call now at 855-237-2346. That's 855-AF-RADIO.

[B]

In case you're wondering what that Greetings Pod fathers was. We don't know. Someone was talking to us but we're not sure.

[C]

Terribly mysterious.

[B]

Yes.

[C]

Yes.

[B]

Lenny Bruce. Still not afraid. We're check the lineage.

[C]

I have two comp your meter.

First that commercial we just heard. You should buy that book.

The forward I wrote for that book is only three pages.

So buy it for the book.

Like my, my forward contribution is like that like half an oreo that they stick on top of the cake like in the corner.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

I mean it's a good ice you a little to get that cake instead of another cake.

[B]

Sizable book. It's a size.

[C]

You're getting it for the cake. Yeah, get it for the cake.

And number two before the break. I like how every time you mention my dissertation it gets longer.

It's now up to 900 pages.

[B]

I'm nothing if not hyperbolic.

[C]

You're just. Yeah, I'm pretty, pretty soon it's going to be like a 20 volume set of books.

[B]

Well, I mean, to me, that is the epitome of a dictionary. My favorite Dictionary is over 20 volumes, rather large volumes.

So I remember when I first encountered that when I was an undergraduate, I was like, there's a dictionary that's this big. And then I found out that Tolkien had worked on parts of it. I mean.

[C]

You are the sort who has a favorite dictionary.

[B]

I mean, there it is. It is like we're talking about Anthropos as being like the archetypal man. The Oxford English Dictionary is the archetypal dictionary.

[C]

So does that require you to.

Execrate the name of Noah Webster? Like, are you.

Is that just pathetic?

[B]

Like, I mean, you know, the Webster's Dictionary is fine. It's fine. But I mean, I want the kind of dictionary that goes on for, for two dozen pages about the shades of meaning of the word have.

[C]

You know, when you say fine, is that dog in a burning house? It's fine.

[B]

Or no, it's just like, if you need, you know, it's okay, it's okay. But the oed, I mean, it is one of the most magnificent pieces of scholarship ever assembled on any subject.

And I'm not being hyperbolic at all.

[C]

On any subject. Okay.

[B]

On any subject. Yeah, yeah.

Anyway, yes, you can call us 855-afridio. It's 855-237-2346.

[C]

And this, this show has all the excitement of the Oxford English Dictionary.

Find someone out there. People, people listening. Find someone who loves you the way Father Andrew loves the Oxford English Dictionary.

[B]

It's true. I mean, I have one right here.

[C]

In my screen and marry them.

[B]

So.

[C]

Let'S move on to verse four, shall we?

[B]

Yes, let's move on to verse four.

[C]

Okay.

[B]

Yes. Second Thessalonians, chapter two, verse four. So this is continuing on, you know, about the man of lawlessness and this.

Who opposes and exalts himself against everything called a God or object of piety, so that he takes his seat in the temple of God, proclaiming himself to be God or a God.

[C]

Yes.

So.

This is. Now we're moving on from ways in which.

St. Paul describes this guy, this guy being the Antichrist, to what this figure is going to do.

[B]

Right.

[C]

And.

The way you just read that is probably different than what a lot of folks will find if they look this up in an English Bible.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, we've got that phrase, so called God Right. Which.

[C]

Right.

[B]

Like so called in English, like the word. I think the Greek word, it literally means as an. It's called this way. Right, yeah. Called in this manner. But English so called has this tinge of sarcasm to it.

[C]

Yes, Right.

[B]

Which the Greek doesn't.

[C]

And that's a deliberate thing. Right. Because it's based on this. And this is really going to the way back machine, this assumption that like Jews and early Christians were monotheist in a modern sense.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

That they thought that the, you know, Zeus, whatever, didn't exist, rather than thinking they were demonic powers, which of course, the latter being the case.

And so St. Paul, he does the same thing in First Corinthians when he says, you know, there are many things called gods and many lords. Right. That guy. Many so called gods. Right. In a lot of English translations because of that. Right.

But that's not what it says. So in this case also. Right. He opposes and exalts himself against everything called a God or object of piety. Right. And why is that phrasing.

That particular phrasing is important because.

In that first clause there, St. Paul is not referring to.

God himself, yet the second clause, he refers to God, capital G. Yeah. So the idea is, first clause.

[B]

Yeah. He's putting himself above everything that's divine or worshiped or venerated.

[C]

Right, Right. And so this is the way he describes it. He is making a contrast deliberately. And a good place to compare. Right. That is at least Pauline. We won't have this whole argument now. But is Hebrews 2, verses 7 through 9 and the way that interprets a particular.

Verse in light of Christ.

[B]

Yeah. So this should be familiar to everybody. You made him for a little while lower than the angels. You have crowned him with glory and honor, putting everything in subjection under his feet. Now, in putting everything in subjection to him, he left nothing outside his control. At present, we do not yet see everything in subjection to him, but we see him who for a little while was made lower than the angels, namely Jesus, crowned with glory and honor because of the suffering of death, so that by the grace of God, he, He might taste death for everyone.

[C]

Right. So Christ here, the pattern with Christ is that Christ.

Subjects himself even below the angels.

Right. Things that are called gods by the nations. Right. Objects of piety, holy ones. Right. He puts himself underneath all that and then is crowned with glory and honor, is exalted by God the Father. Right.

So look again at how St. Paul describes the Antichrist. The Antichrist opposes and exalts himself against all of those things.

Right. So this is an inversion.

Of what Christ does. Right. Same things would be true of the second clause. So that says that he takes his seat in the temple of God is how it's usually pronounced. And this is God, capital G. The article is used. Right. This is one of the signals in Greek when you're. Especially with Jewish authors, obviously, about whether we're talking about. When you have O Theos. In this case, it's a genitive. It's too the oo.

[B]

But.

[C]

The. The article to indicate this is capital G. God. Right. So he takes his seat in the temple of.

God, capital G. So a lot of our dispensationalist friends.

Want to take this very literally. Right. So this means that, okay, the temple in Jerusalem is going to be rebuilt at some point and the Antichrist is going to go and literally sit in it.

[B]

Yes.

[C]

In a chair and they're going to sacrifice animals to him or something.

[B]

Yes.

I grew up with it, with some of that.

[C]

Yeah. So.

But this sort of is a very overly literal and a contextual read. Right. Because we have to talk about what does it mean to sit in the ancient context.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

I mean, sitting was not just sitting.

[B]

Yeah. You see like a depiction of a bunch of people and one of them is sitting. The one who's sitting is the one in charge.

[C]

Yes. Yeah. Sitting was a mark of rank. Right. It was a mark of honor and superiority. So in the. You know, this is not what people are used to in churches now. Right. In churches now, pretty much across the board, not just Orthodox churches. When the time comes for the homily, the priest or pastor, whomever, whoever's preaching is standing up and everyone else sits down.

[B]

I know. I think we need to get this back to the way that it used to be.

[C]

Right. And in the ancient world, in the ancient church, it was the exact opposite.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. Which, I mean, it fit that philosophical model. Right. You know, with the teacher, the philosopher sitting and all of his disciples standing around him.

[C]

Stand and listen. Right. And he sits because he's the one in authority. This is why we have a bishop's seat, chair, throne in the church. Right. He is the one who sits because he's the one in the position of authority. Right.

And so to sit in someone's presence. Right. We still do this. This is a practice of the Orthodox Church that, you know, if a bunch of people are sitting and the bishop walks into the room, everybody stands up.

Right. Or they're supposed to.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

Right. Out of respect.

Right. And then usually he, you Know, gives you a blessing and tells you to sit back down. And he goes, it's that. But this is a. This is a sign of. Of honor and respect still. So to remain seated mean if you. Or if you walk into someone's presence and you sit down first, that's saying, either I am in authority over you or I'm at least your equal. I'm at least your peer.

Right? And one of the ways in which.

You see in the Talmud, We've talked before on the show about the.

The idea of two powers in heaven in the Second Temple period and how that relates to the later Christian doctrine of the Trinity.

But one of the ways in which later Rabbinic Judaism sort of got rid of that idea, said that idea was wrong.

Is in a story that's recounted in the Talmud about a particular rabbi who has this vision where he's taken up to heaven and he sees this figure, this angelic figure who is sitting. And since he's sitting in heaven, in the presence of God, this rabbi believes, oh, this is the second. This is the second power in heaven.

And then finds out he was horribly wrong. And the angel who had the gall to sit down gets taken and whipped, Right?

So, but that gives you an idea, right? That gives you an idea of what it means to sit. So the word here that's translated as temple is naon, which.

Is used in the Greek Old Testament tradition to translate buy it or bait in Hebrew, which can mean temple or can mean house.

And so the idea here is that this is a person who would dare to sit in the presence of God, capital G. Yeah. I. E. He makes himself equal to God.

Capital G. Right? So this is sort of the height of hubris and pride and arrogance. Right? Again, contrast from St. Paul. Compare this to Philippians 2, verses 6 through 11, sometimes called the Carmen Christie. Right? We're talking about Christ.

He did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, right, to be held onto, but humbled himself, taking on the form of a servant, right? So again, each of these clauses is an example, when we compare it to the example of Christ, an inversion of who Christ is. The Antichrist is not someone who humbles himself and then is exalted, but someone who exalts himself.

As highly as anyone could ever exalt themselves, Right? With the most hubris possible is what we're getting at here. He doesn't have to go and sit on a particular spot in Jerusalem to do that, right?

So then St. Paul continues, right? And he sort of comes back to this idea we saw at the beginning of verse three of the apostasia.

[B]

Yeah, right.

[C]

That there's this desertion. There are some people at a post and they desert it or they retreat from it. Right.

[B]

Or.

[C]

Or fall away from it.

And so this. He picks up that idea again starting in verse six.

[B]

Okay, so I'm going to read verses six and seven. And you know, what is restraining him now so that he may be revealed in his time? For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work. Only he who now restrains it will do so until he is out of the way. Although that can also be read as only that which now restrains it will do so until it or that thing is out of the way.

[C]

Right.

[B]

It's not necessarily he. It's. It's a sort of a that.

[C]

Right. It's a. It's a masculine article being used as a demonstrative pronoun, basically.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

So it can be he who or it could be that which. Yeah, right. Because of course, language, gender. Right.

And so, yeah, that translation had restraining or restraint or restrainer. If we're going to make it more. Something more with agency.

Others have like an impediment. Other English translations.

And the word there that's getting translated as a restrainer or restraint or an impediment. Right. Is actually the Greek word katakon.

Which.

Again, kind of means to hold, from which, again, that doesn't help you. But this is also a term that has a military usage.

Katakone is used to refer to like an occupying force.

Or a garrison of troops. Right. A stationed set of troops. And this, of course fits very much with the term apostasia, with the stihita at the end. Right. The stand. Right. So there is this.

Occupying force. There is this. Right. Garrison.

That is there right now, and that then is going to.

Right. In some way treat defect, at which time he'll be revealed. Now.

Most of the.

Translations, as we already mentioned, have something like restraint or impediment or restrainer.

When you read the Church fathers on this, they also use that kind of language when they elaborate on it. Of a restrainer or of an impediment. Right. But this is another case where. Right. Those two ideas are not, like, opposed to each other.

Right.

That, that. What is a. What is a garrison of troops? Do, like, why would you garrison troops in a city?

[B]

Yeah. To prevent an uprising, basically.

[C]

Right. To prevent an uprising or an invasion. Yeah, one of the two. Right. Or both. Yep. Right. To keep the peace. Right. You have. You have a garrison troops there to restrain, impede certain Things from happening to block certain things from happening. Yeah, Right. So those ideas are not at odds with each other, right?

So then we have this idea. So we have this imagery that St. Paul's using. We have this sort of garrison, whatever it is, that is taking this stand.

Right. That it has not been so that the man of lawlessness has not been revealed already. But notice he says that the mystery of lawlessness is already at work.

The mystery of lawlessness is at work. This force is sort of impeding it from taking effect, but eventually it will retreat and then sort of the mystery of lawlessness will have its way and this figure will emerge.

[B]

Yeah, because there's no longer any restraint, Right.

[C]

Once that. That impediment is gone. Once they're gone, right. So imagine if you have this garrison of troops in a city.

Someone wants to invade the city, they can't invade the city because there's this garrison of troops. But then the troops withdraw. Now they can have. At the city, right?

And so this. This language of the mystery of lawlessness already being at work in the world is very much in keeping with what St. Paul.

Says elsewhere, right? About the power of evil in the world, right? So just as a couple examples, right? Second Corinthians 4, verse 4, St. Paul refers to the God of this age.

Right. Doing evil. It's a way of referring to the devil as. Right. Having some kind of rulership being operational in this world.

Ephesians 2, verse 2. He refers to Satan is the prince and power of the air.

And of course, the language ruler of this world gets used repeatedly in St. John's Gospel in John 12:31, 14, verse 30, 16, verse 11. And that's Christ.

[B]

Yeah. Now, the ruler of this world is judged, that kind of thing, right.

[C]

Referring to the devil as the ruler of this world or this age, right. Not the age to come.

And so that's very much sort of the idea.

That St. Paul is getting at when he talks about this mystery of lawlessness already being operational. Right. But it can't sort of come to a head until this apostasia, this retreat, this breaking of camp, right. Happens, right. Literally, katakon means to. I mean, if you want to take a really literal thing of it, it's depart from the middle, right? To leave the midst. But that's this idea to break camp, to pick up and move.

And you pointed out that.

Removed.

Right?

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Some translations have it, as, you know, this.

Restrainer is removed.

And the problem with that is that.

In 21st century English, remove is almost always used in a transitive way. And so people take it that way. Like it means that something is going to get moved out of the way by something else. But, but there's this older use, this intransitive use of remove, like I shall now remove myself to my bed, you know, that you can. Or I shall now remove, you know, meaning I'm leaving, you know, it doesn't necessarily mean someone removed me. I can remove myself, I can just leave. Yeah.

[C]

Right. And so we shouldn't conclude from that, even if you're reading the translation in that way. That's why the translation you read said is out of the way. That's actually more accurate.

[B]

Yeah, yeah.

[C]

But that removed, until it is removed would seem to imply that, oh, some person is going to come and remove that restrainer. Right.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

It's not really what the original is getting at.

Yeah. So what is going on then with this restrainer, with this military garrison, this military unit?

So part of this is.

That a major linkage.

Particularly when it comes to.

This imagery of Christ vs Antichrist, Messiah vs Anti Messiah, Messiah vs Belial.

Has to do with. With the priesthood. And with the priesthood. Understood. In military terms.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

Which is very foreign to us today. Right.

[B]

Yes. We're not really big on. On Templars and such.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

These days.

[C]

Yeah. So. Right. Like now, you know, in the US Military and I think in most militaries. Right. Chaplains are non combatants. They don't bear arms. Right.

The while there may be some sort of metaphorical references to onward Christian soldiers and this sort of thing.

And even to priestly rank.

But we don't conceive of the priesthood in military terms. But of course, the scriptures very much do. And that's something that either we're not aware of or if we're aware of it, it often makes us uncomfortable, frankly.

Because there is throughout the Hebrew scriptures.

Mainly on the Torah, but we could do more. The priesthood is referred to in this military. These military terms that are a lot more like a DND cleric than like Father Mulcahy on mash.

[B]

Yeah. I mean, and like, you know, the idea that that clergy are supposed to be sort of personally pacifistic, I mean, that's. That has a canonical basis as well now. Right. Like there's canons basically saying that we can't, you know, bear arms.

[C]

Right, right. We are not here pro zealotry. We don't think priests should go out, start massacring people.

[B]

Yes.

[C]

For the record.

[B]

Right. Yeah.

[C]

The point here is, to the disappointment of certain people on Twitter, it's true.

[B]

The point is, this is a thing in the scriptures, and it was regarded as normal, you know, at this. This ancient period.

[C]

Right. And. And this starts with Levi himself.

Right. Genesis 34, the. The one major episode we get in the life of Levi, the person after whom the tribe was later named is him, along with Simeon, masterminding the revenge against the men of Shechem.

For the rape of their sister Dinah or Dina. So Levi's revenge, there's another.

Metal band.

[B]

Name or amusement park ride.

[C]

Yeah. Unless Levi Strauss Co. Sues you, so be careful with that.

Right. But. So he go. They go. Remember this episode to get revenge. They. They go. And it's revenge through conversion. They go and talk all of the. All of the Shekabites into being circumcised.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

And then while the adult men are recovering from being circumcised, they go through and massacre them all. Yeah.

And so then when we get later into the tribe of Levi, and we've talked about this on the show before, but the tribe of Levi receives the priesthood in Exodus 32, after, in verses 26 through 29, after the episode with the golden calf, they go and slaughter.

3,000 elders of the people who had been serving as priests before them, who had worshiped the golden calf.

This, the golden calf episode is, of course, at the time that Moses received the Torah, received the law, making this the first Pentecost. And so now we're going to say something nice about Brian Zond, of all people.

[B]

Look him up, everybody.

[C]

Or don't.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

And he says, and to be fair.

The nice thing was that he pointed something out. He did it a very inarticulate and theologically weird way, so not even endorsing the way he stated it, but he did helpfully point out credit where credit is due, that there were 3,000 priests killed at the first Pentecost, and at the second Pentecost in the book of Acts, there were 3,000 people who killed, became. Who became followers of Christ.

[B]

There you go.

[C]

So same number. So that was a helpful observation he made.

Yeah. As for the rest of it, I much prefer the music of Eric Zahn to.

Anything from Brian's on.

And we move on to Phineas, who we've talked about before, or penias.

In Numbers 25, Verses 1 through 13. He and his descendants. He's a grandson of Aaron. He and his descendants are given the high priesthood because he's the one who goes and puts the spear through the fornicating people at BAAL Paor and.

Puts an end to the rebellion There.

And.

A very important, though, beyond just these sort of massacres.

A very important military image for these purposes, for what we're talking about here in terms of what St. Paul is doing is actually relates to Aaron, right. The original high priest, the originator of the Levitical priesthood. And this is in Numbers 16, Verses 46 through 48. Yes. Two references to the Book of Numbers in one half of the show.

And this is where after the rebellion of Korah, which we've talked about before at some length. Right. Cora, remember, is the guy who shows up and says, why are Aaron and these other priests putting themselves over us? Aren't we all priests?

Understand that? As you will.

And then the ground swallows them up.

Aaron. A plague breaks out. And Aaron is called to stand in the midst, to stand between the dying and the dead and the living with his sensor, with his incense being offered to God. And so he stands in the midst, in the middle point between life and death, to ward off and put an end to the plague.

And when this is interpreted in the Book of Wisdom, which was written later in Greek, now a whole bunch of people are going to freak out because I'm saying it wasn't written by Solomon. Solomon wasn't alive in the first century AD and he didn't write in Greek. And the church fathers, the first ones who mention it, say that the Book of Wisdom was part of the New Testament. New Testament.

Because it was written in Greek in the first century anyway.

[B]

Yep.

[C]

But Wisdom.

18.

Which is now part of our Old Testament, but originally written in Greek. Wisdom 18, verses 21 through 25. Go back and describe this episode in the life of Aaron.

[B]

Yes. So this is what it says. For a blameless man was quick to act as their champion. He brought forward the shield of his ministry, prayer and propitiation. By incense he withstood the anger and put an end to the disaster. Showing that he was thy servant. He conquered the wrath not by strength of body and not by force of arms, but by his word. He subdued the punisher, appealing to the oaths and covenants given to our fathers. For when the dead had already fallen on one another in heaps, he intervened and held back the wrath and cut off its way to the living. For upon his long robe the whole world was depicted, and the glories of the fathers were engraved in the four rows of stones. And thy majesty on the diadem upon his head. To these the destroyer yielded. These he feared, for merely to test the wrath was enough. It's interesting the, the, you know, plague is here Depicted not as a kind of impersonal force, but as the destroyer.

[C]

Right. Reshef. Yeah.

Right. Plague is this sort of demonic force that's out there at work. And this military language is used.

[B]

Right.

[C]

The shield of his ministry. Right. To be their champion. Right. This military language is used for what Aaron is doing in standing in the midst and warding this off. Right?

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

And it's pretty epic scene blocking. Right? Yeah. And kind of resonant with what St. Paul is saying.

In terms of this impediment.

[B]

Yeah. The restrainer.

[C]

Right. And this restrainer, this. This garrison. Right. That. That wards off and. And protects. And we can see how this is integrated particularly into these traditions with the Messiah and Belial in 1 Q. Melchizedek, which is one of the Dead Sea scrolls.

The number is the cave it was found in. So it's found in cave 1Q for Qumran. That lets you know it's a Dead Sea scroll. And then Melchizedek, because that's who it's about.

Just to give you the References Real quick, two verses 1 through 3, 15 verses 4 through 7, and 16 verses 13 and 14, if you want to look those up.

But describe Melchizedek coming as the Messiah. So Melchizedek is the messianic figure. We talked about this scroll a little bit back in the Melchizedek episode, but Melchizedek coming as the Messiah figure, and he leads an army of priests of his priest. Because Melchizedek, of course, is a priest against Belial and his armies.

Right. So all of this element of the Priesthood is for St. Paul and the tradition he's received, bound up in. Right. The idea of this conflict between the Messiah and Belial, between Christ and Antichrist. Right. And so the impediment here, or the restrainer is priestly sacrifice. It's Christian worship. Put a fine point on it. It's the Eucharist. It's the offering of incense, just like it was with Aaron. Right. And you can see, as you read through second Thessalonians 2, through the whole chapter, there is this backdrop of worship.

Right. Being talked about who is worshiped, what is worshiped, what is the object of piety. Right. He. St. Paul does not speak of the Antichrist here in political terms primarily.

Right. It's, of course, there was no separation between politics and religion at this time. But from our perspective. Right.

[B]

Yeah. It's idolatry versus piety.

[C]

Right. It's. It's in religious terms right here.

And he talks about.

Toward the end of the Chapter how those who were not willing to accept the truth, that is the religious truth, to accept the yoke, to accept the Torah right, to accept the teaching, the, the. The. The way of being in the world that Christianity represents, that they were in rejecting, that were handed over to delusion. Right? What is that delusion? That's the mystery of lawlessness that's out there in the world. Right. What protects from it? Right. What is keeping the world going, keeping the world alive, keeping the end from coming. Right.

Now.

Someone may point out, if they're not on the line to do it already. Doesn't sound like it.

That a number of the Church Fathers, St. John Chrysostom prominent among them, when they talk about this impediment or restrainer, they talk about the Christian monarchy that started with St. Constantine.

And so some people will again come to say, oh, the fathers say that it's the Christian monarchy.

And there are a lot of folks in the 20th century who took a very literal, direct interpretation of that. They said, well, the last Tsar is gone. There's no more Christian monarch. Therefore, this is the end times now the Antichrist is going to be revealed. Some of them took it very literally. That was Lenin or Stalin.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. So, by the way, so. So since you mentioned that, we do have a caller. Okay. Yeah, yeah.

[C]

So is he calling to make that point? I don't know.

[B]

I don't know. We'll find out, I guess.

[C]

Or she.

[B]

It is.

[C]

It is coming off as sexist, this.

[B]

Episode, in fact, a she. We have Janine calling. So. Janine, are you there?

[D]

Yes, I'm here.

[B]

Welcome to Laura Spears podcast. Janine, what is on your mind?

[D]

Okay, well, I started out with one question, but I got so interested in what you're talking about. I have another one. But my main basic question was in terms of the Antichrist and son of Belial, in the archetypal terms that you've been discussing as representing evil in its forms in the world, does that mean that when we see those forms of evil in the world, such as violence or coercive power that's abused, or, you know, manipulation, lying and so on and so forth, lawlessness, as you say, does that mean that we should understand that as the Antichrist at work in the world, and also do our scriptures tell us to expect that these things will get worse as sort of time goes on? And then I was also got interested in that you were speaking about the military, military terms. You made me think about the word legion used for the man who was occupied by a legion of demons. And in Greek, of course, you hear military terms used for angels, like taxiarchus for archangel. So I was wondering how those things are linked as well. Those are my two questions.

[B]

Those are great questions.

[D]

Thank you.

[B]

Yeah. I mean, to the first thing, right? Like, on one level, I'll just say. Well, listen to the third half. Okay.

[D]

You might say that.

[C]

Yeah, that's good. That means you're tracking with us.

[B]

That's right. That's right. I love it when our listeners do that. Like.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

So, yeah, I mean, we're gonna. We're gonna talk about that. Like, especially this question of is there something coming? You know, are there signs to recognize? We're gonna talk about that.

But, yeah, I mean, I. I don't. I don't know, Father. Like the. Like Legion. I mean, it's. It is actually interpreted like. Like Legion says, you know, for we are many. Right. There's this explanation of why this is the name, like, this guy or two guys, depending on which gospel you're reading, possessed by a big pile of demons. But, I mean, is there a kind of inverted. Is this an inversion of the category? Like, this guy's being. He's. He's being garrisoned by demons? I don't know. What do you. What do you think, Father?

[C]

Well, yeah, that is. That is sort of the imagery, right? Like, we. We use the term possessed, so we've kind of lost what that means, right? To go in and take possession of something. Right? Like the Israelites went in and took possession of the land, right? And these demons have gone in and taken possession of this person.

[D]

Like they're occupying him.

[C]

Yeah, yeah. And they. They don't intend to leave, Right. And. Yeah. And so, yeah, this. This spiritual warfare language, right, Is. Is.

Is not. There's. There's not a distinction between.

Liturgy and spiritual warfare. Those are not two different things.

[B]

Wow. Right?

[C]

Like the. And this is sort of what that. That passage we read from Wisdom is getting at that sort of the weapons of Aaron's warfare, right, against the plague, which is sort of embodied and described as this evil power, right. Is his sensor, is that incense that he's offering to God.

Is worship. Right. And so.

Yeah, so there's. There's there's not a disconnect there. Right. And the. The. The military language that's used about the angels is not at odds with them as the. The worshipers of God perpetually in heaven.

Who are serving in the heavenly sanctuary.

[B]

Yeah. Because, I mean, if the. If the big conflict is over idolatry versus piety, then to be pious in the Christian sense of worshiping the one true God is an attack against idolatry.

[C]

Yes, yeah. We make war against the demons with our prayers. Right.

[D]

The full armor of God is. St. Paul says.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[C]

And so these things are very much meshed. Meshed together.

As you say.

[D]

Well, thank. Thank you so much, Fathers. You also remind me that Christ spoke of the image of the stronger man who takes the strong man's house. That also seems to be that military image kind of.

[C]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[D]

Thank you so much, Fathers.

[B]

Thanks for calling, Janine.

[C]

Thank you.

[B]

Yeah. You know, another thing that occurred to me when, when she mentioned possession. Right. See, I am going to use a little throw in a little old English. Yeah. Right. So. So a couple of military terms from Old English, helden, which is the ancestor of our word hold, which we still use to refer to military action of like holding the battlefield.

[C]

Yeah. Or a building.

[B]

Yeah, right. Yeah. It still has that sense of like occupation, but then you've also got the word weldon, which is the ancestor of our word wield, and you literally, like a king literally wields his kingdom in Old English. And. And a triumphant general wields the battlefield as well. So there's not, not just a sense of possession, but also like making use of, you know, at the same time. So.

Yeah, it's interesting, like how, how much deeper that sense is than, as you said, our modern notion of possession. But if you, if you again, sort of re. Literalize it back to possessing, having, holding, wielding, commanding, it all works. It all works.

[C]

Yeah.

So the Tsar, back to the Christian. You said the czar, right?

[B]

Yes.

[C]

Oh, for a moment I thought you went back to SCA and it had yelled huzzah.

[B]

So.

The first cut is the deepest.

[C]

Maybe I know.

First Cat Stevens reference of the night.

So.

Right. So there are people who took that very literally in the early 20th century, right. That, that the last Tsar has been murdered.

Lenin or Stalin. Right. Is the Antichrist now, now revealed. Now, obviously that is not panned out right. To be the case. Not that those figures weren't Antichrist. More on that in the third half.

But in terms of being the right, the final, the ultimate. Right.

And so, and I, I think that's from a. A slight misinterpretation of the fathers, or misinterpretation might be the wrong word. It might just be an overly literal read because I think what the fathers were getting at and the reason I think this gets read overly literally is again, a context issue. Right. So for most of the Fathers, we're talking about, even like St. John Chrysostom.

St. John Chrysostom is in Constantinople, like 20 years after Christianity became the official religion of the empire.

Less than 20 years, actually, when he starts, when he first goes to Constantinople.

When we're talking about the saints of the 4th century, a lot of them had been alive during the period of persecution, during the final great persecutions.

And so what St. Constantine's conversion to Christianity represented to them, what.

Theodosius represented to them is a little different than what the emperor in the 11th or 14th century or the Russian czar represented. A little different in that.

The. The conversion of St. Constantine and the subsequent early Christian emperors who the Fathers were dealing with represented a. A transformation and an establishment of the Christian religion as religion, meaning Christian practices, Christian worship right, in the world in a way that it had not been before.

Right? So already St. Constantine puts an end to pagan sacrifices in the military.

And puts an end to pagan sacrifices as a public work, which is what liturgy means, by the way. Public work, not the work of the people, public work done by the government, by a ministry of the government.

And makes the Eucharist a public work.

He makes the Eucharist liturgy by making it a public work.

He. He establishes it within the military, he establishes it within the civil order. That, of course, then gets furthered by subsequent Christian emperors, Right? And.

So this to them is what the Christian monarchy represents to them vis a vis.

Christian worship.

Right? The Christian mark is the guarantor that the Eucharist will continue to be served, that sacrifices will continue to be offered, incense will continue to be offered with prayers at every place, Right? Because we have this Christian monarch who is there to ensure it.

[B]

Right?

[C]

And so.

What we're here proposing about the liturgy and the service of the liturgy and Christian worship being the impediment is not at odds with the idea that the Christian monarchy is related to that. Right? This is again, a porque no los dose. If we understand the Fathers who say this in their context, right? They're saying if the Christian monarchy goes away and persecution begins again, right. Then that persecution will begin to put a stop to the Eucharist. And if this worship of God ceases.

Right in the world, that will bring about the time of the end.

Right? That will bring about the time of the end. And especially with, as we said, and we're going to develop that a little more in the third half, also.

With St Paul appealing to this image of the Nephilim of these ancient God kings, right? As the image of who the Antichrist is going to be. Right.

That becomes sort of the image.

There is this contrast because, of course, again, those who are alive before St. Constantine's conversion saw a God king.

[B]

Oh, yeah.

[C]

In the Roman Emperor. This was not like ancient history for them. This was not ancient crazy history. Right. Like, if Joe Biden came out tomorrow and claimed he was a God, people would say, okay, he finally lost his marbles. Let's. Right.

[B]

But in the ancient world, people, like, shuffle him off. Yeah. That's what emperors are.

[C]

Yes.

So. So.

Right. So this was. And this is in living memory that there were these God kings. Right. And so if this is your image of The Antichrist. Right. St. Constantine represents a departure from that because not only did he put an end to those pagan sacrifices, he was, as the Roman emperor when he became emperor, the Pontifex Maximus, he was the high priest of the Roman religion.

But not only does he not practice the pagan sacrifices himself, as would have been his duty as emperor, but he does not take any Christian ecclesiastical office for himself.

[B]

Yeah. Which he theoretically could have done. I mean, there would have been tried to.

[C]

But.

[B]

Yeah, right.

[C]

He doesn't try to make himself a bishop. He never tried to serve the Eucharist. He never tried to offer incense.

Right. He never even tried. Right. He separates those things from himself, even as a Christian.

And so again, someone like St. John Chrysostom living at the time he lived. Right. If this Christian monarchy goes away, meaning this gets replaced by a pagan monarch.

Right. We're going to be right back into this God King territory. Antichrist territory.

Right. And so.

This makes sense.

Right. In that original context. And this is why Julian the Apostate becomes the image of the Antichrist for almost all of the Church fathers.

When you see the Church fathers, I mean, St. John of Damascus is a perfect example. When you read his precise exposition of the Orthodox faith and you read everything he says about the Antichrist and that the Antichrist is going to do, it's all stuff that Julian the Apostate did and tried to do.

[B]

Yeah. And centuries after Julian.

[C]

Yes.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

But what is Julian the Apostate? He's the pagan emperor who came along and tried to reverse what the Christian emperor had done.

Yeah, Right. And so that's why they're connecting.

The.

The Christian monarchy with the impediment. Right. So the liturgy, as anyone who's ever been to an orthodox liturgy knows, is about asking for God's mercy.

Right. Because we've talked many times on the show about how justice works and injustice. Right. Justice is everything being in its place and operating correctly. Injustice is when that order gets broken, and then judgment is when that order gets restored. And sometimes it's a violent correction, right?

And that for God, there is always this. You can see it like a balance scale, right? On one hand, there are the victims of evil in the world who are crying out for justice, starting with the blood of Abel.

Right? And the widows and the orphans in the. The souls of the martyrs crying out, how long, O Lord? Right? And then on the other hand, on the other side is God's mercy and his patience to allow people time to repent.

And different language gets used for this. In the Scriptures, one of the most common is, you know, the cup of the iniquity of this people is not full yet. And then it gets full, and that scale tips, and it tips away from mercy, and it tips toward judgment, toward these things being corrected. And so nations fall, cities get destroyed by flaming meteors. Like.

Things happen and things are corrected. And this is true on the macro scale also. This is what St. Peter says, right? He says christ is not delaying his coming. God has not forgotten about you and all the things you're suffering in this world, but he is patient, he is merciful. He is allowing people time to repent. But the day will come for the whole world when that scale tips, and that's when the final judgment will happen. And so the reason in liturgy, we're asking for God to have mercy so much, right, Is that we're offering the liturgy, we're offering the sacrifice of the Eucharist for the life of the world and for its salvation.

Right? That is what is keeping this world going, right? The prayers and worship of God's people, asking him for mercy for more time to repent, for more time to make things right before the end and the judgment comes, right? And so ultimately, what St. Paul's getting at here with this idea of the impediment or the restrainer is that the end of liturgy will be the end of the world.

Right? That when the worship of God ceases, this is what Christ is referring to. He says, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth? Right?

[B]

Yeah, we find worship happening, basically, right?

[C]

When that ceases and that fails.

That'S when the end comes. As for the man of lawlessness, St. Paul says in verse eight, what, how he ends up, Right? Yeah.

[B]

When.

[C]

Yeah, this is what he appears.

[B]

And then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord Jesus will kill with the breath of his mouth and bring to nothing by the appearance of his coming.

[C]

Yes.

So. And yes, you should understand the breath of his mouth in terms of the Holy Spirit.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

Piers of the fire of the Holy Spirit.

[B]

Nice.

[C]

Which is purifying, right?

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

And so he also will meet his end. So. Yeah. So in our third and final half.

We'Ll talk about.

What St. John has to say about the Antichrist in this figure and how he fleshes out what we've already seen in St. Paul.

[B]

Yeah. Yeah. Cool. We have a caller on the line, but we're going to get to him right after our break. So we'll be right back with the third half.

[A]

Father Andrew Stephen Damick and Father Stephen DeYoung will be back in a moment to take your calls on the next part of the Lord of Spirits. Give them a call at 855-237-2346. That's 855-AF-RADIO.

[C]

But one thing is needed, and Mary has chosen that good part which will not be taken away from her. Luke 10, verse 42. Mary's choice to receive life giving words at Jesus feet hints at Martha's real need. When one's material needs consume all one's attention, nothing more will be sought after. The demands of physical life can totally colonize the mind. Jesus desired to redirect Martha's concerns toward spiritual things. She had prioritized food over him, although a bare morsel of bread in his hands could turn into lamb. Spiritual life has its own logic. And that logic tells you that if you are in need of many things and there is one who is the source of all things, you must seek that one, and the many will be provided to you. In Christ we find the mystery of sufficiency and of surplus. So if sufficiency in everything is what you desire and surplus too is, then.

[B]

Empty your heart of its clutter and.

[C]

Offer it to him. The Story of Jesus by Matthew the Poor.

[A]

We're back now with the Lord of Spirits with Father Andrew Stephen Damick and Father Stephen DeYoung. If you have a question, call now at 855-237-2346. That's 855-AF-RADIO.

[B]

Welcome back. Everybody talking about the man of lawlessness, the Antichrist, him or herself. We don't want to be sexist.

See?

[C]

No, nobody ever says he or she when you're talking about the Antichrist.

[B]

I know. I love, I mean, everybody's totally happy.

[C]

With him being a dude.

[B]

I mean, I, I do like to point out, I do like to point out to people that, that the devil in Norse mythology is, is Female.

Hila. You know, Hila. Yeah, well, the God of the Dead. Yeah, Right, right. The God of the dead. Yeah. I mean, Kate Blanchet. Right.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

All right. Well, we do have. We do have a caller on the line. And I said he, but actually, the. The. The. The caller board says Chris. So I don't know. Chris, are you there? Welcome to Lord of Spirits.

[C]

I am here.

[B]

Okay, so you are a he. All right.

[C]

You're just misgendering our callers now.

[B]

I don't know.

[C]

So many microaggressions. Talk about lawlessness.

I had a question concerning something Father DeYoung said. He says that the end of the world comes with the end of liturgy or when liturgy ceases. Am I. Am I characterizing that correctly? Yes. Okay, now that seems different than what I saw in the 1999 TBN film Omega Code.

Yeah, yeah. The newly departed Marian Robertson and I had a slight disagreement on that.

[B]

Wasn't it this morning? Pat Robinson died?

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

Pat Robertson died just today.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

Yeah. Wow.

[C]

So it's not like that is what you're saying. It is not. Okay, well, there are also no codes in the Bible. Only in Moby Dick. What? Only in Moby Dick. Oh. I have to rethink everything. In fact, there's a page in Moby Dick where it is encoded that there are no codes in the Bible. Only in Moby Dick.

Man. Okay, well, this changes everything. I guess I'll go back to seminary. Okay. Yeah. I appreciate it. One more question, Father DeYoung. Have you played any Diablo 4 yet? I have not, but my wife has been playing.

Looks amazing, so. Yeah, seems good. And she's. She's got some kind of. She was in the stress test in the beta.

So. And she's got some crap cross platform thing going on between her Xbox Series X and her computer, so. Wow. Wow. Legit. Okay.

[B]

That's it.

[C]

Well, that was a good film. I was hoping you all would discuss it in the third half.

Yeah, no, no. I'm more likely to discuss the Nick Cage remake of Left Behind.

Cameron's is traditional. I know, but Nick Cage is Nick Cage. It's true. But that movie's only like a tenth of a Mandy.

That's true. You know what I mean.

[B]

We should do our own MST3K version of the Nicholas Cage Left behind or.

[C]

The Lord of Spirits.

[B]

Yeah. Yeah, that would be fun.

[C]

All right.

[B]

Okay.

[C]

That's it.

[B]

Thanks for calling, Chris.

All right, welcome to the third half. Everybody.

Finally got through Second Thessalonians, Chapter two. Some of it, anyway.

[C]

But there's other verses of it. Actually not even eight, six verses of it.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. The highlights.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

But I mean, the word Antichrist doesn't even show up in any of that. It's St. John who gives us that actual word.

[C]

Right. But not in the book of Revelation.

[B]

Not in the book of Revelation. Right.

[C]

But in First John, which we're going to talk about last.

[B]

There we go.

[C]

So, as is usual with us, we're going to get to the only passages that use the term Antichrist in our episode about the Antichrist dead last.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

So.

[B]

Yep.

[C]

But you should know what you're getting into by now when you listen to the show.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

So we actually, comparatively. We got to the topic at least broadly. Relatively quickly.

[B]

Pretty quickly. Yeah.

[C]

So, yes. So the other.

New Testament author who talks about the Antichrist, this final antichrist figure, is St. John, as we just mentioned in his Apocalypse and in his first Epistle.

And so.

I felt the need, not for speed.

But wow. First Top Gun reference, to separate this out a little bit.

And to talk about Saint Paul first and then talk about Saint John, even though little bits of Saint John crept into Saint Paul and little bits of Saint Paul are now going to creep into Saint John.

Primarily because.

I was educated in the Western system. No, because there is predominant now in biblical scholarship.

This idea, thanks to our 19th century German friends, that there are theologies plural in the New Testament.

That different, at at minimum.

Different authors within the New Testament. And of course, then you get into the whole issue of modern scholarship not thinking anybody wrote anything, and everything's written by different people. And even the stuff we're attributing to St. John was written by a bunch of different people, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But at the very bare minimum, any given author, you know, St. John has this theology and St. Mark has this other theology and St. Paul has this other theology. And they're separate and they're not really commensurate. And so there's piles of presuppositions that go into this.

One of them being that, you know, in the ancient world within nascent Christianity, like, no one talked to each other, but there were just all these completely independent Christian communities that did not communicate. One wonders how they became Christian in the first place.

Who were practicing potentially radically different things than each other. Like during the first century, I know, not like later, not like second century, third century, where you have Gnostics showing up and radical.

[B]

And this view is actually taken seriously by some people.

[C]

This. No, no, no, no. This view is taken seriously by everyone. Yeah.

[B]

Like, it's the standard. I was trying to be a little restrained in my. In my.

[C]

Everyone.

[B]

But yeah, I mean, it's like the standard view of. Of a lot of, you know, New.

[C]

Testament scholarship, these conservative scholars, everyone. Even, like I said, even I felt the need to kind of talk about St. Paul first and then talk about St. John second, just because it's that ingrained. Right. But the presuppositions behind it. I've only begun to enumerate the stupid presuppositions behind this. I'll give some dumb examples.

Here's a dumb example. St. Mark's gospel.

Does not describe Jesus birth.

St. Mark's gospel begins with Christ's baptism. And so you will hear otherwise intelligent people say, well, whoever wrote Mark's gospel. Because of course, it can't be somebody named Mark. Right?

As if St. Mark was famous for anything else that you would put his name on this. Anyway.

You know, all the fathers go to this trouble to say, well, really, this is St. Peter's account. Right. So if St. Mark is fictional, why didn't they just call it St. Peter's gospel? But anyway.

So whoever wrote Mark's gospel must have had an adoptionist Christology.

Must have believed that Jesus became the Messiah at his baptism, not at his birth. Because he doesn't describe his birth.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

Okay, so why is this so stupid? Well, because. Yes. Anything someone writes. Right. Anything I write, Anything you write. Anything anyone writes reflects their. The world of their experiences. Right. Their views of things, their understandings of things, of the world, the experiences they've had are all reflected in what they write, but they are not exhausted in each thing that they write.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

Right. Let's just call him St. Mark. Who wrote St. Mark's gospel?

He did not write everything he believed, thought, did, practiced. He did not write all of that into the 16 chapters of his gospel.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

There are things he believed and knew and understood that he didn't write down in that one text.

[B]

Yeah, I mean, like, you get this all the time, like on the Internet, even just about, like, if I write an article. Sometimes people like, people like, well, you didn't cover this. You didn't cover this. I'm like, well, no, I wasn't writing about. About that. Yes. You know.

[C]

Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I have seen you accused publicly when you wrote an article and just quoted scripture in it, they accused you of believing in sola scriptura.

[B]

Right. If so, then the fathers were believers in sola scriptura. Like, yeah.

Right.

[C]

So. Right. Because of course that one text that you wrote, we could determine all of your views on everything and all of your understanding from that one text. Which is, of course, stupid. It's stupid. Okay.

Next level.

[B]

Dumb.

[C]

Rudolph Bultmont. He's a 20th century jerk.

[B]

Oh, man.

[C]

Rudolph Bultmont.

Looks at the Gospel of St. John. He's been proven wrong in almost everything he said about St. John, by the way. Right. I remember it was Gnostic.

[B]

I remember my. One of my, my. One of my scripture professors in seminary, like Boltman was like. Like the devil in, in those classes, like whenever his name got mentioned, it was. He was, you know, the opposer.

[C]

Yeah, see, he's not the devil.

[B]

I know, but I mean, you know, he be devil.

[C]

He was just. He was just working on a serious lack of data.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

Not thinking well and being very confident in conclusions despite the lack of data and not thinking well.

But. So he looks at St. John's gospel and amongst other crazy things, says, well, look, hey.

St. John's gospel is the only gospel where it doesn't give.

Tell, or narrate Christ initiating the Eucharist.

Right? Saying, this is my body, this is my right. That's in the other three Gospels. It's in First Corinthians, but it's not in St. John's Gospel. And so he said.

St. John's Gospel was written by a community. As if any text has ever been written by a community. And not one person in the community, but anyway was written by a community that did not celebrate the Eucharist.

Now, is there any evidence whatsoever from any source that there was ever a Christian church in the first century? Well, he thought it was written in the second century also, which has also been proven false. But in the second century that did not practice the Eucharist in some way. The Gnostics had a Eucharist, right? Everybody had some kind of Eucharist, right? No, there's zero evidence.

The only evidence he has for it is that story is not in St. John's gospel.

[B]

Amazing.

[C]

And when someone said to him, hey, what about John 6.

Where he says, unless you eat my body and drink my blood, right, you do not have eternal life. Rudolph, Pop, I said, that can't be about the eucharist. Why? Because St. John's gospel was written by a community that didn't practice the Eucharist, man.

[B]

And I assume he got paid to say things like this.

[C]

This is what we call circular logic.

[B]

Yeah, right.

[C]

Okay, Amazing.

[D]

So.

[C]

Yeah. So the.

But. But this same kind of thinking, to greater and lesser degrees, is it's it's ubiquitous in biblical scholarship.

Ubiquitous. Even like conservatives, if you try and bring in something from St. John to understand something and say Paul, they'll be like, well, that way, wait, that's John.

That's different.

Right. And internally. Internally, the New Testament documents don't present themselves that way.

Internally, the New Testament documents, where apostles refer to each other, where Saint Peter refers to Saint Paul, where Saint Paul refers to Saint James and John and Peter, they always express them as being in ultimate agreement. Sometimes they describe sort of interesting conflicts, but even that's rare. That's St. Paul in Galatians talking about a little set to he had with St. Peter. And that's about it. That's all you got?

[B]

Right.

[C]

This idea that there was some antipathy between St. Paul and St. James is fabricated. It's not in the New Testament. There is no source for it.

Sorry, Islamic apologists, Right. So there's. There is no basis for this internally thinking that any of these writers were opposed to each other. There is no logical reason to think that someone could take one text written by an author or two texts, Luke, Acts, right? Let's call it two texts, Luke and Act, and say, okay, I could exhaustively determine the religious way of life of the author of this from this text.

Right? We would never say that otherwise. You'd never say that about any text. I know everything this person thinks about everything, how they live their life, the whole shot based on the fact that I read this one book they wrote. And that book they wrote is probably much longer than any of the New Testament texts. So that doesn't make any sense. Right. You add to this the way in which the New Testament canon came together. Right. Which is not, as we've talked on the show before, that some guy somewhere sort of forced these books altogether into a collection, even though they disagree with each other.

It's the opposite. The canon came together organically.

By 151, 50 AD 150.

Every Christian church in every major city of the Roman Empire was using the four Gospels and only the four Gospels.

There was no Christian emperor compelling them. No one was out there burning other books. Nobody was forcing it. It happened organically.

And guess what? They could read. They weren't stupid. They saw that some of the details didn't match.

They were aware.

[B]

They still.

[C]

They still use them together, but they did not think. They did not think that. That. That they were teaching different Christs.

[B]

Yeah. No one was.

[C]

No one thought that.

[B]

No one was pitting them against each other. And like. And I'll even Say, I think this is worth pointing out, like if you read St. Ignatius of Antioch, like his work is almost like a kind of.

Amalgam of Johannine and Pauline language.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

Indicating that he. And what's interesting is he doesn't ever quote John directly, which strongly suggests that he may not have access to his actual writings, but he just had him as his teacher, you know? But if you read his. If you read his letters, it's almost like it's John and Paul speaking together with one voice, which is just kind of. Just goes to show that that's how the church received them, you know, as two teachers talking about the same Christ.

[C]

And, you know, I'll use the lingo, right. The texts ascribed to John, the Johannine literature emerged from western Asia Minor, from churches that St. Paul planted, as we mentioned earlier.

[B]

Yeah, yeah.

[C]

These are not two different geographical milieu's.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

Two different sets of communities. Sorry, Rudolph.

Right.

Just doesn't happen. So what accounts for these sometimes differences or different ways of using words or different terms being used, like the term Antichrist being used by St. John in one place, not in another and not by St. Paul.

What we have to realize is that not just the text of the New Testament. I've hammered on this with the text of the New Testament, but all writing.

Everything that any human has ever written is occasional.

It is written at a point in time for a purpose with an intended readership.

Right. When I write a grocery list, right. Which I don't. My wife does. But were I to be the one to write the grocery list.

It would be shorter, more boring, and the food would not be nutritious. But also. Right. I would. I would be writing it in response to a certain need. I need food to eat for the next week, right? And therefore I would try to put together a list of food that should I eat that food over the next week, I would be nourished, satisfied, what have you. Right. I would list foods that were to my taste and leave out ones that weren't. I would write it in a way, right? And Father Andrew could attest to this because he has seen like show outlines I've written in a way that would probably be intelligible only to me.

Right? Like just weird words and phrases that were evocative, but that would remind me of something, Right. Because my intended audience is not someone else to read my grocery list and understand it. It's just me, right? So all that would be true, my grocery list. All of that is also true of St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans.

He wrote it in a particular time with particular things happening in the world to the Christian community in the city of Rome to answer certain questions and deal with certain problems they were having.

Yet an intended audience used language that he believed they would understand in their time and place.

To convey to them the things that he wanted to communicate to them.

It's true of every other text in the New Testament.

Every other text in the New Testament. So St. John is writing to a different community in a different place at a different time, dealing with different issues than the issues that St. Paul was writing to Thessalonica to address.

So they can refer to the same traditions, the same ideas, right? The same teachings regarding the Antichrist figure. But because they have different audiences at different times, at different places, right? They can use different language.

And emphasize different parts and elements of that tradition and different ways of coming at that tradition. And they're not disagreeing with each other. They're not presenting two different theologies. They're presenting the same thing, right?

And so this is the extra step of interpretation that's required in interpreting anything, any writing, right? Is the first step of interpretation is contextual, getting at, as best we can, that original ear, the original recipients, what they were dealing with, how this addressed it, right? And then there's this other step where we take it and we apply it for our purposes, right? This is what you see the Fathers doing with Scripture, right? They take something that St. Paul wrote to one community for a particular purpose. And then St. John Chrysostom looks at what St. Paul did, right? And what he communicated to the community he was writing to. And St. John goes and he says the same thing, homiletics, tries to convey the same thing, the same Christ, right, Ultimately to the people he's preaching to in Antioch or in Constantinople, and does a fabulous job of it because he's St. John Chrysostom, right? But we can no more go and just quote St. John than we could just go and quote St. Paul, right? When we interpret St. John Chrysostom, we have to do the same thing. We have to say, what is he conveying? How is he conveying Christ, ultimately, who Christ is to the people he's preaching to? And how can I communicate that same thing to the person I'm talking to in, you know, southern Louisiana in the 21st century?

And the language I use is probably going to be. It's not going to be Greek, right? Like which I use is going to be different than St. John's and St. Paul's right? But if I'm doing it right, I'm not going to be contradicting them. I'm not going to be doing something different. Right. And so this is how we have to understand these things. So all of this is me taking a bunch of shots at modern biblical studies. And. But also.

To say that St. John and St. Paul are not teaching something different on this. Right. But they are writing in different circumstances, different genres, even in the case of the Book of Revelation. And so they're focusing on and conveying different elements of the tradition that they're, that they're referring to and that they're sort of synthesizing in a Christian way and then teaching.

So, okay, that. That clears mud, but it covers the ground.

Tribute.

[B]

Yeah, so. So what is in those Johannine texts?

[C]

Yeah, so we're going to start with Revelation, which as everyone knows, is simple and easy to understand.

[B]

Amen.

[C]

But the figure associated, even though he's never called the Antichrist or the man of lawlessness, for that matter, the figure who's associated with the Antichrist, and rightly so, in the book of Revelation, is the beast. Okay. Specifically the beast out of the sea in Revelation 13. But what St. John is doing there in his vision, Right. Is that there is a sort of. I mean, this is a vision St. John receives. But again, St. John is a person who is steeped in Old Testament prophecy and prophetic imagery. So when he has his vision, God communicates through that vision with him using.

The imagery of Old Testament prophecy that's familiar to him. Right. And so we have to take a look at the beasts in Daniel briefly before we get to the beast. Right, the beast of beasts, the super beast in.

In Revelation 13. Okay. And Daniel's beasts, of course, he sees this succession of beasts in Daniel 7. This is actually the story of the beast surrounds the story of the enthronement of the Son of Man that we've talked about a bunch before on the show. So we're not going to get back into that here. We'll talk about the beast part briefly. And what you have there is this succession of beasts that are these sort of amalgamations of animal forms.

That represent a succession of empires.

Babylon, Persia, Greece and Rome. And it's sort of parallel to the vision of the statue that Daniel interprets for Nebuchadnezzar with the statue made of the different metals. Right. Same kind of idea.

You can especially see some of this symbolism with Greece and the horns and Alexander. Alexander on coins has rams horns, which was a way of portraying him as divine.

I won't go into the other way. He was portrayed as divine because I want to completely panic Father Andrew.

[B]

You can look that up in other ways if you need to. Everybody.

[C]

Someday. Someday. Maybe. Maybe I'll talk about that somebody. Okay, so at the conference, we're gonna have a live Q and A. That's not. Oh, no, that's. Is going to be recorded.

[B]

It'll be recorded.

[C]

Come to me at the conference and I'll tell you all about it. If you could find me, maybe you can hire the A team. Anyway.

So. But the core of what's going on in Daniel is that there. There are these just like with the statue that gets destroyed by the rock hewn, right? Without human hands.

That the beasts are defeated at the Son of Man's enthronement. Right. And Interestingly, in Daniel 7, even though they're defeated when the Son of Man is enthroned, they're only finally sort of destroyed and punished after a time.

So this part of Daniel 7 is actually also one of the key texts related to the Messiah ruling in the midst of his enemies, which we will be talking about in a future eschatology series episode about the millennium. I have spoken.

Not next episode, but soon a future.

[B]

All of our eschatology episodes are in the future.

[C]

Yes, ironically.

So, except this one. Well, part one is in media race.

[B]

So.

[C]

When we come to Revelation 13 and we see the beast out of the sea, we've talked about before how this is associated with Leviathan and Behemoth, or Behemoth, that is the beast from the land, but the beast out of the sea. You can see a sort of an amalgamation of all of Daniel's beasts, Right? That's why you get this super beast kind of imagery, right?

You also have the imagery of. Of the beast as a king with blasphemous names, right? And this beast with the. With the kings with the blasphemous names has authority over every tribe and people and language and nation that he achieves through conquest, Right? And so for anyone living in St. John's time, facing Roman persecution, this is ringing a lot of bells, right? Like, St. John is not really secretive that he's talking about Rome, right?

[B]

You got the.

[C]

The whore of Babylon who sits on seven hills, like, hello.

Right? But even like the blasphemous names, right, You. You look at the official titles of Caesar, which include Lord Kyrios.

Savior of the World, Son of God, Right.

Right. These are almost every title that's ascribed to Christ in the New Testament. Was a title of Caesar.

So blasphemous names. But the blasphemous name thing really started with all the way back with the Selucids.

Who.

You know, we're. We're familiar with maybe Antiochus IV Epiphanes. Right. Who did the abomination of desolation. But Epiphanies there was that he was the manifestation of a God.

Right. And Savior Soter was another common title. His. I think it was his father might have been his grandfather who had so terre. One of the Ptolemies had so terr. Right. This. This was a common thing. And Caesar had just kind of balled all of those up and taken them all for him. Right. From all of those previous rulers. So clearly St. John is talking about Rome, but again, he's talking about more than just Rome. Right. Rome is sort of a prime example of what he's talking about. Rome was the current. The contemporary example at the time. St. John has this vision of what he's talking about. And.

In him presenting Rome as Antichrist, we have to realize that there were people like Josephus, the famous Jewish historian. Josephus, at the end of the day, concluded that Rome was the Messiah.

[B]

Which is amazing.

[C]

Yes.

[B]

For so many reasons. Anyway.

[C]

That Rome was the savior of the world.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

This is after the Jewish revolts.

[B]

Wow.

[C]

Talk about a collaborator.

[B]

I know. I mean, that's pretty much as collaborating as you get.

[C]

Right, Right. But so this is the antithesis of that. Right? No, Right. This is. This is. This is Antichrist. Right. And so this is Rome as a world system, but also Caesar as the embodiment of it. Right. Imperator as the. The embodiment of it. And of course, then you get the number of the beast.

Right.

Insert jokes about apartment 665 being the neighbor of the beast, etc.

[B]

Right. And you know, this. This episode of ours is episode 66. I was like, well, that's too bad we haven't done 600 more episodes, but we'll get there.

[C]

You know what Meatloaf said, two out of three ain't bad.

[B]

There you go.

[C]

So. So folks may be familiar with, if they've dipped their toes in the biblical studies stuff a little bit, that the earliest manuscripts we have of Revelation, which are not that early, by the way, but the earliest ones we have actually have 616 or 616 instead of 666.

And.

You know, people get worked up about it because they like to find things to get worked up about. But what's going on here is that this is what's called Gematria. This is.

Using numbers to represent letters, right. Which.

Comes about as a reverse of what was normally done. As we talked about on the show before, normally they didn't have numerals. So they use letters to represent numbers. Right. And so this is the way of using those letter numbers to represent other letters. It's a way of encoding something.

And the fact that he's encoding something, St. John kind of telegraphs because he's like, let the reader understand, you know, it is the number of a man.

Right, Wink, Right.

So it's kind of obvious to everyone, anyone reading it, that this is something encoded. So Saints Irenaeus and Saint Hippolytus say that this is encoded. Teitan or Titan or Typhon in both cases. And for both figures, both of these fathers, this is clearly like trying to draw it back to the Nephilim story, right? Because of course, the Titans.

Are taken to be.

If we see the story of the Titans as pro devil propaganda, they're taken to be the angels who sinned, right. As being the equivalent of like the watchers in the Book of Enoch.

Who. And who takes it that way? Well, St. Peter takes it that way, right. St. Peter talks about the angels imprisoned in Tartarus, which is the place where the Titans were imprisoned. He's the only author who uses the word Tartarus in the New Testament.

So.

That'S who the Titans were. Typhon is probably a little less well known. Typhon is. So after the imprisonment of the Titans, the defeat imprisonment of the Titans by the Olympians, Gaia, who's technically one of the sort of an Ur Titan.

The Earth. Gaia gets mad. And first she brings forth the giants.

To attack to get revenge for the Titans on the Olympians, leading to the Greek Gigantomachy. And then sort of her final step after the defeat of the giants is to bring forth Typhon, who is this giant monster beast who's an amalgamation of all these different animal forms that comes up out of the Mediterranean Sea to kill Zeus to get revenge. Right. So either Typhon or Titan, we're connecting this back to Greek versions of the Nephilim story, right. And you can see how Typhon would connect to a beast out of the sea too. Yeah, right. And so we're associating in this case Rome and Rome's king, right? Caesar, with, you know, who presented himself as a God and add these blasphemous names with the Nephilim, right. In the Old Testament. So those fathers are not wrong. That is an association that's happening here. Right. But I think you could make a very good case that the Gematria is way more specific than that. And to me, the clincher for this is the fact that this makes sense of both numbers.

This works for 666 and616.

Right. So.

The. The Greek form.

Of the name for Nero Caesar, Right. In. In Hebrew or Aramaic, is.

These are transliterated into English is N, R, O, N, Q, S, R.

That's the standard English transliteration of the Hebrew consonants. And the one long vowel, which is.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

Wow.

[B]

It's being used.

Nero Caesar, basically. Nero Kaiser.

[C]

Yeah. But with a nun. Right. After. In Nero. So it's Neron. Right. That gives you the Gamatri on that is 666. If you drop that extra nun so that it matches the Latin consonants in Hebrew and aramaic, you get 616.

So that works for both.

So the idea here is that St. John is not just using Rome as the contemporary image for what he's talking about, but he's using a particular Caesar, Nero, the Caesar who killed saints Peter and Paul and lots of other Christians, is using him as, again, an emblematic person.

[B]

Right.

[C]

Cain is archetypal sinner. Right. Nero is sort of being used here as an archetypal. Nero is being used as an archetypal figure. Now you might say, well, wait a minute, right. According to.

St. Irenaeus, St. John received his vision around 95, 96 AD. Right. Or AD 95, 96.

Nero was dead a long time.

Before that.

Right. He got offed.

But. Right. We'll notice two things. Number one, St. John describes the beast as having had a fatal wound that was healed.

And at the time that St. John received his vision, there was a widespread belief and tradition that Nero was not, in fact, dead.

[B]

He says he's not dead.

[C]

Not dead yet.

So that he had actually been grievously wounded, but went into hiding in Asia minor, near where St. John received his vision, supposedly. And that he was going to recoup and then come back and save the empire.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

Because at the end of the first century, like many other times in Roman history, things weren't going so well and everyone was convinced everything was collapsing.

[B]

Yeah. Sort of the original Arthur story. And in that element of it, you know, the idea of going off to be healed and he'll be back.

[C]

And so there are Roman sources where you can read about this.

[B]

Right.

[C]

Around 80, 88. So not long before this vision. Dio Chrysostom. Chrysostom was a title that was given to St. John. It was given to other people too. Dio Chrysostom is a pagan, pagan, Roman. But in his Discourse 21, he refers to this. The Sibylline Oracles 4 and 5 refer to this. Tacitus refers to this in Histories 2, 8. Suetonius refers to this in Section 57. Right. So this is attested. This was a belief, and it's only attested by this. But historically there were phony Neros who showed up and tried to claim the imperial throne.

In Rome in this period. And thereafter, people showed up claiming to be Nero. Right. Coming back.

And this tradition was so pervasive and so entrenched in Roman thought that it was still around in St. Augustine's Day. St. Augustine in City of God 20193 says that as the Western empire was collapsing in the early 5th century, there were a lot of.

Barely converted pagans who said, oh, Christianity was a mistake. That's why the Western empire is falling and Nero is going to come back and rescue us and make the empire pagan again and turn all this around. Right. So again, in the same way that Julian the apostate ended up being sort of the image or the icon or the emblematic figure of the Antichrist for a lot of the Fathers in late antiquity, Nero here is presented by St. John and becomes for generations of Christians thereafter, especially in the west, the image of the Antichrist. Right. In the same kind of way. Right. And again.

The way St. John describes it and the way these people up to St. Augustine describe it is Nero is going to reappear, Right. And you can compare that to the language St. Paul uses in second Thessalonians 2, where both Christ appears, right? What we would call a second Advent, second coming, and the man of lawlessness appears, right. And Nero appears is going to reappear, Right. And so this idea that the Antichrist is going to have be someone who does a counterfeit resurrection, right? He's going to be this God King figure who does a fake, a phony resurrection, sort of a parody of Christ's actual resurrection. Right. You can see how that becomes an archetypal image. But of course, St. John is not saying, oh, Nero's the final Antichrist, and then that, you know, that's it. Either this is going to happen soon or he's going to come back as the Antichrist at some point in the future. He's not identifying him as the, the final Antichrist. And how do we know that? Well, we know that because of how St. John talks about the, the Antichrist in First John where he actually uses the Word, Right, yeah, Yep, yep. And what he says there is very consonant with what.

St. Paul talks about, with the mystery of lawlessness.

Right. That is already at work in the world. Right. And already impinging.

[B]

Right.

[C]

So first John 2:18.

Is kind of the famous one.

[B]

Yeah, exactly. Which it's real brief, children. It is the last hour. And as you have heard that Antichrist is coming, so now many Antichrists have come, therefore we know that it is the last hour.

[C]

Right. And so.

Right. You have heard.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

And Antichrist is coming. Singular. There's going to be this singular figure already. There's a bunch of them. So it's not just one figure. There is an ultimate figure.

In the future, but there are already figures. Right. And what. How do those figures work?

First John 4, verse 3.

[B]

Right.

[C]

He talks about the spirit of Antichrist.

[B]

Yeah. It says every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the Antichrist which you heard was coming and now is in the world already.

[C]

Yes, Right. So you've heard the Antichrist is coming. The spirit of Antichrist is already active in the world.

And is motivating these people.

Right. Making them. Them antichrists. Right. And so this spirit of Antichrist, the mystery of lawlessness. Right. These are not different concepts. Right. These are the same kind of ideas. And in fact, to put a finer point on it, St. Paul refers to in second Thessalonians 2, verse 9, the energies of Satan.

[B]

Yeah. Which gets translated like ESV as activity of Satan. But I mean, that's the same thing. That's energies, you know?

[C]

Yeah, yeah. That The Antichrist, when St. Paul uses it in second Thessalonians 2, he's talking about the Antichrist working sort of counterfeit signs and miracles through the energies of Satan, the enera. Right. The idea being they're actually the works of the devil.

Right. And he is doing them. He is bringing them into reality in the world. He is cooperating with Satan. Right. Rather than cooperating with God. And this is the perspective that St. John has in First John, in First John 3, verses 8 through 12, from Cain on, uses Cain as the archetypal sinner from Canaan. These Antichrist figures, they do the works of the devil in the world.

And Christ comes to destroy those works. Right. Christ comes to destroy those works. So.

A concept we have to understand here in terms of the relationship between Christ and the Antichrist, in terms of Antichrists and Antichrist figures in the Scriptures and in history. Right. Is.

The idea of negative typology.

[B]

And.

[C]

Negative typology is really a kind of demonic parody, ultimately. Right. So.

Positive typology, Right. It would be typology the way we probably normally think about it. Yeah, right. There's some aspect of someone or someone's life in the scriptures or in history with the saints, that is, that points toward or exemplifies or images some element of the person of Christ or the work of Christ.

[B]

Yeah. Like an obvious example would be Joseph, you know, the son of.

Jacob as a type of Christ. You know, all the things that he goes through and the things he does and so forth. That'll be an obvious example of that kind of positive typology.

[C]

Right. Or the sign of Jonah. Right? Yeah. Three days, Right.

This is how we think about it. And this is. This is positive but not full. Right. Meaning, you know, we could point to this in Jonah without saying, okay, well, Jonah was perfect. Right. Part of the typology is that in Christ we find the fullness of that. Right?

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

Or with Joseph, in Christ we find the fullness of that. Right.

There's also negative typology where elements of Christ, of the person of Christ or of Christ's work are inverted or bent or twisted, Right. And so are put forward in a, in this warped way or even an inverted, a flipped over way.

[B]

Yeah. And I mean, and an antichrist like this seems obvious to point out, but worth, worth saying. An Antichrist is a type of Christ, otherwise he wouldn't be an antichrist. He would be just a bad person or whatever, you know.

[C]

Right, right. He's a type of Christ in this negative way. Right. And we kind of saw this idea that St. Paul was playing with in, in second Thessalonians 2, right? Where, you know, Christ humbles himself and is exalted, whereas the, the Antichrist exalts himself and is destroyed. Yeah, right. That's an inversion, Right. It's the opposite.

[B]

Right.

[C]

But by looking at that opposite, you can see something about the.

The, the true, the real. Right. You can see something about Christ by seeing the inversion. Right. Because Christ is the opposite.

And. Right. You can see this even. Here's, here's an example of negative typology.

From St. Paul. We referred to Romans 5 earlier.

Right? Where he makes this comparison between Adam and Christ, right? And he said, where Adam is disobedient and Christ is obedient. Right? That's negative typology. It's the opposite, Right. Adam transgressed, Christ does not. Right. Adam brings death, Christ brings life. Right. So that's negative typology, but that negative typology doesn't mean that Adam's, like, an evil person.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

Or. Right. Like he's not. So you can keep. If you have an icon of just Adam. Right. You can. You can keep that. Right. The. The fact that he, in this sense served as a negative type of Christ or you could even say a type of Antichrist.

Right. Does not mean that he is not ultimately. He did not ultimately, as a person, become a saint. Right.

[B]

It's the place that he's serving narratively.

[C]

Right.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

But the opposite is also true.

The opposite is also true that someone serving as. There being some positive typology between a person in Christ does not make them a saint.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

Right.

[B]

And I mean, and there's even positive typology about animals and objects that is related to Christ.

[C]

Right.

[B]

You know? Yeah.

[C]

Right. So, for example, right. When we. When we hear sung and read the interpretation that the. The donkey that Christ rode on.

At the triumphal entry was a type and image of the Gentile church. Right. We're not gonna make icons and dedicate churches to Saint Donkey.

Because donkey is a type of the church.

[B]

Right.

[C]

That's a ridiculous example.

[B]

Right.

[C]

But this applies to humans too. One could, for example, for example, Saul.

Old Testament Saul, not saul who becomes St. Paul. Old Testament Saul. I've never seen an icon of him, have you? No. And for really good reason. Right. He ends his life demon possessed.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

Committing suicide. Yeah. Okay. But he was the king of Israel.

One could make positive typology between him and Christ at certain points in his life and in certain stories about his life.

Fathers do the whole thing about going and finding his father's donkeys and stuff. Right. So. Right. Someone can at times and places be an image of Christ and even.

Dare I say, it can even be a Christian. Right. And unfortunately apostatized to bring this back full circle.

Right. So typology and the person's salvation or the person's relationship as person with God are not one to one.

So you can have a saint like Adam where there's a negative typology, a negative comparison between him and Christ in certain ways, but is still a saint, ends up being a saint. And you can have other figures who I won't name because there's been enough of that on the Internet.

That's who, in some ways might have served as a positive type of Christ. I mentioned Saul. I guess we'll do that one. But who do not end up being saints themselves. Right. Even though at times in certain elements of their story may have this positive typology related to Christ. Right, but this is, this is at the core of something we've talked about, we talked about early on in the show actually, of seeing myth and religious practice, right, outside of ancient Israel, outside of Second Temple Judaism, outside of Christianity.

Seeing these as pro devil propaganda.

Right, that these are not just random, unrelated stories that are piffles and can be dismissed, right, as silly fables, but nor are they the truth, right, that we have within that tradition throughout history that I just described, right. They feature inversions of the truth, distortions of the truth, bendings of the truth. Right? And this is how, when you take a nuanced view of how the Fathers read Homer or Plato or whomever, right, this is what you actually see.

Right? They're saying this emerges from the actual world, which includes the spiritual world.

Right? And is a description of it and is a description of events in it, but it's one that's warped. It's one that sometimes outright inverted, flipped 180 degrees, flipped in like photo negative. But even from those images, if you understand them and how to work with them, you can show how they.

Represent and connect back to and can help illuminate the truth.

And so they're neither discarded nor embraced.

Right. Nor just sort of cherry picked. Well, here are the nice parts and we'll put out the expurgated bowdlerized version without all the naughty bits. And that'll be the Christian version.

Right. But a much more nuanced way of interacting, right, with it.

[B]

Yeah.

Yeah. So to sum up some of my final thoughts.

You know.

I was raised as a conservative evangelical Protestant. And especially in the period of, you know, 1970s and 80s and 90s.

That means a lot of dispensationalism. You know, you really can't get away from it.

We don't need to go into exactly what dispensationalism is. I mean, you can look it up on the interwebs, but a major piece of it is this idea that.

You know, the end of the world is at hand.

And I remember books like late Great Planet Earth from Hal Lindsay in the 70s, and I think he didn't, didn't that book predict that the end of the world would be like 1988? I think that's what it was.

It did not end in 1988.

But I mean, there's been millenarian fervor like this in many periods in history. You know, the one in the 19th century that ended up being called the Great Disappointment by the Millerites.

And one of the things that you often see happen when people have millenarian fervor, like the sense that the world is ending. And I think a lot of people these days do have this sense. I mean, there's all kinds of just nutty stuff happening.

And, and not just nutty stuff. There's a lot of dangerous, violent stuff happening, right? And, and a lot of folks, they put all these things together and they'll say, this is. This is it, this is it. You know, and they may even attempt to identify particular figures as being the Antichrist.

You know, the signs are all lining up, you know, and all this kind of thing.

I think my favorite millenarianist I've seen on the. Or millenarian I've seen on. On the interwebs lately is a guy who calls himself the third eagle of the Apocalypse.

His. His music is really catchy.

And with this idea that the world is ending, a lot of times people get this sense that the rules change as a result. I mean, if you think that the world is ending, it's true. You. You tend to lose some of your inhibitions. You tend to.

Everything's hyped up, you know, your feelings are stronger about things. You become more fervent or more depressed or whatever.

And I mean, this works both on the. The macro level where you think the world is ending and also just the level where your world is ending. Like if your life is falling apart, there's this sense that the rules don't really apply or that the rules change. You know, like, look, we're all. Everything's about to lose everything. So therefore we've got to really focus on X, Y and Z and the normal restraints, you know, don't apply.

And I've even seen this to our shame within some orthodox circles these days, right? There's this idea out there. We live in the time of Antichrist, and so therefore we don't have to be obedient to bishops.

So here's the thing about all that.

That is just utterly ignorant of Scripture. As we saw what St. John said, you know, Antichrists have come. Spirit of Antichrist is at work in the world. And he wrote this almost 2,000 years ago.

Right? And even this idea that's out there, you know, we don't really have to be obedient to bishops because the time of the Antichrist is here. Like I read one person saying this.

When someone, for instance, was mentioning the ecclesiology of Saint Ignatius of Antioch, which he talks very clearly about obedience to bishops. I mean, there's one point where he even says, you know, if someone is Works apart from the bishop. He worships the devil. Like, it's really strong language.

And.

You know, they'll say, well, Ignatian Ecclesia, ecclesiology doesn't really apply anymore because we're in the time of Antichrist. But St. Ignatius was a disciple of the Apostle John, who said those things about Antichrists already coming and the spirit of Antichrist already in the world. So in other words, he talked about his ecclesiology during a time that his own teacher said was a time of Antichrist. Right. So it wasn't like, well, everything is great, you know, and, and Christians are free and everything. Like, it was a really bad time for Christianity. Nations himself wrote this as he was on his way to be martyred. Right, but, but, you know, even aside from just this question of whether we should obey bishops or not in the time of Antichrist, obviously the, the general answer to that is yes, if a bishop tells you to do something sinful, you don't do it. That's always been true. But they don't lose all their authority because it's a time of Antichrist. Because here's the thing, Episcopal authority is set up within the time of Antichrist, which has been the case for 2,000 years now. But the broader question, the broader issue of, you know, should I behave differently because this is the time of Antichrist? The answer is no, or yes. But here's what way. Yes, if we really understand what it means that we're in the time of Antichrist, understanding that that's been the case for 2000 years now or more, depending on how you, you know, whether you're applying it even to Old Testament stuff, which clearly is a thing.

Then that being at work in the world, the way that you fight back against that is.

By the life of faithfulness, by the life of prayer and worship and kindness and love and almsgiving and fasting and all of these things that we know are the weapons of the spiritual war.

Right. Sometimes people feel like a time of Antichrist means it's time to get crazy. It's a time to. To be extreme, a time to. To. To be nasty to other people. Right. You know, because, because when you have a feeling that the world is ending, people can get very agitated.

But the call is the same. You know, even if, like, the final Antichrist is alive in the world today and at work in the world today, and like, this is the, the truly the last generation, the call to Christians is the same as it was when the New Testament was written. It's the same it has not changed. There is no called. Like. Like, different rules apply now, or the old rules don't apply anymore. That is not true. That is not true. The call to faithfulness is the same. We still have to love. We still have to give alms. We still have to be faithful in prayer and worship, fasting and all these things. Like, this is still the norm. It's been the norm.

I think, you know, one of the things that we talked about was the idea that the liturgy in. In a sense, holds back the end of the world. That's. That really summarizes a lot of what I'm trying to say here, is that. That what is the task? It's to enter into worship. It's to enter and. And then all the things that flow from worship and realize that our task as a church is to try to rescue our fellow humans, to bring them into the church. Not to say, well, it's the time of Antichrist, and so you're all my enemies, so it's okay for me to blast you and be nasty to you and not care about the salvation of your soul or think that being nasty is caring about the salvation of someone's soul. It's not, you know.

If we're going to be like the saints, then we need to be like the saints. We need to behave the way that they behaved and don't just pick out the parts that appeal to us. Like, oh, I love it when they're polemical. Like, no, that's. Actually, they only entered into that when they really felt that they needed to, and they were defending actual undermining of the body of the Church.

The rules are still the same. The life of faithfulness is still the same because it was formulated in the time of Antichrist. So, yeah, we're in the time of Antichrist. I'm not saying it's not going to end tomorrow. The world's not going to end tomorrow. I don't know, it might. But the rules today are still the same as they were 2,000 years ago. And if the world doesn't end tomorrow, this will be the same next week. It's still the same. So we don't need to get agitated because Christ said, be of good cheer, for I have overcome the world. That's peace. That's. That's joy. And Christians should be known for their peace, their joy, their genuine love for each other, for other people. So rules are the same. Keep living the right way. Become more faithful. Father, your final thoughts?

[C]

Yeah, so.

I never had to dispense with dispensationalism because I never really.

And I wasn't surrounded by a lot of people playing pin the tail on the Antichrist, though I was aware of it right out there in evangelical culture. For the record, all those people who have picked Antichrist throughout history, almost all of them were right.

Yeah, sure, not about which one was the final one, but most of the people they picked, you know, Hitler, Stalin, Lenin, Napoleon, Ronald Wilson Reagan, who had six letters in each of his three names. Think about it. But most, most of them, most of them were actually right.

And this is because, right, as St. Paul said, the mystery of lawlessness, as St. John said, the mystery or the spirit of Antichrist is out there in the world and is active. And unfortunately, the reaction most of us take to this, at least in the contemporary period, at least in the United States, which is where I happen to live, so I can only speak from my own experience.

Is not to stand.

Not to stand as a garrison or a bulwark in any sense, but to hunker down, to go and hide.

Past generations of Christians have interacted with a culture that was full of sin and corruption brought about by the same spirit of Antichrist, by producing works of beauty.

Poetry, art.

Works of fiction and nonfiction, learning by interacting critically with their culture and society, exposing falsehoods, teaching and promoting the truth in ways that have transformed cultures in various places. And the closest we can get, especially in the US is fighting a lame culture war.

Which is, hey, let's have a boycott so that this cheap Belgian beer stops putting gay people in their ads and goes back to women in bikinis.

Christian values, right? That. That's our idea of, oh, yeah, we're gonna. We're gonna fix the culture. We need the dog on the boogie board again in the beer commercial. Then, then everything will be great. Or maybe, you know, big horses and a big American flag.

We think we're, you know, fighting some kind of culture war when we buy our chicken sandwich at one restaurant rather than another.

And it's frankly pathetic.

We've surrendered.

We've given up.

On teaching or putting out or producing anything of value or anything of worth.

To anyone, but maybe our own, our own communities.

And that's not what our forebears in the faith did. Even in much more hostile environments.

When faced with a paganism that had dominated the world, the worship of demons, sexual immorality, pederasty as a cultural institution in the Roman Empire, right, Christians went and took those pagans own works, reinterpreted them and showed them the lies, taught them the truth.

[B]

Right?

[C]

Stood for what was true and ended up, and ended up changing that world. They didn't hunker down, they didn't hide.

Right?

And so I think.

As Father Andrew said, we are now as we have in every other age, been living in the spirit age of the spirit of Antichrist.

Where the mystery of lawlessness is at work in the world. But we've been called to be this garrison. We've been called to stand and to fight to ward that off, not to ward that off from our small insular community.

Not to cover our kids eyes so they don't see it, to ward it off from the world.

The earth, the world. That's what we're called to do. And we saw tonight from scripture what the weapons of our warfare are. Their worship, they are prayer, their kindness in the world. But they're also teaching.

They'Re also interacting with things critically and publicly.

And seriously, seriously, not just again picking sides in the dum dum culture war, but seriously interacting, right, and doing this in public with real actual people in the world who we can meet and talk to and break bread with. Because you're not, you as a person are not called to do this for the whole world. We as a church spread throughout the world are called to do this for the whole world. You're called to do this in your world, your corner of it. Those people who you can see not on the Internet, not on social media, where you virtue signal or piety signal or whatever, the actual humans who are available to you to sit down and break bread with, to have a discussion with, to talk about the ideas they've imbibed from the world around them. Maybe where some of those are wrong, maybe where some of them are 180 degrees wrong, inverted from the truth, maybe where some of them are just a little bent and we can straighten them out, right, and bring them to come to know Christ.

Because.

As, as beleaguered, and this is frankly kind of pathetic to American Christians thinking they're so beleaguered and persecuted compared to our brothers and sisters in other parts of the world. But as believers, you may feel we don't actually want the end to come.

I still need time to repent.

A lot more of it than I'll probably get.

Because I would need, I'd need to live to be 180, but to even make a good start. But we need more time to repent. There are people out there who are still lost.

Who need to come to know Christ. And so I don't want the end to come yet.

But to do that, we're going to have to stand in the midst, not off in a corner, not hiding.

And we're going to have to intervene and we're going to have to take a stand and we're going to have to do the messy business of getting to know our fellow human beings.

In the little world that God has placed us in to bring it to him in Christ. So those are my thoughts.

[B]

Amen. Amen. Well, that's our show for tonight. Thank you for listening everyone. If you didn't get through to us live, we'd still love to hear from you. You can email [e-mail] you can send us a message at our Facebook page, or you can leave us a [e-mail] LordOfSpirits and join us for our live.

[C]

Broadcast of the second and fourth Thursdays of the month at 7pm Eastern, 4pm Pacific, where we won't take no prisoners and won't spare no lives.

[B]

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[C]

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[B]

Thank you. Good. Good night. God bless you and I feel fine.

[A]

You've been listening to the Lord of Spirits with Orthodox Christian priests, Father Andrew Stephen Damick and Father Stephen DeYoung, a listener supported presentation of Ancient Faith Radio. And I beheld and I heard the voice of many angels round about the throne and the beasts and the elders, and the number of them was 10,000 times 10,000 and thousands of thousands, saying with a loud voice, worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power and riches and wisdom and strength and honor and glory and Blessing. Revelation, chapter 5, verses 11 through 12.