← The Lord of Spirits
The Lord of Spirits
East End Boys, West End Girls
Why is the Western theology of salvation, both Catholic and Protestant, different from Orthodoxy? Where did the Latin "treasury of merit" come from? Did Martin Luther fix it? Join the Podfathers for a direct look at a core theological difference with Orthodoxy.
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- [00:00]
Narrator
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. 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.
- [01:05]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Hey. Good evening. Dragon slayers, giant killers, Mobins of the magisterial 1962 Alfred Newman soundtrack to how the west was won. You're listening to the 133rd episode of Lord of Spirits podcast. I'm Father Andrew Stephen Damick and with me is the talk of Twitter, Father Stephen DeYoung himself, which is impressive since.
- [01:26]
Father Stephen DeYoung
I'm not on Twitter.
- [01:27]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
I know, I know, I rent free and all that talking about right in.
- [01:33]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Front of my face, behind my back.
- [01:35]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
We're live. The great gatekeeper, Mike Purgatorial Bedpan Degan will be taking your calls tonight, beginning in the second half. The other day my brother sent to me a, a DM and he told me that he's been out in Colorado which he where he used to work and I think the company he works for now is still there, although he lives in another state. And he was having dinner with one of his former co workers and a guy that he, you know, worked with years ago. And apparently this fellow told him that he, he and his wife, his family had converted to orthodox Christianity recently and that they were fans of, of this particular show. And my brother's sitting there listening to him talk about this and he goes, so you know that that guy on that show is my brother, right? And apparently somehow this fellow had never put two and two together, that he only knew two people with the name Damik. So anyway, Eric Sexton, he live in.
- [02:37]
Father Stephen DeYoung
A Lithuanian community of some sort.
- [02:39]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
I know, I know. Eric Sexton, Colorado. What's wrong with you? I mean, he's my brother. Just kidding. Very nice of you to listen.
- [02:49]
Father Stephen DeYoung
He's good likes and Drake, KC Kasem long distance dedications now.
- [02:54]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Exactly, exactly, exactly. So tonight, though, we have a very special treat. An entirely uncontroversial episode. With zero spicy takes from Father Stephen. This episode is designed to ease you into great Lent, detach you from all the cares of this world, and calm your troubled soul. That said, I'm going to go ahead and get all of the objections out of the way now. So, number one, Father Stephen, you're being unfair. You're just mean. You haven't really read everything. You don't understand. You're making caricatures. You are a modernist. You're warring against the saints. That's my favorite one. Did I miss any?
- [03:32]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Yes. We're talking on the Internet and someone might hear this outside of North America. Oh, that's outside of our diocese.
- [03:40]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
You're teaching outside of your diocese.
- [03:44]
Father Stephen DeYoung
So just. Just to clarify that if you're in North America, you must lavishly obey everything we say on this program. But if you are, because you're indeed you're inside our archdiocese, if you're on any other continent, or even in Mexico or Central America, you could freely ignore everything we say.
- [04:06]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
What about those unclaimed regions of Antarctica?
- [04:09]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Yeah, so there's some dodgy things like Puerto Rico, I think, technically is in a different archdiocese and stuff.
- [04:15]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
That is true. Even though it's technically part of North.
- [04:17]
Father Stephen DeYoung
America, technically it's part of the United States. So, yeah, there's some nitty gritty here, people. If you're on the edge, just disregard.
- [04:26]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Let's go do something else with your evening.
- [04:29]
Father Stephen DeYoung
But if you're in the contiguous United States or a Canadian province, this is the law of the Medes and the Persians. There's no escape for you. That's how it works, right?
- [04:40]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
That's right. That's right. Pregnant pause. So we're talking about Latin theology.
- [04:47]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Yes. Which is obviously going to be non controversial.
- [04:51]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
I know.
- [04:52]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Yeah, I know.
- [04:53]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
I'm ready.
- [04:55]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Yes.
- [04:56]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Our last. Our last episode was a big hit and really reached a broad. I mean, everyone. Everyone loved it. Especially those people out there who believe that penal substitutionary atonement, which is a heresy, is the orthodox Christian doctrine is a thing. Yes, I know.
- [05:15]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Yeah. Well, they're gonna love this one.
- [05:18]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yes.
- [05:19]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Even more. But by the way, I am unfair and I am mean. I should also clarify that yes.
- [05:25]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Can confirm.
- [05:27]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Yes, I will hurt people's. Hurt people emotionally with my words. And I'm unrepentant about it. And I haven't read everything that is true.
- [05:41]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
That is.
- [05:42]
Father Stephen DeYoung
I've not read Everything. There are a vast array of products sold in stores in the United States. I have not read their nutrition facts labels.
- [05:51]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
My youngest son, by the way, is on this. His sister, who is 10 years older than he is, showed him a documentary about processed food. And now if anything is ultra or highly processed or whatever, he'll just refuse to eat it. So we're thinking. When you mentioned that, I was triggered.
- [06:13]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Yeah, See, I get triggered the exact opposite way. When I watched Super Size Me, I was craving a Big Mac. Seriously. Like that scene with dancing Ronald McDonald where they play pusher, man. I was like, man, I gotta get to the drive through. Like now I'm pausing the movie.
- [06:31]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
So.
- [06:32]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Yeah, but that's not what we're pushing today. See, that's a segue. Great. We're talking about Latin theology. Eds. We'll start with why are we. Why are we talking about Latin theology instead of Western theology or the west or Western Christianity or one of those things.
- [06:51]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah.
- [06:51]
Father Stephen DeYoung
The reason for that, several. If you're a longtime listener to the show, you know about my very popular take that the west is a false construct. The west, the way it's talked about, or Western civilization is kind of nonsense in that there is not really a narrative through line that begins in ancient Sumer and ends with post World War II United States global hegemony. That is no more a real thing than 19th century German pretensions were a real thing to be the pinnacle of human civilization. But there's. There's sort of more problems with it than that. What is and isn't part of the west is kind of arbitrary and selective depending on what's being talked about. So when you get that Western civ narrative that starts at Sumer, obviously we want to claim all of ancient Greece, right? Philosophy, democracy, all that kind of stuff, even Greek mythology a little bit in a watered down version. But then like after that, Greece isn't part of the west anymore.
- [08:01]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah, it moved out the west, the mess.
- [08:04]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Yeah. And Russia, like sometimes is. It sometimes isn't right. In the Western civ narrative. Like, it pops up a few times. Like you read about the Bolshevik revolution and stuff, Russian involvement in World War I and 2, you know, and then it's out. And so if you try to then apply that narrative to like, what is Western and Eastern theology, that it gets super confused. So it's like, when did Greek theology, like, obviously the New Testament is written in Greek, so apostolic Greek theology is part of Western theology, I guess. And then, you know, they kind of like the Cappadocians and stuff. And then there's some nebulous point where all of a sudden it stops being Western theology and starts being Eastern theology. Same thing, Russia wise. And so it's not super helpful. And plus people who use this narrative of the west, especially the people who want to save it or something, their narrative always involves kind of saving it from him. From itself. Yeah.
- [09:07]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
It's some usually earlier version of quote unquote, the west that needs to be.
- [09:14]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Saved from the later version of the same thing that it evolved into. Yeah. So like the Enlightenment. Some people want to cut it off before the Enlightenment or even before the Renaissance. Some people will accept the Enlightenment because they like America and they want to include the Founding Fathers and stuff. So they'll include some of the Enlightenment stuff, but then they want to stop it after that. They definitely don't want to include like Karl Marx who lived in, like Germany and England in the West. Right. Like, we don't want him. He's. He's clearly not. Even though, again, he's a Hegelian. Right. Like, he's. He's. Karl Marx stands at this through line. Right. So, like all of these things are Western phenomena from which the west needs to be saved according to this narrative. Also very confused. Right. And that's gonna fold over in, as we're gonna see later tonight, that those, like, philosophical names, for example, are gonna fold over into the Latin theological movements. Yeah. Right. So all of that makes the west, or Western Christianity or Western theology not the right adjective. Right. To use. Whereas when we're talking about Latin theology. Right. This, this seems to be a much more descriptive term, makes sense to describe the set of phenomena we're going to be describing. The genealogy we're going to lay out tonight. So our genealogy is really going to start with what are essentially Greek concepts, Christian concepts expressed in Greek, we should say, being translated into Latin. And that's both for. For Western Europe, but also Western North Africa, while that is still a Christian thing before the Islamic conquests, it covers that layer. Right. But also, once it is separate, Latin theology is a very good descriptor for Roman Catholicism because before Vatican ii, it's all being done in Latin and even afterwards, it's Latin terminology and everything that has set the stage. And even in Protestantism presence today, shall we say, especially evangelicals today, do not have a strong identification with Latin. Not only are all the theological terms for the Reformation like justification, sanctification, glorification, all Latin terms.
- [11:50]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Right.
- [11:52]
Father Stephen DeYoung
But I mean, Calvin wrote his Institutes in Latin. He wrote a commentary on The Latin Vulgate Latin was the language used by scholars and theologians, Protestant theologians, for centuries, right after the Protestant Reformation. For all those reasons, describing it, this sort of through line is Latin theology. Even though after the first half of the 20th century, less and less of it is in Latin per se, seems still to be a better descriptor. And to distinguish it from theology that's going on in, for example, Greek and Slavic circles, neither includes anything we don't want to include nor excludes anything we don't want to exclude. So that's why we're talking about Latin theology. That's why we're using those terms. And so, as we said, Latin theology per se begins with Latin translation. And by Latin translation, I'm not just talking about. Though this is included. I'm not just talking about translating the Bible into Latin, translating the liturgy into Latin, those kind of things, the translation of actual Greek Christian texts into Latin, but also the translation of theology into Latin. We've talked before on the show about how the correct way to understand what's going on at the ecumenical councils with terms like homo usios and these kind of things, is that biblical concepts, often concepts that started out in Hebrew or Aramaic, the concept itself is being translated, meaning a label from a new language is being applied to that concept. So that that label, that word could be used as a descriptor to describe a concept that already existed within Christian theology.
- [13:50]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah.
- [13:51]
Father Stephen DeYoung
And so the same thing is going to happen in the transition from Greek to Latin. The terminology of nature, person. Right. Those are both Latin words, by the way. Essence. All of these things are going to get shifted from the original Greek term to a Latin term. And this happens beginning at the very end, like the last decade of the second century, an effort toward this starts to be made in the west, because at that point, they're in a situation where the only place where Greek was being used commonly in Western Europe and Christian North Africa was in Christian circles and in the liturgy.
- [14:42]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah. I mean, the original Mass in the West, I've heard. I mean, I'm not a specialist in this, but I've heard that it was either entirely in Greek originally or at least included a significant amount of Greek. Certainly to this day, if you go to even a Latin Mass, there is a significant chunk that is in Greek where they're singing Kyrie eleison and Christe eleison. These are not Latin phrases.
- [15:07]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Right. And so very end of the second century, you've got really, it's only Christian circles and only within the liturgy and liturgical kind of thing that Greek is being used. This means unless you're in Christian circles and growing up in Christian circles and around Christian circles, you are less and less likely to be fluent in Greek. Right. And so there comes to be a general social pressure. Well, we need to translate this into Latin so that people can understand it. Over the course of those couple of centuries, though, by the time you get to the late fourth century, beginning of the fifth century, because now Latin is being used in the churches. Latin is being used by Christian authors now in the West. There's no real compelling reason for anyone who's not a scholar or doing trade with the east or something similar to learn Greek, Right. And so everything then becomes Latin. Right? And when you get toward the end of that, the big events that we tend to think of in terms of Latin translation. So St. Jerome's Vulgate, right, his translation of the Latin of the Bible into Latin, the Bishop of Rome at the time of the late 4th century having a Latin Mass per se. Those are not the first translations. Translations had started long before that. But Those are standardizations. St. Jerome was brought in not to translate the Bible into Latin, into which it had never been translated before. There were Latin translations of the Psalms. Already were Latin translations of specific books of the Bible, but they were different in different places and had been done by different people. And they were being used in churches, but they were of varying quality. And so St. Jerome was brought in to standardize the Latin Bible, not to be the first translator. And then there was the whole uprising. The first RSV, KJV host fight happened not in the 1950s in the United States, but in North Africa at the beginning of the 5th century when they got St. Jerome Psalm translations. And people literally rioted in some of the churches because the psalm translations they were used to got replaced by these new ones that was like the end of the world. See, people don't change. Folks, people, individual people change over the course of their life, but people as a whole, people as a group, yeah, we don't change that much. So there's this standardization of the Latin. And then as we mentioned, the fact that now Latin is being used everywhere in Christian circles and the fact that Christianity is now the religion of the Roman Empire by the time we get into the end of the fourth, beginning of the fifth century, means that, as we said, there's no compelling reason for the average person living in Christian North Africa or Western Europe to learn Greek. And so people don't. Why is that a problem? Well, because, as we said, the way translation works, especially in this case, we tend to think, somewhat naively, that there is a word in one language that equals a word in another language. Like what is the Greek word for tree? What is the Greek word for dog?
- [18:42]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Right, yeah.
- [18:42]
Father Stephen DeYoung
And that seems to make sense to us as long as we're talking about nouns like that.
- [18:46]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Sure.
- [18:47]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Right. Like, you could go in your yard and I could point at a tree and I could say, you know, I call that a tree. And my friend next to me could say, el arbol, you know, and we could go, ah, okay, yeah. Those are the two words for that thing. But when you get to concepts, when you get even to verbs. Right. Denoting actions, especially abstract actions and abstract ideas. Homoosios. When you get to those kinds of concepts and words, it's not like you could just point at something. Right. What you're doing now is you're finding a label in the new language, as we said, to apply to the concept that has a certain Greek label. And you don't, you know, you don't do that at random. You don't say, okay, our word for homoosios is going to be canis, which means dog. Right. You're trying to find something in Latin that's as close as you can get to that concept. And there's a sort of reliance in that first generation. There's this reliance on the fact that that first generation is familiar with the concept. They're familiar with the concept. They're just learning the Latin word for it. Problem is, you go a couple of centuries and the only access the people a couple of centuries later have to the concept is the Latin word that was chosen.
- [20:18]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah. So early on, the word is picked and the concept is still understood, but they picked up, you know, a word that fitted as best as possible but kept the understanding. And then later on, after the understanding gets lost, all that's left is the meaning of that particular word. I mean, we have the same problem right now. You know, Orthodox Christians in the United States using English words from the Bible, that means something quite different outside of the Orthodox context. Like the word salvation, for instance. What does it mean to be saved? That means something very different if you are a Baptist versus if you're an Orthodox Christian. And yet they're both using the same word.
- [20:59]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Right. Or even what we mean by grace is different if you're a Roman Catholic or a Protestant or a Orthodox Christian. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. So you have this slippage. And so especially when you get to the point where there's nobody who knows Greek you don't have easy access to someone who knows Greek because you have someone who knows Greek. They could be like, oh, no, no, no, no, no. That Latin word was used for this Greek word. Sort of think about how, regardless of your Christian religious background, right. You have probably heard sermons or read articles or read books where someone will take an English word in the Bible, they'll take an English translation of a Bible verse, and they'll say, well, this English word is being used to translate this Greek word, which actually means more like xyz. Right, right. Because the English word doesn't quite match. And that's fine if you have someone around who can read the original language and sort of keep correcting that so that the concept is handed down generationally and the word doesn't mislead people.
- [22:07]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah.
- [22:08]
Father Stephen DeYoung
The other factor you have, not only is no word a perfect translation for the concept, but words also change meaning over time.
- [22:17]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah. I mean, a great example, for instance, would be, you know, John 1:1. Right. Where energos gets translated in English, as in the beginning was the word. As long as you have some understanding of what logos means and you use the word word, you're probably fine. But if you say, well, it says in the beginning was the word. And we know that this meaning Jesus, that means that Jesus is a word. He's just something that's said. Right. That would be the kind of distortion that we're talking about, where all you have is the word, the later word, the translated word, and you've lost the original sense from the original.
- [22:58]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Or people who use the term word of God to refer to the Bible.
- [23:02]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yes. That's a really obvious good example.
- [23:05]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Yeah. When you read that phrase, is that referring to the Bible? Because we use that terminology all the time now. Well, a lot of times, if you're reading, like St. John's Gospel, that's actually referring to the person of Jesus Christ, not to the Bible. Right.
- [23:18]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah.
- [23:19]
Father Stephen DeYoung
So, yeah. So words change their usage over time. And with Latin, we're talking about 15, 1600 years. Words don't mean the same thing 1500 years later that they meant originally. There's drift. And so you get this slippage. And so you go from Christians who are generally aware of the concepts and just expressing them in Latin to centuries and centuries and centuries and centuries later. Christians reading a Latin word in a text and reading a bunch of meaning back into it from the current usage of those words in the same way that sometimes people do with the English Bible. I don't know if I've told This story on this show before, one of the worst sermons I've ever heard was a guy who was. I mean, he was doing his best. I'm not meaning to really pick on him, it's just this went horribly wrong. He was going one verse at a time. Yeah, this is not J. Vernon McGee.
- [24:27]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Even though he expository preaching, but he's.
- [24:29]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Going with one verse at a time, which normally is fine as long as you keep track of context, which is what's going to be the problem. He gets to the parable of the Good Samaritan. He reads the first verse. A certain man was going down to Jericho, brethren, we need to be certain in our faith.
- [24:49]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Oh, man.
- [24:54]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Right. And see, that's what he'd done. Right? Now, if you know the Greek, you know that what's translated there, the King James as a certain man is just some guy. Right?
- [25:02]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Right.
- [25:03]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Some guy.
- [25:04]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
There was once this guy.
- [25:06]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Right. But he was preaching from his English Bible. Didn't necessarily look up the Greek to see that. And the word certain. Right. Has this other meaning that he read back into it.
- [25:20]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
And it's great. I mean, you mentioned also that words, of course, change over time. Another classic is in the original version of the King James. The word conversation is used in a number of places. I think in a number of places in the New Testament. St. Paul talks about your conversation. And now we use that word to mean, like what you and I are having right now, that we're talking to each other. But in the 17th century, your conversation was the way you lived your life, you know, so if you think it's only about how you talk to other people, then you to come up with a very different interpretation.
- [25:57]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Right. Well, and I have recently a certain Protestant apologist who I won't name, who is not a stupid man, but he made a similar mistake. He was reading the conclusions and the anathemas of the Seventh Ecumenical Council, where it anathematizes anyone who communicates with iconoclasts.
- [26:19]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Oh, no.
- [26:19]
Father Stephen DeYoung
And then he said, you're not even allowed to talk to them.
- [26:23]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Ah, see? Wow. No, it means you can't have communion with them. Like you. Right.
- [26:29]
Father Stephen DeYoung
You don't share. You don't share community with them. You don't celebrate the Eucharist with them. Right. That's what it. Right, yeah, that's what it originally meant. But communication now means.
- [26:40]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah.
- [26:41]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Shared discourse. So these are all examples. This happens with these Latin translations later on. Right. They are perfectly good. Well done. Incredibly well done at the time. They're done. But history then Takes its course. And you get this slippage. Right. You get these shifts. Even at the time that some of these translations are done, that's an issue of time and usage. Right. But even at the time they're first done, there are some little. Little shifts that happen. So in Greek, Orthodox listeners have probably heard this. Other folks, maybe not so much, but the distinction that is made in Orthodox theology between worship and veneration.
- [27:30]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah, yeah.
- [27:31]
Father Stephen DeYoung
The Greek words are latreia, for worship, which means service, and proskine, which. Proskine means to literally to bend the knee.
- [27:44]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah.
- [27:46]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Like to bow down. And that's what we use for veneration. In Latin, the word for veneration is veneration.
- [27:55]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Veneratio. Yeah, yeah.
- [27:57]
Father Stephen DeYoung
And the word for worship is adoremus.
- [28:02]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah. From which we get modern English adore. We adore.
- [28:05]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Right, right. Adoration, yeah. Here's the thing, though. Adoramus, the Latin word etymologically is from aura, to pray and add to or towards. So it means to pray to.
- [28:20]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah, Etymologically, yes, yeah. And the great thing just to.
- [28:26]
Father Stephen DeYoung
That might have caused some confusion in the Reformation.
- [28:29]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah. Like just to muddy the waters. Even in English, when you use the word worship. Now, most people, when they hear that word worship, they understand it to mean something to the effect of stuff you should do or you do towards God or a God. But the irony is that actually, in most of the history of that word in English, it is referred to what we would call veneration. It comes from the word worth, sort of worth ship, sort of to recognize the worthiness of another. And we still have a couple of echoes of that, of that usage in modern English. So, for instance, judges in the UK may be called your worship. And by that, no one means that they're offering religious sacrifices to them. And then, of course, also very famously, the Anglican wedding service includes the phrase, with my body, I the worship, when the. You know, the husband and wife talking to each other, and they do not, again, mean that they are treating one another as gods. They mean that they're showing respect and honor. But of course, now, when we use that word worship, we typically mean it something you do towards God alone. The question, of course, really is, what is the action that you are doing that you're using those words to describe?
- [29:44]
Father Stephen DeYoung
What is the concept that we're labeling with those words? Yeah, people fall into this thing a lot. A lot of the questions we get. I mean, it'd be nice to call them questions about objections or something worse. They'll say, we'll make some distinction like that, and somebody will say, well, here I found the word latreia or I found the word worship in this hymn. You know, before that cross, I bow down in worship.
- [30:10]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Aha.
- [30:12]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Caught. Idolaters. We are not griping to a word. I know this will hurt some people of a certain political persuasion in the United States, but words don't actually mean things.
- [30:26]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah, people mean things.
- [30:28]
Father Stephen DeYoung
People mean things by the words they use. You can fumble over words. You could use words incorrectly, but you're still trying to convey something. The meaning is in what you're trying to convey, not in the words you may mistakenly use if you use them incorrectly. And so when we're making that distinction, we're putting a label on the two halves of that distinction. But it doesn't matter what label you put. We can make up words like they made up the word atonement. We could just make up bleep and blorp. Right. Bleep is what you offer to God alone. Blorp is to give something the honor it's due.
- [31:03]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah.
- [31:04]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Okay. We're just using the words to differentiate the concepts.
- [31:09]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah.
- [31:09]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Okay. The words themselves are not super important. And if you think they are, you're going to have a real problem with our. Once we tell you our next example.
- [31:19]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Dun, dun, dun.
- [31:21]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Because our next example comes from the terminology used for the doctrine of the Holy Trinity.
- [31:27]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah. Try to follow this closely if you can. This will be a little bit difficult, probably.
- [31:33]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Okay. So there is a Latin word substantia.
- [31:38]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah. From which we get modern English substance.
- [31:41]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Right. And there is a Greek word epostasis. Right.
- [31:46]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
And both of these words in both their parts, etymologically mean the same thing. So sub, Latin Latin under IPO, in Greek under stancia. Standing. Stasis. Standing. So literally standing under.
- [32:06]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Underneath. Yes. Yeah.
- [32:09]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
So these words are called calcs of each other that they literally. The parts all translate one for one.
- [32:15]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Right. So you would think that with these two terms are applied theologically in Latin and Greek, respectively, that you would translate epostasis as substantia.
- [32:30]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Right. Yeah. No, they're not.
- [32:37]
Father Stephen DeYoung
The classical Greek, not the language classical Greek. But the classic framing of the doctrine of the Trinity in Greek is that God is one in ousia. And then there are three epostases.
- [32:52]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah.
- [32:53]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Whereas the classical framing in Latin is there is one substantia and three personae.
- [33:01]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah. So even though hypostasis and substantia literally etymologically mean exactly the same thing, they're being used in very different ways in.
- [33:12]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Greek and Latin, essentially opposite ways. Substantia is used in Latin for God's oneness. And in Greek, hypostasis is used for his threeness to try and simplify it for people. Okay, so if you come from the words mean things, Squad, we got a real problem.
- [33:33]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah. No, it's not that words mean things. It's that. It's that words are used to mean things.
- [33:38]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Right, right.
- [33:39]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
By people.
- [33:40]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Right. Because here we have a very counterintuitive example of those labels being applied that. That doesn't make sense under that understanding. But the conceptual idea of God's. Of the unity of God, the unity of the Godhead, of the divine nature, and the concept of the three persons of the Godhead, that concept is in both of those, but it is framed in different terminology. The terminology does not match up in any kind of direct or strict way between the Greek labels and the Latin labels, even though conceptually they're being used to talk about the same reality. Finally, this is the complicated one. The Greek word ener versus the Latin actus. In Aristotle, you find a distinction he makes between dynamis and energia.
- [34:39]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Okay. Which usually gets translated into English as something like power and energy or energies.
- [34:49]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Well, now, yes.
- [34:51]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah.
- [34:52]
Father Stephen DeYoung
In the past, it was typically translated through Latin, right?
- [34:55]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Oh, yeah, right.
- [34:56]
Father Stephen DeYoung
That in and of itself causes an issue. And for Aristotle, these are ontological terms, these are metaphysical terms. These are two ways of being present. You could be present. His classical example is an architect. Right. Even when an architect is not designing a building, he is still an architect. And so when he is not actually designing a building, he is an architect, essentially in dynamics. He has the ability, the power, the potential to design a building, and that makes him an architect. There are also times when he is designing a building. Like he is in the action of designing a building. He is doing it.
- [35:46]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah.
- [35:47]
Father Stephen DeYoung
And that is when he is an architect. In Enriquea, it is he himself designing a building. So he is an architect not because he is able to design a building. He is an architect because he is designing a building.
- [36:04]
Caller Eddie
Okay.
- [36:05]
Father Stephen DeYoung
That's the distinction he makes. Now, that second category, energia, that term is used in the New Testament. That term is used in the fathers. St. Basil makes great use of it, for example, and then becomes ultimately part of the essence and energies distinction in orthodox theology, as that gets elaborated fully. But energia, right. When he used to talk about God, it is God himself present in action. It is God godding, and then you can distinguish the divine energies. Right? So God creating, we do not encounter God in his essence, with all of these capabilities to do these things, we encounter him in action doing those things. Right. We don't encounter God in his essence, which you could talk about its relationship to love itself. We encounter God loving us and the rest of his creation. That's very hard to distinguish in Latin. There's not a. There's not a good Latin word for enria. And so those terms dynamis and aria get translated into Latin as potentia and actress. Potentia for dynamis, just kind of a power and ability and actus, which means something more like an effect. These are not ontological or metaphysical categories per se in Latin. That's why I say they're not a great translation. If you're going for just one to one correlation of the words, if you understand the concept, then it's a fine label to slap on it. Right. But if you don't understand the concept, you're not going to get the concept from the Latin word. And so because this is more like power and effect. Right. A person possesses powers, possesses potentials that can then be actualized. You could bring about an effect. You could use that power to bring about an effect. The architect has the ability to design a building. This is no longer about his identity as an architect or his presence as architect anymore. It is about this person has this ability and then he could go and actualize that ability by actually designing a building. But actors does not refer to his presence in the process of designing the building within the action of designing the building. It refers to the building he designs, or at least the design of the building that he produces. There's a produced effect. And we could do a whole episode just on this. Maybe we will someday. Who knows?
- [39:01]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Who knows?
- [39:03]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Because the way this affects. If you start thinking about it, the way this is going to affect Latin theology's view of ordination of priests and bishops receiving powers, charisms. Right. And powers that they can then use to do things to bring about effects. Right. Very different than the orthodox understanding, participatory understanding based on the idea of energies. Right. But we're not going to do a whole episode on that. We're just using this as another example here that we can go into further. But this. This is a particularly potent example, pun intended, because it is based on this distinction, once we lose sight of the original concepts on which these Latin labels were put, that you get the definition of God as actus puris. God is pure act. Yeah, right. That he is not in the midst of any activity, because that would imply change or it would imply parts, it would imply separation within God.
- [40:17]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah, you can, I was gonna say you can see how like this idea of potential and act, which is in the Latin words, if you have this idea that God is pure act, that. In other words, that everything that he can do, he is doing, he has done and. Yeah, has done. You know, it's, it's a pretty straight line from there to hardline deterministic Calvinism.
- [40:47]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Right. And, and from that you get the idea that God is. All of God's attributes are identical with his essence. This is one of the things that's entailed by actus purists, which causes lots of problems. But again, the. That's a whole episode unto itself. So the early Latin fathers, saints of the church, holy Christian men, understood the concepts apart from the Latin words. They understood the concepts that they were using the Latin words to express and communicate.
- [41:20]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Right.
- [41:21]
Father Stephen DeYoung
But Latin writers later on centuries later were dependent on just the words themselves.
- [41:28]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah. Like an extreme version. An extreme version of this is the KJV only Protestants, you know, who have literally sacralized the King James Bible as being sort of handed down from God as it is. Exactly. In other words, they don't care what the words are translating because they have this English Bible and that's all there is. I'm not saying that the Latin, the later Latin writers are doing that. I'm just saying it's KJV onlyism is a sort of extreme version of that.
- [41:58]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Yeah. Not later Latin writers. See, I'm going to be mean. See, we've already. I'm going to get accused of this anyway. So I'm not, I'm not going to hold back. Trent basically does that because sort of the mark of a true KJV only person. Because, you know, there's people who just prefer the King James. Right. For various reasons. I could, I could empathize with them. Right. Like there are a lot. It has a lot of things going for it as a translation, the English of it and the poetry of it. But the real King JV onlyist is the guy who thinks he could correct the Greek from the English.
- [42:30]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yes. I love those people so much.
- [42:33]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Okay, okay, okay. Well, literally surrounding and post. Trent Rome said you could correct the Greek that was then circulating, like Erasmus's Greek from the Latin.
- [42:47]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Amazing.
- [42:49]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Trent made the Latin vulgate as it stood at Trent, the, the biblical text, by the way, all its particulars.
- [42:58]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
I just have to break in just for fun because there's someone in the YouTube chat right now who doesn't believe that we're actually live because I'm talking to them in the YouTube chat at the same time. So. Sir Vilder. Yes, we're live. I'm talking to you both in the chat and on the show.
- [43:16]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Wilder. Is this a Dutchman?
- [43:17]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
I. I don't know. It might be.
- [43:19]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Any relationship to Geert?
- [43:21]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
I don't know. Let us know. Sir Vilder.
- [43:26]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Yes. No, Father Andrew just doesn't pay attention while I talk. It has nothing to do with this being pre recorded. It's true.
- [43:33]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
My attention does drift sometimes. You do go on.
- [43:36]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Yeah. I mean, I don't blame. I don't say I blame you. I'm just saying my attention drifts while I'm talking. Sometimes I lose my train of thought because I'm like. I get bored with what I'm saying and start thinking about something else.
- [43:49]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
I mean, it's great in French. You bore yourself.
- [43:51]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Je mait. Yeah. That's why I have to keep drinking caffeine. So the first sort of major Latin theological writer, at least, who gets credit is Tertullian. And we all know he flakes out, goes and becomes a Montanist.
- [44:13]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah.
- [44:15]
Father Stephen DeYoung
So that has nothing to do with the mountains. Has everything to do with Montanus.
- [44:19]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
I mean, his name means mountain, but.
- [44:20]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Yeah, the crazed heretics. Right? Yeah, but I mean, like much later in church history, in the 19th century, you have within Roman Catholicism the ultramontanists.
- [44:29]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Ultramontanism. I know.
- [44:31]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Yes. Which does not mean you're no connection between these.
- [44:34]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
We should. I mean, I'm just going to put this as a request. We should do an episode on Montanism.
- [44:40]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Oh, the original.
- [44:41]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah, the original one. Because it's before the 4th century, which you say you don't care about anything after the 4th century, that means you have to care.
- [44:47]
Father Stephen DeYoung
No. Montanus and his two female prophetesses, who he. I know, traveled everywhere and stayed with. I know nothing. Sus. Anyway, but so Tertullian. Yeah. Started well and then someone cut in on him and he flaked out. But his main claim to Latin linguistic fame is he's the first one that we know of to use the term trinitas. The word that's used in Greek, of course, is trios, which means technically trio. But who we're really talking about, though, when we talk about who frames, and we've at least mentioned this in passing on the show before. Who frames. Not Roger Rabbit, but Latin theology in terms of its terminology, pun intended. And the general scope of it is, of course, St. Augustine.
- [45:40]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yep. He's the guy.
- [45:43]
Father Stephen DeYoung
And as we always say, despite accusations otherwise, hither and yon, St. Augustine is a saint.
- [45:52]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yes.
- [45:53]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Objectively, he is a saint of the Orthodox Church.
- [45:55]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
He's on the.
- [45:56]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Commemorated on June 15th.
- [45:58]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yes. You can find him in actual synaxaria.
- [46:01]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Yes.
- [46:02]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
There, there is a canonical icon of him here in my studio.
- [46:07]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Yes.
- [46:08]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
He is called a Church father by ecumenical councils.
- [46:12]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Yes. But really, this is. Here's the core thing, guys. If you want to know if someone is a saint in the Orthodox Church, are they in the Cynics area? Are they on the calendar? If they are, they are.
- [46:22]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
If they're not, are they actually being celebrated?
- [46:25]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Purely objective. There is no subjectivity to this. And objectively, St. Augustine is a saint. He is named a church Father by the fifth Ecumenical Council, so no shade is being thrown at him. He is the one who ends up creating most of the later Latin theological terminology. And by that I don't mean necessarily. He's the first one to use that word, a particular word in a theological context, Christian theological context. But that. It's his usage. It's the way he applies those labels to concepts that gets picked up by later writers. Part of that is for historical reasons. As we were talking about, if you think about. We were talking about that frame where people stop learning Greek and just know Latin. St. Augustine is living during that time. So St. Augustine himself does not know Greek. Right. His Greek is shoddy at best. He was to Greek as I am to singing, but he was in the Church that was formed by those concepts. And so he understood the faith. But because of his lack of Greek knowledge, he's expressing it entirely in Latin. Right. He's taking cues from Latin translations that he's reading, but he's also having to frame a lot of things himself. And so in St. Augustine, despite his lack of Greek knowledge, you still find that, as we were saying about the. The early Latin Fathers, he is, by those Latin words, implying Greek terms. And if you read him that way, if you read St. Augustine as not implying later Latin meanings with his Latin words or later Latin usages, but implying Greek, the Greek Christian concepts, you can understand why the Church Fathers of the east who read him during his life and thereafter did not think he was teaching something radically different than them.
- [48:28]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Right. They read him in context of that period's theology in the Church at large.
- [48:34]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Yes. It's not because they were also teaching Medieval Roman Catholicism or Calvinism. It's because they understood St. Augustine to be teaching the same thing they were teaching in Greek, just in Latin. Okay. That was their reading of him. And it's that reading of him that has him recognized as a saint. But later generations reading St. Augustine, and St. Augustine writes this voluminous amount of work in Latin. Most of the rest of the Church Fathers are in Greek still in the late 4th and early 5th centuries. Yep, you got a few people like St. John, Cassian and some of the later people, but you do not have a lot of Latin fathers. And so for subsequent generations who only know Latin, St. Augustine becomes their whole. He is the fathers, essentially, for a lot of future generations. Right. The Fathers is, you know, 80 or 90% St. Augustine and then some other writings. And that, of course, causes some of the slippage we were talking about. Not in the sense that St. Augustine caused theology to go wrong, but that the slippage in language and in context, historical context, causes people to read St. Augustine differently over time. That said, if you want to hold St. Augustine guilty of something that would be integrating Platonic metaphysics into Christianity.
- [50:03]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
He.
- [50:03]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Is the one who does that. Some of the things like divine simplicity and stuff that we were just talking about do come in with St. Augustine and then become ubiquitous in the West. But in addition to just the word slippage, the word usage changing, all those things we've already talked about, people fail to read St. Augustine as a whole. They fail to read him systematically, and they fail to read him contextually. What do you mean they failed to read him contextually? Well, he retracted a lot of stuff that he wrote.
- [50:37]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Right.
- [50:38]
Father Stephen DeYoung
De Trinitate in its entirety toward the end of his life. St. Augustine refused to have copies made because he said there was nothing in it worth reading.
- [50:47]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Basically put it out of print, so to speak.
- [50:49]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Yes. Nonetheless, De Trinitate became the basis for all Trinitarian theology in the west going forward. He also published his retractions. This is one of many reasons to admire St. Augustine as a saint. That takes a lot of humility after you've written a whole bunch at the end of your life to look back on it and essentially publish a book listing all the things you think you got wrong. Now, in hindsight, that's something.
- [51:22]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Why is it that, of course, there's other things he did retractions on as well?
- [51:26]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Yeah, yeah. Most, certainly not all. But the lion's share of his retractions actually come from his anti Pelagian writings. Sorry, Calvinists. The stuff of his that they love most is the stuff where he thought. Where he basically says in his retractions, he kind of went to an opposite extreme in arguing against Pelagianism oh, so.
- [51:50]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
A lot of the stuff that hard predestinarians super love is. Exactly. Stuff where he's like, yeah, let's scratch that.
- [51:58]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Yes. Whereas, like that quote we gave a few episodes ago he made in the City of God about astrology saying that God does not control all wills. That statement was made three years before he died.
- [52:11]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah, yeah.
- [52:14]
Father Stephen DeYoung
So unless you think late St. Augustine is his dying utterances and everything else was retracted, that's pretty close to the end of his life.
- [52:23]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah. So the question is, why is it that these retractions are not more widely known or just sort of get ignored?
- [52:32]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Well, first of all, they're boring reading.
- [52:36]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
That's true. That would be like reading Errata, you know, for.
- [52:40]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Yes, you're reading Errata. Yeah. And there's, by the way, just. There's. In relation to that other point, he did not retract a single word of his treatise on the freedom of the will. But yeah, so they're not. They're not great reading. In order to really understand them, you have to have read all of the rest of St. Augustine.
- [52:59]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah.
- [53:00]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Which pretty much no one has. Honestly, there's like. And I am not one of these people. I have not read all of St. Augustine. Not even close. I've read more than the average bear. But, like, not close to all of it. There's maybe five, like, St. Augustine scholars in the world who have read all of St. Augustine, like, literally.
- [53:19]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah.
- [53:20]
Father Stephen DeYoung
I mean, you haven't read it all. You're not going to know what he's talking about in the retractions a chunk of the time, because he's referring to works you haven't read and you're not going to know the context. So the retractions is really hard to read effectively unless you have this really thoroughgoing knowledge of his works already going into it. But also what ends up happening in the west, frankly, by the time you get to the Reformation, it's people pitting parts of St. Augustine against other parts of St. Augustine. So the Reformers, both the Lutherans and the Calvinists, are latching onto stuff from the Anti Pelagian writings, soteriological stuff out of St. Augustine, and quoting him to back their positions. And Rome is latching onto his sacramental theology, his ecclesiology, you know, the fact that he's a bishop and a monk, you know, these kind of things, and arguing in the other direction and so trying to have this sort of comprehensive understanding of the man himself, the saint himself, and what he understood and how he understood things at the end of his life was not nearly as useful as weaponizing quotations in an ongoing argument. So I think he's been done wrong and he serves because of that. He serves as kind of a test case. The fact that you could have people with sort of radically different views on things both grabbing stuff and quoting it. This shows you how that original context of the late 4th and early 5th century and those Latin fathers is lost 1000 years later by the time you get to the time of the Reformation. Yeah, I don't think I've done this on this show. I've only referenced it. So I will do this. I'll do this relatively quickly. Here's a test case on St. Augustine. What St. Augustine himself, the saint believed and taught about original sin is neither the later Roman Catholic view nor the later Protestant view, because both of those hinge on different interpretations of essentially the concept of guilt. In fact, you will generally get both of those groups saying that St. Augustine taught original guilt. In the case of Luther and Calvin, they're going to argue that that guilt is essentially forensic, penal, criminal case guilt. Right. Everyone is born guilty of Adam's crime, the penalty for which is eternity in hell, the penalty for which is spiritual death. In that kind of structure, by the way, your own personal sin is kind of completely irrelevant. It's like getting convicted for multiple death sentences. Like, you can only kind of go to hell once. Right. So whereas. Whereas the understanding of guilt in Roman Catholicism is much more nuanced. We're going to get into that a little bit in the second half, but it is more in the context of a debt or a liability, which is actually closer to the word that St. Augustine actually uses in Latin. In Latin, he doesn't use the word that you would normally associate with guilt, the Latin word culpa, from which we get the English word culpable, guilty, responsible. That's not the word he uses. And that is a word that St. Augustine uses. So, for example, it is Ode to the Paschal Candle, the only hymn or poem we have that he wrote. He uses the phrase famously, Felix culpa. Oh, happy fault, right? Oh, happy guilt. Oh, happy sin. Talking about Adam's fall into sin and calling it happy because it brought about so great a salvation. So he's capable of using that concept, culpa. He has that in his tool chest. That's not what he uses to describe what people inherited from Adam. What he uses to describe what people inherited from Adam is reatus. And reatus in Latin can mean a lack, a liability, an extreme Edet. Right. So you can see the later. The medieval Roman usage of it is closer to St. Augustine than the Protestant Reformation usage of the term, what they read back into it. But this is why it's a good test case here. It's not identical to the concept that St. Augustine was trying to express. And the way you can see that is, again, if you read some more St. Augustine, because we have to say, okay, if we're saying that some element, something about the sin of Adam. Because he doesn't just say every human being is born with Adam's sin. He says they're born with the reatos of Adam's sin. Something about Adam's sin, he's saying is inherited by every. Every person who is born on this earth. We have to look, if we want some clues into what St. Augustine means, we have to look at how St. Augustine views sin. St. Augustine does not view sin as a crime punishable by eternity in hell. It's not how he talks about sin that doesn't work with his Platonic metaphysics. He doesn't even really talk about it in the sense of a literal debt that has to be repaid. He talks about sin as a privation, a metaphysical privation, a lack. And so what you actually find is that St. Augustine talks about the effects of the fall in two closely related ways that show you what he means, what he believes human beings inherit. One of those is the grace that gets referred to later in Latin theology as the super adinum bonum, that Adam is created. And Adam, as created, is partaking in participating in God's grace. From the moment of his creation, when he is expelled from paradise, he is deprived of that grace, and he has to receive that grace anew. So part of what St. Augustine is saying is that every human who's born is born without that participation in God's grace. And they have to come to participate in God's grace anew, namely through baptism. That's why you have to baptize a baby. Second piece. So the second piece has to do with a Greek distinction. We already talked about dynamis. And. Because if you understand Aristotle's view of virtue, and you could go read the Nicomachean ethics if you want to understand that better. But virtue is an acquired property. It is an excellence. But it is an excellence found through exercising a power, a dynamis that you have in an excellent way, right. I. E. You have a. If you were talking about humans and ethics, you as a human have the. The dynamics, the power to write love, to Run, to jump, to think. Right. If you do that excellently, if you do that well, and you do it well habitually. Right. That is virtue. Right. But for Aristotle, the fact that those things have to be habituated, those virtues have to be acquired, means that for every dynamis possessed by a nature. Right. So let's use human still, by human nature, every dynames also entails an adenames.
- [61:55]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Not potentiality.
- [61:58]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Right, right. A, an impotency.
- [62:01]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Right, yeah.
- [62:02]
Father Stephen DeYoung
The possibility that it will not be exercised at all or will not be exercised excellently. Okay. And so the other piece for St. Augustine, St. Augustine is trying to put this concept across as this privation. What is, ah. When you attach it to something in Greek, it is the alpha privative. Right. Sin is a privation for St. Augustine. Right. So now Adam for St. Augustine is created. Excellent. Right. He's created virtuous in all of his human powers.
- [62:41]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Right.
- [62:43]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Now humans are born with this adenomis, this impotency, this. Right. Possibility that those will not be actualized, this potential to decay, to air, to fail, weakness. Right. Those are the two core things. If you really look at the way St. Augustine talks about this. Right. Both of those things are the same things taught by the Greek Fathers that nowadays gets labeled as quote unquote ancestral sin over against quote unquote original sin. But frankly, if we're just talking about St. Augustine himself, he's not teaching anything different than the Greek Fathers on this. But he comes to be read differently.
- [63:26]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah.
- [63:27]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Later in history and then radically differently by the time you get to the 16th century reformers. Right. Well beyond what he says. So we mentioned there's this period right after St. Augustine, these immediately subsequent generations where St. Augustine is the fathers.
- [63:44]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah. And really kind of a bottleneck.
- [63:47]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Right. And so this period of time is often referred to as the Platonic period in Latin theology. It starts with a figure like Baby who writes his own De Trinitate, which is basically notes on St. Augustine's de Trinitate. They're not identical, but I mean he contributes things, but I mean he's building off of. He's standing at St. Augustine's shoulders. Right.
- [64:13]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
He's better known for his constellation of philosophy.
- [64:16]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Right. Which is overtly Platonic. Right. And then goes to Anselm. I know everybody thinks satisfaction theory and atonement when they think of Anselm now because of Kurdaeus Homo. But he also wrote the pro Slogian and the monologian. He wrote literal dialogues. Right. Like Plato style dialogues. Remember he also came up with the ontological argument for the existence of God. Right. So Anselm was a figure who's deep in Platonic metaphysics in most of his works, and so he's sort of the last big figure. There are other figures, of course, after him that we're going to get to in the second half, but that's going to be sort of outside this Platonic period. And just as a fun fact, Father Andrew didn't know this. One of his interlocutors in one of his dialogues is named Bozo.
- [65:08]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
It's true. I did not know that.
- [65:10]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Which is where the clown gets his name. I hope that's true, because. Well, yeah, no, I mean, that's. There is. Because imagine the interlocutors in Plato's dialogues, right? They're all kind of dumb, Right. So same kind of thing, right. And then finally, during this period, and we've mentioned this on the show before, but you can see already as you get into the 7th and 8th centuries in Latin theology, there start to be debates, and the debates have a particular character. So an example we've used on the show before that we'll use again now, is the debate between Retramnus and Radbertus on the Eucharist, where they were arguing about whether in the Eucharist it is Christ's crucified body and blood, or his resurrected and glorified body and blood. The reason this is a good example is it shows us the questions that are being asked in Latin theology in this period. The debate is about what the Eucharist is. And those debates are going to continue right into the Reformation. Right. What the Eucharist is.
- [66:31]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah.
- [66:32]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Rather than what you see in the east in treatises on the Eucharist, which talk about what the Eucharist does. Right. And part of that difference is that the concept of the Eucharist as a mystery, the concept of apophaticism, right. The. The idea of the transcendent, the idea that if there is a way that these things, quote, unquote, work, it is concealed from all seekers, right? It is. It is miraculous. It is beyond human understanding. The west becomes far more confident in human reason. There is a shift in how they understand reason. It's subtle at first. It takes a long time for this to finish happening. But even as late as Thomas Aquinas, you find. Thomas Aquinas talks about the noose, essentially using the word intellectum. But you. Very soon after that, you start getting some slippage, and how intellectum is used, meaning it isn't really pointing at the same concept as the Greek word noose anymore.
- [67:41]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah.
- [67:42]
Father Stephen DeYoung
So there is this, there comes to be this very confident view. We'll leave it here for this first half because we'll see how this develops in the second half. This very confident view about the ability of human reason to understand the details, the mechanisms of how God and salvation work. All right.
- [68:10]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Well, we've just spent 80 minutes on basically late antiquity. We're not going to quite get depart from it yet in the second half, but we're going to head into the Middle Ages, so we're going to take a little break.
- [68:22]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Much less boring. Much more boring. So we'll move quicker. Quicker.
- [68:25]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
That's true. Take a little break and we'll be right back.
- [68:29]
Narrator
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. Ancient Near Eastern texts such as the BAAL Cycle portray the pagan God BAAL as a rebel, the hero of a revolution, worshiped and glorified for his long string of victories. In the Baal book, A Biography of the Devil, Fr. Stephen DeYoung shows that the Hebrew Scriptures consciously turn the Baal story on its head, depicting him as a failed and defeated rebel who nonetheless tries to steal the glory that belongs to Almighty God. From these scriptures, the figure of the devil emerged within Jewish and Christian tradition. Father De Jong works through the Old and New Testament passages that refer to various BAAL stories, and he surveys BAAL worship through followers, beliefs, religious practices and liturgical life. In these pages, we will see that the figures of BAAL and the Devil, the Prince of Demons, are one and the same. To find this book and others like it, you can go to store.ancientfaith.com Again, that is store. 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.
- [70:17]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Hey, welcome back, everybody. We're, we just spent 80 minutes talking about late antique developments in Latin theology. We're not going to quite leave that yet.
- [70:30]
Father Stephen DeYoung
You're really focused on that 80 minute thing. Like are you worried about your bedtime already? Is that what's going.
- [70:35]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Absolutely. No.
- [70:36]
Father Stephen DeYoung
You're going to ride home on your ball cycle.
- [70:39]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah. I'm just wondering if it might be. I don't think it's a record for a single half for us yet? I don't know, actually.
- [70:48]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Oh, no. But first halves go along a lot.
- [70:51]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
It's true, it's true. But we do actually have some calls.
- [70:58]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Are they happy?
- [71:00]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
I don't know. We'll find out. We'll find out.
- [71:02]
Father Stephen DeYoung
But, yeah, we got that mean yet.
- [71:04]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
So we have. I know we have Eddie calling from Texas, and. And Eddie is wondering about, you know, some of the words and stuff, the Greek and Latin words that we talked about in the first half. So, Eddie, welcome to the Lord of Spirits podcast.
- [71:20]
Caller Eddie
Thank you for having me. So, Father DeYoung, you. You got me confused. I thought I knew what I was doing, and now you shook the foundations. I always thought. I thought. Well, first off, I thought it was Latvia, and now I found out it's latrea, so I've been saying it wrong the whole time.
- [71:36]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Wait, you said Latvia? Latvia.
- [71:40]
Caller Eddie
No, Latria. Latvia.
- [71:43]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
No, it's really Latria. Don't. Don't. Don't follow Father Steven's Greek pronunciation. It's. It's vaguely Erasmian.
- [71:50]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Okay. Yeah, I thought it was Latvia.
- [71:52]
Caller Eddie
And then he said latreia. So then I felt like less of a man than I already feel like. Just normally.
- [71:59]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Just listen to your local Greeks and how to pronounce Greek. Buddy.
- [72:03]
Father Stephen DeYoung
All vowels of diphthongs are E's. That's just.
- [72:05]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
That's right.
- [72:06]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Go with it. Yeah.
- [72:08]
Caller Eddie
So I thought it was latria and dulia, and then you threw in proskinesis. So how did those three words fit together, is what was my question?
- [72:19]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Well, go ahead, Father.
- [72:21]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Latria and dulia are kind of synonyms.
- [72:26]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah. I mean, like, literally speaking, latria is service and dulia is service. Like from a slave is to serve.
- [72:37]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Yeah.
- [72:37]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah. So they're kind of the same thing. And then proskinesis is, you know, veneration, bowing, literally. So.
- [72:47]
Caller Eddie
So the Orthodox veneration is strictly there. Okay. Because I. Then I had it explained to me wrong then, because I was told it's.
- [72:55]
Father Stephen DeYoung
About the concepts, not the words.
- [72:58]
Caller Eddie
Right.
- [72:59]
Father Stephen DeYoung
But I was.
- [72:59]
Caller Eddie
I was. I was told latria is the worship you give to God. Dulia is what we give to the saints. Am I totally wrong on that, or.
- [73:06]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Well, so what I'm trying to say is that it's the concepts that are important. Don't get hung up on the words.
- [73:11]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah. The actual actions.
- [73:13]
Father Stephen DeYoung
We could call it bleep and blorp.
- [73:15]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah. We put bread and wine on an altar to God. We bow we name churches after, we make icons of saints, we sing their praises, but we do not give them sacrifices of bread and wine. You see the difference?
- [73:37]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Because if you put all the emphasis on the words, like it takes just a few minutes searching to find some hymn or something where one of those Greek words is used differently.
- [73:47]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah, like, like for instance, in the, the feast on January 13 of the veneration of the chains of the Apostle Peter. There's a lot of translations of those texts where you can say, you can see where it says, we worship your chains, O Peter. And it does not mean we're offering sacrifices to those chains. It just means we're, we're kissing them, we're, you know, venerating them, we're showing them respect and honor. So the key thing is really the actions. And sometimes the words can slip around, like proskinesis can sometimes get used to refer to worship, you know, but, but the question is, what is the action being done?
- [74:28]
Caller Eddie
Gotcha. And is it, is it possible? Can I slide in one, one extra little short question?
- [74:33]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Sure, sure.
- [74:34]
Caller Eddie
I, I, I've talked to both of you independently on different podcasts, and now that I have you together, I would like to know, what would it take for you from New York? Father, Dammit, you need to see that movie.
- [74:45]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Well, first you'd have to pronounce my last name correctly.
- [74:52]
Caller Eddie
Did I pronounce it incorrect?
- [74:54]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
I'm afraid so. So that means you've lost any chance of me watching.
- [74:57]
Father Stephen DeYoung
I, I yell your name every time I hit my thumb with a hammer.
- [75:00]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
I know when my dad was in the Navy, he used to say that he was never sure whether someone was cussing at him or calling his name because they would all mispronounce it.
- [75:09]
Caller Eddie
No, I said damic.
- [75:11]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
See, that's still wrong, buddy.
- [75:12]
Father Stephen DeYoung
That's not correct. It's damic.
- [75:14]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
It's Damic. Like night and day Mick.
- [75:17]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Yes. As opposed to an Irishman at night.
- [75:21]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Right.
- [75:24]
Caller Eddie
I'm a loser at life. You guys got me, man.
- [75:30]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
I sometimes wish that my great grandfather had left the name where it was, which was Domica.
- [75:36]
Father Stephen DeYoung
But yeah, that would be way easier to pronounce.
- [75:38]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
He apparently thought that Americans couldn't say that or whatever. I don't know. So we got Damick. It still has all the, all the, all the consonants are intact. He just did a number on the vowels. Oh, well, well, well.
- [75:50]
Caller Eddie
I still think you need to see Escape from New York, and then we can revisit the issue down the road. Thank you so much for taking my question. I genuinely appreciate you two.
- [75:58]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Thanks for calling, Eddie. All right.
- [76:01]
Father Stephen DeYoung
I think U2 is overrated. I prefer REM.
- [76:06]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Wow, that is the spiciest take of the evening.
- [76:09]
Father Stephen DeYoung
There you go. So we have Rachel. How pompous do you have to be to call yourself the Edge and dress like a pilgrim all the time?
- [76:18]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
It's true. It's true. So we have Rachel calling from Walnut Creek, California, who says that she has an. Actually to deliver on the translation of a specific Greek word mentioned in a previous episode. So, Rachel, are you ready to deliver your. Actually, welcome to the Lord of Spirits podcast.
- [76:38]
Caller Eddie
Oh, boy.
- [76:39]
Caller Rachel
Can you hear me?
- [76:40]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
We hear you.
- [76:41]
Caller Rachel
Hello? Okay. Yeah, well, I guess it's an, um. Actually, I was more just curious to. To hear where the source of.
- [76:49]
Caller Eddie
In the.
- [76:50]
Caller Rachel
In Genesis 3, in the garden, that this Satan is described as a serpent. And I've heard Father Stephen say that the Greek word is drakkon dragon, and I can't find anything for that. I always. Version of the Septuagint or the Greek Old Testament that I can find says Ophis, like serpent, which just means serpent.
- [77:14]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
So.
- [77:17]
Caller Rachel
That was the thought there. And then I had a broader question about translation.
- [77:21]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Okay. Did you, in fact say that, Father.
- [77:24]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Stephen, and if so, it's a textual variant?
- [77:27]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
A textual variant, yes. Yeah. I think he has, like, next to all of his action figures on the shelf, which is real, by the way. There's photos of this. He has some.
- [77:40]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Oh, you don't know the half brother, right? I know you gotta come down here and visit. Anyway, I'm ready.
- [77:46]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
I'm ready. Yeah. I mean, I'm all ready for Cajun food during Lent, but. Yeah. Don't you have some, like, text somewhere, some massive volume that shows you every textual variation in, like, the Greek scripture?
- [78:02]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Well, yeah, it's getting published. Yeah, basically. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I have. I have. I have books that have photos of all the New Testament papyri. I have books. Yeah. So, yes, it is a picture.
- [78:16]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Do you remember. Happen to remember offhand which manuscript tradition or whatever that was from?
- [78:21]
Father Stephen DeYoung
No, I do not.
- [78:22]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
No. Okay. Yeah.
- [78:24]
Father Stephen DeYoung
No, but if I. If I didn't say it was a textual variant, I should have.
- [78:29]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Okay.
- [78:30]
Father Stephen DeYoung
If I said that's just the word that's there in the Greek, then that. That would be an incorrect statement. So I would accept an, um, actually on that.
- [78:39]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Okay.
- [78:40]
Father Stephen DeYoung
If that is what I said. But I don't remember what I said, so. But I.
- [78:43]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
You can.
- [78:43]
Father Stephen DeYoung
You know, who knows?
- [78:44]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
You can go spend the points that you got for them. Actually, Rachel, at any. At any good bookstore near You.
- [78:50]
Caller Eddie
Oh, I will.
- [78:51]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Okay. So what is your broader question?
- [78:55]
Caller Rachel
Yeah, just. I'll try to keep it brief, basically. I've heard you guys talk about that in some ways, America is kind of like the new Babylon, the new Roman Empire. In a lot of ways we are. One way I would say that we're maybe not is that we speak English. And at least in a lot of those, you know, like Greek and Latin and stuff, there are in abundance of Orthodox texts in those languages. And, you know, so far, at least that I'm aware of, there's not really a whole lot of English to that point. But I really just like, for us as native English speakers, is it incumbent, if we have a penchant for languages or anything like that, to learn these, you know, Orthodox languages? I've heard you say that a lot of Orthodox texts are still not available in English. So should we just wait for someone to translate these? Should we take it on their word? Is it a good idea for us to go ahead and, you know, try to understand it better that way? And the languages that we should be learning, you know, I don't want to be spicy, but, you know, I don't really understand other than the scriptures, like Hebrew, you know, really, like, it hasn't been an Orthodox language in, like, 2,000 years. So wouldn't it make a lot more sense to learn Greek, Slavic languages, Georgian, Romanian languages that, you know, Orthodox people actually have use. So, yeah, that would be.
- [80:31]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Oh, oh, can I start with this one?
- [80:34]
Father Stephen DeYoung
I will.
- [80:35]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
I mean, number one, like, you started off saying that you did not think that comparing the United States to Babylon is a good comparison, because there's not that many Orthodox texts in English. There's way more in English than there were in ancient Babylonian or, you know, languages speaking around that area. And, I mean, Christianity has been in English in one form or another for 1300, 1400 years, something like that.
- [81:03]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Humanist.
- [81:05]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yep, yep. I mean, honestly, I like to mention this to some of my friends in seminary. Christianity arrived in English before it did in Slavonic. So, yeah. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. The earliest English texts we have. Actually, the earliest English texts we have are all Christian, and they date from at least the 8th century, probably earlier, which is long before the conversion of the Rus, centuries earlier. So, yeah, I mean, you know, like. Like Saint Cadman's Hymn is one of the earliest English text. It is possibly the earliest English poetry. There's another text called the Dream of the Rude, which. Which might be a little earlier, but they're both 8th century at the latest. Maybe 7th century. So I mean, the question of Orthodox languages, you know, I don't know what you do with that because like there's a huge amount of variety in terms of languages that have, have had Orthodox theology in them for centuries. You got everything from, you know, like Arabic and Georgian to Romanian to Slavonic to Greek, you know, on and on. And yeah, of course the presence of the church in those places can have a transformative effect on the language. But at the same time, like the form of Arabic that is used in the Divine Liturgy in the Middle east is essentially the same form of Arabic that is used in the Quran. So what do you do with that? Like, is Arabic an Orthodox language? I mean, it says in the Bible that Arabic is one of the languages that was heard at Pentecost, you know, with the apostles there.
- [82:56]
Caller Eddie
Right.
- [82:57]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
So I, I think the question is, I mean, if one is going to be a ling. A scholar, you know, you should learn the language of whatever it is that you're studying. Absolutely. But the fact it, like, let's say the only language you speak is English, that does not mean that you are cut off from understanding Orthodox Christianity. Now. You should probably hesitate to, you know, say it, say things, say authority, authoritative sounding things about certain matters. Right. If you don't know like any Greek for instance, which is probably the most useful language to learn in terms of, of Orthodox theology. But, but you're not cut off from, and you're certainly not cut off from being a saint. You know, like, you know, we have a newly canonized saint, Saint Olga of Alaska. How much Greek do you think she knew? You know, I'm not even sure how much Slavonic she would have known, even though I do know that they use Slavonic in some of the churches in Alaska. But she probably was worshiping in her own native language. I don't know, I'm just speculating off the top of my head. But she's a saint. So yeah, I mean it's good, it's absolutely great, awesome to learn these other languages. But I don't think that, I think the idea that there's a sort of sacralization, like at what point do you consider the language to be an Orthodox language? Like when does that happen? How long does it have to be in that language and used for what? You know, I don't think there's a good answer to that. And even also there was early on there was something, well, not super early on there was something called the trilingual heresy, which is where some were actually preaching against the new invented Slavonic language because they were saying, well, you know, Christianity really should only be expressed in Greek, Latin or Hebrew because those were the languages that were on the titulus that hung above Christ's head on the cross. Which is nonsense. It's just nonsense.
- [84:58]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Finally, a heresy I can get behind.
- [85:05]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
So, yeah, you know, language becomes holy by using it for holy purposes.
- [85:12]
Caller Rachel
That's kind of what I mean.
- [85:14]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah, yeah.
- [85:15]
Caller Rachel
So English, like languages that Orthodox people like, use, have a history of using and that have engaged with orthodox theology in those languages to understand it from like an English speaker's perspective.
- [85:29]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah, yeah. I think, you know, if you attend church a lot and you read your. Read the scriptures and you listen to the preaching of your priest and the catechists in your parish, you're going to have a good understanding of what it is you need to know. You are. If you want to go beyond that, then, yeah, maybe you should do some language study. And that's great. I mean, we need more people doing that. So.
- [85:56]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Allow me to give the minority report.
- [85:58]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Go for it, Father.
- [86:00]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Well, first of all, Arabic did not exist in the first century AD as a language.
- [86:05]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Not as it exists now, that's for sure.
- [86:07]
Father Stephen DeYoung
No, it didn't exist at all.
- [86:09]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
There was a. What, Proto Semitic, whatever.
- [86:12]
Father Stephen DeYoung
No, it was a dialect. They were speaking a dialect of Aramaic.
- [86:17]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah, yeah.
- [86:19]
Father Stephen DeYoung
It's doubtful whether Arabic even existed when the Quran was written. There's like a big debate about.
- [86:23]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah, sure.
- [86:25]
Father Stephen DeYoung
But also in defense of Hebrew and Aramaic, you're not going to be able to understand the Bible in Greek unless you know some Hebrew and. Or Aramaic.
- [86:38]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
I agree.
- [86:39]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Because it's full of Hebrew and Aramaic grammar. Even though they're writing in Greek. You're not going to be able to learn Georgian without knowing some Aramaic. Syriac is a dialect of Aramaic. Arabic is essentially a spin off the Georgian thing.
- [87:00]
Caller Rachel
I'm not too sure about because I do know some Georgian. I have no idea about Aramaic.
- [87:05]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Well, there are segments of the church in Georgia that use Aramaic as a liturgical language.
- [87:12]
Caller Rachel
Oh, okay.
- [87:13]
Father Stephen DeYoung
That's what I was getting at.
- [87:15]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
And Georgia had early on extensive contacts with the Syriac Aramaic speaking world. I mean, the earliest church in Georgia was actually under the Church of Antioch.
- [87:30]
Father Stephen DeYoung
So. And Semitic languages, once you learn one, picking up others is relatively easy.
- [87:36]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
So you too can learn ugaritic, death curses.
- [87:39]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Yeah, I mean, that one is an outlier, admittedly. Right. Unless you're like super into Old Testament studies. Fair enough. Skipping ugaritic. But there is a lot of Syriac, Christian Syriac literature that's untranslated. There's even a fair amount of Arabic, Christian literature.
- [87:57]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
The majority of the church fathers are still untranslated.
- [88:00]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Yeah. So those, those, like dipping your toes in Semitic languages is not unhelpful. But just in general, every American listening needs to hear this. One of the best things you can do in life, in terms of enriching your life and broadening your understanding of things, is learn another language.
- [88:23]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Absolutely. Even if it's just to read it.
- [88:26]
Father Stephen DeYoung
You know, I know there's a whole. This is Mirka talk merkin. Right. And because English is sort of spread everywhere, you don't have to learn another language. But people, because of that, deprive themselves of a lot of good things that come with learning another language. If you're going to learn another language, why not write one of these orthodox languages? And then once you've learned it, why not help with the translations?
- [88:56]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yep. I hope that helps, Rachel.
- [88:59]
Caller Rachel
Yeah. Thanks, guys.
- [89:00]
Caller Eddie
You're the best.
- [89:01]
Caller Rachel
God bless.
- [89:02]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
All righty. Thank you. Okay, we're going to take John, who's calling from Toronto. John has a question about pagan philosophy.
- [89:10]
Father Stephen DeYoung
John, welcome to the deep in the heart of Kyustan.
- [89:13]
Caller Eddie
Yes, yes, thank you. Father, can you hear me? Okay?
- [89:18]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
We can hear you. Okay.
- [89:20]
Caller Eddie
All right. Father's blessed. Thank you so much for your show. I, you know, my wife and I are huge fans. We really love it. It's replaced primetime television for us. So I think that's a huge compliment to how great the show is because we watch it every single day. So thank you again. My question is about.
- [89:36]
Father Stephen DeYoung
We need to use that as a tagline that we're better than the cbc.
- [89:42]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Okay. Don't get.
- [89:42]
Caller Eddie
Don't get me started on the cbc. That might not be your favor. Okay. But you were a truly excellent show. So my question is about pagan philosophy. I'm trying to connect a few things that you mentioned on the show about the gods of the nations and about the pagan gods. So if I've been following and understanding correctly, the pagan gods are demons, right?
- [90:09]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yep.
- [90:09]
Caller Eddie
And the pagans who wrote pagan literature and pagan philosophy were also deeply religious people like Plato. They were. They. They followed the religion of their time. Right. So the basic thrust of it is, I guess, from my perspective, like, I came to orthodoxy late in life, so I would say everything backwards. I studied the philosophy first and the religion second. And I regret that I spent so much time studying philosophy and didn't start with scripture and go the other direction. So now that I'm trying to kind of fix this in my life. Why study pagan philosophy if you have not, you know, mastered the Bible, mastered the Fathers? And I'm interested too because I know from studying philosophy that there were many orthodox people obviously who studied it as well. Right. Like Basil wrote a letter about it. Eustavius wrote a huge commentary on the Iliad and the Odyssey in the Middle Ages. So there must be some reason to do it. I'm just trying to understand what it is and that's my gap.
- [91:08]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Okay. Yeah. I mean, as you know, a lot of the church Fathers studied that stuff very closely and understood it. I mean, I think that the best way is through like what Saint Justin Martyr says, for instance. Essentially he says anything that's good or true belongs to us.
- [91:27]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Right.
- [91:27]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
So this idea that, for instance that, you know, if Plato says something that's good and it's true, it doesn't have cooties by virtue of his being a demon worshiping pagan, it's still good and true.
- [91:41]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Right.
- [91:42]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
So, you know, he himself said that he got a lot of benefit out of the various philosophical schools that he belongs to, which are essentially religious groups. Okay, so everything that's good is good and belongs to us Christians, as he would say. So that's the short response I would give. I don't know. Father, you have anything more or less or other?
- [92:07]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Well, I think.
- [92:10]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
So.
- [92:10]
Father Stephen DeYoung
For example, Aristotle, it is organon, right? The categories, the prior posterior analytics on interpretation is basically teaching you how to think and how to use language with precision. That's why St. John of Damascus, the first part of his fount of wisdom is his commentary on Aristotle's Organon. Defining theological terms. Here's what we mean by nature, here's what we mean by this, here's what we mean by that, here's how you put together arguments, here's how these things are constructed. I think that by itself, you've heard me probably often say how much various scholars need to take a Logic 101 course. And that's a good Logic 101 course. So I think that there are elements of that that are sort of critically important because if you don't understand those, you won't fully understand how the Fathers are interpreting the scriptures and how they're making arguments and how they're putting these things together and how they're getting from point A to point B when they lay things out. So that alone I think justifies a certain amount, right, A certain amount of Greek philosophical education. I think in the abstract, the pre Socratics, even Plato are actually far less helpful But a lot of the categories in Aristotle are so important to understanding orthodox theology because they are the undergirding of just how you think and how you argue and how you structure things that I think they're kind of necessary not to understand the Bible, but to understand the Fathers and how the Fathers understand the Bible, which we hold is the correct way to understand the Bible.
- [94:21]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah, yeah. Does that help, John?
- [94:26]
Caller Eddie
That does help. If I can add one quick clarifying question. So if we kind of follow pagan philosophy through to modern times, are there writers that are dangerous to read? Like Nietzsche is often read by many people as a heuristic, you know, as a source of ideas to apply to other things. But some of Nietzsche's ideas are pretty disturbing and very anti Christian. Is there any value in reading someone like Nietzsche?
- [94:51]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Oh, man, don't get him started on Nietzsche. Don't you read it every Lent?
- [94:54]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Father Lent's about to start. Yeah, yeah, I've read Nietzsche every Lent for decades now. But that doesn't mean I recommend everybody go and read Nietzsche, because most people who read Nietzsche read him really badly, treat Nietzsche and understand what Nietzsche is trying to do. Even that it's definitely not all good what he's trying to do, but to even understand what he's trying to do and be able to assess the good and the bad, you have to be pretty well versed in Hegel, which is a gymnastic feat all to itself. Need some Dostoevsky, you need some Schopenhauer. I don't recommend reading Schopenhauer to anyone. You know, all of life is suffering, but especially reading Schopenhauer. So, yeah, so I mean, it's definitely not, it's definitely not for everybody. And Nietzsche in particular, there's not like a bunch of other Nietzsches, right? Like I could say, you know, if. If Hegel you really can't understand without a good teacher because he writes obtusely, that can be helpful in terms of understanding. I mean, we're going to talk later on in this episode, in the third half, understanding certain social and societal movements and things, Right. There are ways in which reading some of that modern philosophical stuff, you could say, oh, that's what's going on with that movement over there or that school of thought, right? So it can be helpful in that kind of way. Nietzsche really doesn't work that way and that most of the stuff that's quote unquote inspired by Nietzsche is inspired by some weird bad reading of Nietzsche. So actually reading and understanding him doesn't help you understand that.
- [96:44]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah, yeah. All right, well, thank you very much for calling, John. All right, we're going to take one more call. We've got Nicholas.
- [96:51]
Father Stephen DeYoung
We have to wait for Jordan Peterson to get out of the hospital and talk about Nietzsche with him, I guess.
- [96:55]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Oh, boy. We're going to take one more call. I've got Nicholas calling from the state to my east, the Garden State itself, New Jersey. Nicholas, welcome to Lord of Spirits podcast.
- [97:07]
Caller Eddie
Thank you, Father, for having me on.
- [97:09]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yes, you're welcome.
- [97:11]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Yes. What's it called?
- [97:14]
Caller Eddie
I have a question.
- [97:16]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Since you're talking about the word concept fallacy and we live in the English speaking world.
- [97:24]
Caller Eddie
A lot of the Bibles we have in English are, at least in my perspective, have a very heavily Protestant bent. And so do you guys have any.
- [97:33]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Recommendations for Bible translations that try to.
- [97:38]
Caller Eddie
Mitigate that perspective, if you will?
- [97:42]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Because, like, I know you brought up before the words like Latria and, and so, like, I've only come across like.
- [97:52]
Caller Eddie
Maybe two orthodox translations that make attempts.
- [97:56]
Father Stephen DeYoung
To try to bring those concepts for. So I'm open to hearing what you.
- [98:00]
Caller Eddie
Guys have to say about that.
- [98:02]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
This is your forte, Father. Give your spiel on Bible translations.
- [98:07]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Yeah. So if you aren't going to be learning biblical languages, or at least not anytime soon, I always recommend to people the Net Bible, as long as you get the full notes edition, the translation is not that great. But if you get the full notes edition, like most of the page is notes, there's like a little box of translation and then like the whole rest of the page is two columns of notes. And the notes are not like study Bible notes interpreting it. They're translators, notes about the original language that's behind the English translation. So it'll give you all the information about, right, here's the Hebrew words, here's how the Greek has it, here's how the, the Syriac has it, here's how the Latin has it right in those notes. So you can kind of get back behind the translation a little bit without learning other languages that way. And since the Net Bible, again, you got to get the full notes edition because you want the notes more than the translation. It's in the public domain, so you can get it cheap. Like you can get a hardcover copy for like 25 bucks online. You could get like a leather bound one for like 50 or 60.
- [99:27]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
The net Bible. Yeah, yeah. I mean it's, it's, you can go to netbible.org and read all the notes. It's all.
- [99:33]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Yeah. You can just download it all. Yeah. For free. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. If you want a printed copy because you're like me, then, you know, you get it cheap because it's public domain. Anybody who wants to can print one. And then, you know, the Eastern Orthodox Bible is fine. It's, you know, I mean, I don't think it makes a radical difference over most other English New Testaments, but it's fine. They're going to be coming out with a book that's going to bind together the Lexham English Septuagint, which is a good English translation of the Greek, even though the canon list in it is a little wonky, and the Eastern Orthodox Bible, New Testament. So I'll probably get one of those when it comes out. That'll be a nice thing just for your day to day do the readings, you know, kind of. Kind of use. But yeah, that's.
- [100:34]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah. All right.
- [100:36]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Is ancient faith going to get mad at me for that?
- [100:38]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
No. I mean, we do publish your book, the Whole Council of God, which has basically everything you said and lots more at the end of it.
- [100:47]
Father Stephen DeYoung
So that's true. That is true.
- [100:49]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah. Yeah. So. All right, Nicholas, thank you very much for calling. All right, well, we're going to move on. Where are we? Middle Ages.
- [101:01]
Father Stephen DeYoung
You are in Emmaus, Pennsylvania, I believe.
- [101:03]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Oh, there was. See, now you.
- [101:04]
Father Stephen DeYoung
I know we're getting late.
- [101:06]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
There was some guy in the chat who kept asking me, like, what. What town are you located in? What exactly where are you? I was like, it seems a little.
- [101:14]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Oh, did I just dox you?
- [101:15]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Stop asking. You doxed me, man. Actually, everyone knows exactly where I live.
- [101:19]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Yeah. Is this gonna be like, what about Bob? Is this gonna be.
- [101:22]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
I have to tell you though, I'm kind of excited about moving because the area in the, in the Raleigh area that we're looking at moving in, moving to, there is an unincorporated, like town or village or whatever it might be that is actually quite famous. And I'm really hoping that I can get my new studio located there so that I can tell everyone that I will be coming to them from Lizard Lick, North Carolina, because it is a real place that I could be living in or near in the near future. So everybody pray that my studio can be located in Lizard Lick, North Carolina, because that would be awesome. So great.
- [101:59]
Father Stephen DeYoung
There you go.
- [102:00]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yes.
- [102:02]
Father Stephen DeYoung
I still remember there's a sign in Cross Lanes, West Virginia that says they're the largest unincorporated area in the United States. I said, wow, here is the biggest group of people who can't get their act together and they're proud of it. No trash Pickup for us. Thank you very much. So, yeah, so now we come to the middle half of the show.
- [102:28]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Indeed.
- [102:29]
Father Stephen DeYoung
And the Middle Ages. See, that's a segue again. See how I do?
- [102:33]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Nice, nice.
- [102:34]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Yeah. And so as we get into really the high Medieval period, Latin theology completes this turn towards soteriology. The doctrine of God at that point is kind of fully enshrined in Latin theology. In Platonic terms, when you read the authors of the period, there's not a ton of difference on the way they express the doctrine of God. And that's coming from St. Augustine through some of the intermediaries we talked about, but that's pretty much firmed down. And so there is a move of focus to anthropology and soteriology. We already mentioned that a little when we were talking about how Anselm wrote not only the pros logian and monologian, but Cordeus Homo. Right. Why the God man on Atonement? So even though this shift sort of fully happens at this point, it really started earlier. It's picking up a thread that began much earlier in the history of Latin theology and that began with the whole issue with Pelagianism. So Pelagius was a British monk. That great early English speaking Christianity that Father Andrew was just going on about gave us plagias.
- [104:12]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Do you know what Jerome said about him?
- [104:16]
Father Stephen DeYoung
I'm sure he said a lot of things, but which one in particular?
- [104:18]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah, well, I mean, of all The Church Fathers, St. Jerome is the man in terms of hilarious insults.
- [104:26]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Yes.
- [104:27]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
And what he said about Pelagius is that he was. He came up with his heresy because he was too full. And this is how it usually gets translated in English, too full of Scottish porridge, which I have decided means that this is a man who came up with a heresy where you literally did not need the help of God to be saved because you've been eating haggis.
- [104:49]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Yes.
- [104:51]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
It's gotta be tricky.
- [104:52]
Father Stephen DeYoung
The fact that you've been able to successfully consume and live on haggis would give you a kind of overconfidence in human ability.
- [104:59]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
That's exactly right.
- [105:01]
Father Stephen DeYoung
To eat that much of it and not die.
- [105:03]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Do they even have the neeps and tatties in those days? I don't know. But I do recommend the neeps and tatties next time you have haggis.
- [105:11]
Father Stephen DeYoung
So, yeah, so he comes, he becomes sort of an itinerant preacher. And the log line of his preaching is that he is preaching moral theology. He's trying to bring about moral revival, as it were, among Christians. In the early 5th century, now that Christianity has become the religion of the empire, now that it has become fashionable and advantageous to become a Christian, there are a lot of folks in churches who are not sort of fully committed to living Christian lives, Right? So he is going to come and improve the morals of the Church. Tertullian was all about that too. So just a note, a historical note. History tends to repeat itself when you see people who the focus of their preaching and their message is primarily on morals. A lot of times down the road there ends up being an issue. Yeah, so just something I've seen half a century on this earth. But so Pelagius does this. And in arguing for sort of rhetorically, in his rhetoric toward increasing people's sense of, frankly guilt, of culpability, right, for sin, and trying to drive them to repentance and urge them on to living a moral life, several people, including most notably St. Augustine, think he is going a bit too far in terms of how he talks about human capability to work out your own salvation without the assistance of God. And so St. Augustine tries to handle this through the proper channels. He finds out that Pelagius is within the territory of the Bishop of Jerusalem. So he has the Holy Synod of Jerusalem pull him in and examine him for heresy. Here's the problem. There's only been two ecumenical councils. And so the bishops only ask him about the doctrine of the Trinity, which wasn't the issue. So they clear him. They say, he's not a heretic, he's not an Arian. St. Augustine goes, no, that wasn't the point. Right. And so what comes to be known as Pelagianism, right? And this is a broader thing. You know, you get these modern folks sometimes who want to say, you know, Nestorius wasn't a historian and Pelagius wasn't a Pelagian, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right, Fine, you know, whatever. But you have to understand that when the councils, especially after the first two, when the councils condemn something, certainly Pelagius had some followers and disciples like Celestius who went further than him, right, on these things, but they had learned from Arianism that when you condemn very specifically one guy's view, you're going to have a whole bunch of other guys show up with similar views who are going to say, well, no, I don't technically have that precise view, so I'm okay, even though your view is very similar. That's the semi Aryans, right, who had to be dealt with at the Second Ecumenical Council. And so at The Second Ecumenical Council and the following councils, when there's a problem, they say, okay, what are all the variations we can think of of this bad idea? We're going to condemn all of those. And what are the consequences of these bad ideas? We're going to condemn all of those. What are the presuppositions that would lead you to these bad ideas? We're going to condemn those, too. That doesn't necessarily mean that any given figure who held to a form of that heresy held to all of that. In fact, it's unlikely that any one person held to all that, because sometimes the things they condemn don't fit together. They're like variations where you'd only hold to one of them. Right. Logically. But the idea is these are ideas that are dangerous for human salvation. These are ideas that, if you follow through on them, will endanger your salvation. And so the councils are warning you away from them. They're putting up a fence between you and that whole area. Right. To. To keep you away from. From it. So the question of what elements of this pag. The historical Pelagius held isn't totally relevant to the condemnation. Right. But broadly speaking, for a quick definition, since Father Andrew needs to get to sleep sometime soon.
- [110:08]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Wait, what exactly.
- [110:13]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Is that? Pelagianism is the view that divine grace, the action of God, is not necessary for salvation. He did not deny the existence of grace. He did not deny the forgiveness of sins. Right. Plagiaris do not deny that these things are there. They just deny that they're necessary. Right. And in some variations, this gets down to. Like at the second Council of Orange, this gets out to the detail of the fact that. That God acts first. Right. God acts first. God acts. God saves. To put it in very short form, God saves you. Right. And you cooperate with God in your salvation.
- [111:01]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah.
- [111:02]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Okay. Whereas in various forms of Pelagianism, the activity is shifted away from God and toward the individual person. So the way Pelagianism ends up getting condemned at the Third Ecumenical Council because you're like, wait, I thought that was about Nestorius. It was. By the time you get to the council of Ephesus, St. Augustine has departed this life. St. Augustine passed away a year before the council. So through a long confluence of events, St. John Cassian was in and around Rome at the time. And the man who at that point was Archdeacon Leo, that point in Church history, the archdeacon of the city of Rome was sort of the on deck circle for the next bishop of Rome. So the next pope was generally made the archdeacon of Rome preceding it. And this archdeacon Leo is the man who became Saint Leo the Great as the Bishop of Rome. But he was friends with St. John Cassian, had St. John Cassian write a treatise against Nestorius to represent Rome's position on Nestorius and his deposition to take to the Council of Ephesus. And in that treatise, St. John Cassian connected Pelagianism with Nestorianism, he argued. And so St. John Cassian had come from the east, as most of the Eastern fathers do. His understanding of soteriology flowed directly from his Christology. So he says, in Christ, as Christ works out our salvation in Christ, his human and divine energies are in perfect cooperation, perfect cooperation. And therefore, in our salvation, the grace of God, the divine energies and human energy are in cooperation or in perfect cooperation. And so by separating human activity from God's grace, by holding those apart, Pelagius and the Pelagians are de facto separating the divine and human natures in Christ, and therefore they are essentially Nestorians. And that's how he gets roped in. That's how Pelagius gets roped into the Third Ecumenical Council for condemnation. Let me add, as is my want, that Semi Pelagianism is not a thing, you guys. Semi Pelagianism is man, bear, pig. It is. It is something the Calvinists invented in the 16th and 17th centuries to call their enemies as a slur. It does not correspond to any historical belief, especially not St. John Cashin, who gets labeled as that by the Reformers.
- [114:16]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah.
- [114:17]
Father Stephen DeYoung
In a twist of irony, since he's the one who got Plagueis condemned. So. But within. Within the context of these discussions, terms get used, some Latin terms again that become very important in later developments of Latin theology. One of those is grace. Gratia. Right. And one of those is merit. And so within the context of these discussions surrounding Pelagianism, merit is the term that's used for human action, human activity, human energea, or in Latin at this point, human actus. Right. Even though, as we've said, that's a flawed translation. And grace is being used for divine action, divine enerrhea. Right. Divine actus in the Latin translation. And so, for example, at the Second Council of Orange, the. The major question decided by the council is can you merit first grace? Now, when you hear that as a modern person, especially if you're like here in the US or in the rest of the Anglophone world that's been deeply colored by Protestantism, you hear, oh, can you earn grace? Is probably what you think that means.
- [115:49]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah.
- [115:51]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Right. Can you merit first grace? So first grace in this case is baptism, Right? Because baptism, when you baptize infants especially, right, that's the first sort of partaking of God's grace that you receive. As we were talking about with St. Augustine, can you merit that? That doesn't mean earn. That means, can human activity bring you to that meaning in terms of your salvation? Do humans act first or does God act first? That's the question they're deciding now. The decision, of course, is that, no, God acts first and then humans respond. So there's nothing anywhere there about earning anything. And Pelagius did not say anything about earning anything. This idea of earning salvation through some means is nowhere actually in any of these discussions. Right. Pelagius just thought that the effects of Adam's expulsion from paradise were very minimal. So that a person could, by their own determination and their own habituation, form the virtues, right? Of love, right. Of faith, of hope within themselves. Right? With minimal assistance from God. God stepped in when, oh, you messed up, you sinned, okay, Forgiveness, right? But then you get back on track and it's your own efforts. That's Pelagianism. That's still not earning your salvation, guys, right? That's still not that idea. Wasn't there the idea that especially keeping the Torah somehow would earn you your salvation? It just doesn't exist at this point in history, in Latin theology even.
- [117:45]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Right?
- [117:47]
Father Stephen DeYoung
So that's sort of the first, the beginning of soteriological discussions within Latin theology. But as we said, once we get into the Middle Ages, sort of Latin theology as a whole sort of starts to turn in that direction. One of the most important figures, if you're going to talk about the sort of next phase of Latin theology, is Peter Lombard. Lombard was not like his last name.
- [118:14]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
No, he was.
- [118:15]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Lombardy was a Lombard.
- [118:17]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah, yeah, Peter the Lombard, basically.
- [118:21]
Father Stephen DeYoung
And he's living in the middle of the 12th century, and he writes a work called the Sentences. Okay, this is not the first work called the Sentences, but it's a very important one. The earlier works called the Sentences are essentially florilegia, meaning collections of quotations from Christian church fathers, from the Scriptures, from councils, Right? All pulled together. His is an important watermark because he sort of does that in a more systemic and comprehensive way in his Sentences. And so he pulls all of that together into one place, probably the closest equivalent, because he also. It's also set up as a basic work of theology. Like the first part of Saint John of Damascus is found of wisdom that we mentioned in this Commentary on Aristotle's Organon and the Categories in particular. Also, it's even a little bit like some of the early stages of the Philokalea, although less. It's got the characteristics of Latin theology by now. Right. So whereas the Philokalea is very much aimed toward prayer in an apophatic way, the Sentences are aimed more towards theological reasoning. Right. And theological reasoning is not bad, like I said, St. John of Damascus, right. It's. Yeah, it's a similar kind of thing there. It's not bad, just different. So that becomes such a formative work that throughout then the. The next few centuries in the Middle Ages at universities that at the newly founded universities in Europe, people are going there and studying the Sentences, and it becomes very common for new budding theological writers to write commentaries on the sentences of Lombard Sentences. But probably the biggest theological idea that comes out of Lombard Sentences in terms of the flow of Latin theology is he is the first one to make the distinction between the sufficiency and the efficiency of Christ's work. And in this case, we're post corneas homo. And so in the west, more and more, Christ saving work has not completely been narrowed, but has been, shall we say, focused on the cross rather than the Incarnation and his life as a whole, particularly the Cross and then the Resurrection. But the Cross in particular has become sort of the focal point of the understanding of Christ's work. And so for him, the importance of this distinction is, first of all, we have to say, right, that Christ's saving work, right? And now if we're in this Latin theology mode where we're focusing on the cross, he would not have to do something more in order for one more person to find salvation.
- [121:49]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Right?
- [121:49]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Right. So there's a certain number of people who are going to find salvation. It's not going to be everybody. There's a certain number. But for one more than that to find salvation, he wouldn't need to do anything. Okay? So what Christ has done is sufficient to save anyone and everyone at the same time. Right. Universalism has been rejected as heresy. And so it is not going to be efficient, it is not going to be effective, it is not going to effectively save everyone, Right? It is going to only effectively save a subset of people. Now, you may have noticed, if you know something about Calvinism, Calvin has a very different way around this. Right? So technically, under Calvinism and their view of limited atonement, Christ would have to do something different to save one more person, because he only died for the sins of the elect. A subset of people, and therefore he collapses. Sufficiency and efficiency, essentially. But Lombard makes this distinction and it becomes critically important. So then the soteriological discussion becomes in the west, or, sorry, slipped in Latin theology.
- [123:08]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
How dare you, sir? I know, I'm still vigilant over here. You think I'm taking a nap, but I'm not.
- [123:16]
Father Stephen DeYoung
How do you get. How do you get then, from Christ's work, which is sufficient to save you, to you actually being effectively saved, to your salvation being accomplished for yourself? And so the term that gets repurposed. And you're going to see a shift in meaning here. The term that gets repurposed is merit, okay? And it's only a slight repurposing because as we talked about, right. Merit before was being used to talk about human action. It's being used here to talk about Christ's action and what Christ accomplishes as man, right? Corneas homo, right, accomplishes as man accomplishes in the Incarnation, accomplishes in the atonement, right? Accomplishes in working our salvation. So we're talking about Christ's merit. And then that merit is seen as a sort of mediatory element. Christ's work, what Christ does, his suffering in particular throughout his life and especially at the cross, that produces merit, right? And that merit then is applied to people for their salvation, to humans for their salvation. So we're sort of media. It's mediating between the universal and the limited, right? Between what, you know, Calvinist B.B. warfield will call redemption accomplished and applied, right? There's a couple side effects of seeing it this way. So merit has to be quantifiable, right? What do I mean by that? Well, it has to be quantifiable because it's not applied to everybody, right? It has. It has to be a thing. It can't be this infinite thing, because if it's a truly infinite thing, then it would just overflow to everyone. So it has to be quantifiable, has to be containable, right? It has to be finite in some sense to be able to be moved to some people and not others. It has to be created in some sense, right? That it's not eternal. It's sort of produced, right, by what Christ does on the cross. It doesn't sort of always exist in the merits of Christ. This understanding of merit and its relationship to grace, to God's action, then, is going to lead to a shift in the view of what sin is. So here's part of where we see the idea of sin as debt more firmly taking shape in a sort of more literal sense of debt. And so it's sort of demerit, Right. You have merit and de. Merit, credit and debit. Right. Notice, however, it's still not juridical guilt.
- [126:32]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah.
- [126:33]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Yep. It's still not like criminal charges. And so the understanding comes to be in the medieval period in Latin theology that there are a series of deposits, right, From Christ into you, right. Sort of infusions, right. At various points of this merit that forgives sins, takes care of demerit, right. And then works salvation, right. Within. Within a person. Those that happens through, right. The sacraments, beginning with baptism and then receiving the Eucharist. That happens when you do things like go on pilgrimages, when you do penance, when you do acts of faithfulness, acts of love and charity toward people, right?
- [127:30]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
You.
- [127:30]
Father Stephen DeYoung
You receive these sort of infusions of grace. Now, again, a lot of Protestant later dogmatics are going to say, well, this is earning your salvation. Technically, that is not what Latin theology is saying, Right. So there is this distinction that's made of two types of merit, condign merit and congruent merit. Condign merit is when God owes you his grace. Now, that sounds crazy right off the bat, but the reason God would owe it to you is that he promised it to you, right?
- [128:06]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Right.
- [128:07]
Father Stephen DeYoung
So God has promised that baptism will bring about the forgiveness of sins. Therefore, if you are baptized for the forgiveness of your sins, you will receive the forgiveness of your sins from God. Right. He's only required to do that in the sense that he promised to do it, and he keeps his promises. That's condign merit. Congruent merit is merit that's given to you freely that God didn't necessarily promise to give you, but you did something that made it appropriate or made yourself worthy to receive it, sort of as a gift. So this would be doing acts of kindness to others, acts of love and charity, for which there was no sort of explicit promise to receive grace anywhere. Then salvation happens right? At the point where there's sort of a bar, there's sort of a level, right? And when you have a level of merit, when you have a level of grace that you've received that reaches that bar and is above the bar, you are in a state of grace. And if you die at that point, you go to heaven. If you are below that bar because of mortal sin or just because you never got close to it because you didn't do anything good in your miserable life or whatever, then you go to hell. You go to eternal hell. It is possible for someone within this system to be in a state of grace. So be at the point where your salvation has been worked out and you're ready to go to heaven and you continue to do good deeds. This would be the Western, the Latin theological understanding of saints. Right. Saints are people who not only entered into that state of grace, but then through their continued lives and receiving the grace of God, these things had sort of extra. That is put into the treasure house of the merit of the saints. The Pope has the keys to that. It's in an Al Gore style lockbox and.
- [130:23]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
It'S a 26 year old joke.
- [130:26]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Yeah. He could dole that out, Right. For the. For the forgiveness of sins. This was one of the. This is probably my favorite of Luther's 95 theses. If the Pope could do that, why doesn't he just forgive everybody's sins?
- [130:39]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
I mean, it is a very good question.
- [130:41]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Good question, Marty.
- [130:42]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Brother Martin.
- [130:43]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Yes. So now, the way we've just described it and we're doing it quickly, right. You could read that as this very crude kind of banking metaphor, taken literally, okay. Of like withdrawals and deposits and debits and credits and this and that. Right. You get to a certain balance and okay, now you're good. And you can take it rather crudely. And the reality is, and I know there'll be some Roman Catholic folks who get mad at me, but the reality is part of what brought about the Protestant Reformation, honestly, is that your average peasant in Western Europe understood it in that crude way.
- [131:26]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah.
- [131:27]
Father Stephen DeYoung
And there were people like Tetzel taking advantage of them in that crude way. Yeah. Right. And so that was a popular understanding. Yes. That's never the way that, you know, bishops and highly educated churchmen understood it, but that is the way a lot of common people understood it. And again, to give credit to Rome, verse 2, the Counter Reformation backs away from a lot of the very literal, crude versions of this.
- [131:55]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
But it's worth noting that this idea that there is this treasure house of.
- [131:59]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Merit, it's still a thing.
- [132:02]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
It is absolutely still a thing. You can go on the Vatican website, which, if that doesn't speak authoritatively for the Roman Catholic Church, I don't know what does.
- [132:10]
Father Stephen DeYoung
People say it doesn't. So, you know, I know, I don't.
- [132:14]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
That's amazing to me. Yeah. I'm like, y', all, Vatican, oned yourself into this. I don't know what to tell you.
- [132:22]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Anyway, Vatican I does a verb.
- [132:24]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
There we go.
- [132:26]
Father Stephen DeYoung
I mean, I feel like it works. Yeah.
- [132:29]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
If you look at the Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1474. And following, you can see all that stuff and various other places too. So not making this up.
- [132:42]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Is it the Vatican or the Vaticant. That's what I want to know.
- [132:46]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Vaticaniption.
- [132:48]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Yeah.
- [132:49]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
So.
- [132:52]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Yeah. And so then another key element of this that we can't leave out is the distinction between eternal and temporal guilt. Right. So guilt as liability as debt here takes on two kinds. And this is still Roman Catholic theology. I'm sorry. It is. There is eternal guilt that's taken care of by Christ directly. Right. And then there is temporal guilt. Temporal guilt is built off of the idea. It is sort of a formalization or a mechanization or a making transactional of the idea of repentance as dealing with the consequence, accepting and dealing with the consequences of your sin in this world. And so that is turned into this formal thing of temporal guilt, which. The same way Christ's suffering takes care of eternal guilt, your suffering or grace and merit from saints who suffered.
- [134:04]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Right.
- [134:04]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Et cetera, take care of that temporal guilt. If you have temporal guilt, if you have eternal guilt when you die, you go to hell. If you have just temporal guilt left, then you go to purgatory to pay off the rest of it. Okay. And I know once again, Roman Catholic Church has done a whole lot of backpedaling from the very crude way purgatory used to be understood. But purgatory was understood in that crude way very recently. Yeah, we have the receipts, folks.
- [134:38]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yes. I mean, like an example that I always think of back when I was in university, when I was half the age that I am now, I had a Catholic girlfriend for a while, and she showed me her gigantic Catholic Bible.
- [134:54]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Were you trying to kill your parents with grief? Evangelical. Boy, you know, I don't remember them.
- [135:01]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Ever objecting to her religion. I don't know. It's been so long, Father, I don't even remember if we discussed it. But, but, but she had this big Catholic Bible. And in the front of it, I mean, this was like a real Catholic Bible. The whole, you know, Neil Obstad, all that kind of stuff was in there.
- [135:21]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Took up a whole object.
- [135:22]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
It was huge. Yeah, it was a huge, huge volume. I mean, I love a big Bible. And anyways, the front of it had this.
- [135:29]
Father Stephen DeYoung
And you cannot lie.
- [135:31]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Thank you. The front of it had this chart.
- [135:33]
Father Stephen DeYoung
In it, and it said if you.
- [135:35]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Read the Bible for this many minutes, then you get this amount of time out of Purgatory. Like it was a chart with numbers, you know? So, like, I know I know, you know, probably your average Roman Catholic here in 2026 does not believe that kind of quantification. Maybe, I assume, but. But I mean, not that long ago it was definitely believed. And you can't say, oh, it was always a metaphor. What, you wouldn't have charts like that. And like there's some kind of. Sometimes it's almost freakishly precise in some of the language. For many, many centuries it was this way. And I mean, I'm glad they've gotten away from that. Like, let's just go the whole way and dump purgatory entirely. But hey, you know, we're making some progress here.
- [136:25]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Yes. So, yes, you have to, you know, good that you're backing away from it. You still have to own it historically.
- [136:35]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
So.
- [136:35]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Yeah. And sort of this period of Latin theology ends up getting summed up, pun, fully intended by Thomas Aquinas, who, interestingly, you know, he lives in the 13th century. Not very important during his life, actually, his works and everything. He doesn't finish his summa before he dies. Tertius Spartas gets put together from notes at his monastery, but he did that as a work of basic theology. That was the intro, that was the 101. But he sort of becomes the image of this period at the Council of Trent. The Council of Trent sort of enshrines the theology of Thomas Aquinas as part of the Counter Reformation, as sort of the basic explication of Latin theology during his day. He was actually more concerned with the controversies of his day involving the recovery of Aristotle and the Latin of Eros. I'll take mercy on Father Andrew and not go into all that right now. It's mercy, sodding. I can see him nodding in my head, but. So he sort of becomes emblematic of that. But to sum up the second half, I think you can see that some of the trends we saw in the first half are now sort of fully coming to fruition. Faith is. It's being practiced, right? For sure. As it's being practiced and arguably as it's being laid out has become very transactional, mechanical. There's a way these things all work. We have an ontology of the universe that includes God and rocks right in one chain of being. We're sort of, you know, we're not at modern sciences attempt to explain everything, but we're at theological sciences attempt to explain everything. Right. The idea that you could have a cohesive view of the entire cosmos and understand it all right, by a mix of God's revelation, Aristotle's logic and Platonic metaphysical categories is thoroughly in the view of the scholastic mind. And as you probably know, in the 16th century, stuff's gonna happen.
- [139:10]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yes.
- [139:10]
Father Stephen DeYoung
But we'll get to that in the.
- [139:12]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Third half on that cliffhanger. We're gonna take our second break, and we'll be right back with this completely uncontroversial episode of the Lord of Spirits.
- [139:21]
Narrator
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.
- [140:01]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
The book of Lamentations was written after the Babylonians had invaded the land, slaughtered the populace and brought about national extinction. What remained for Jerusalem and Judah? The five poems of the book represent the authentic voice of Israel in exile, a mourner wailing over the judgment of God, desperately seeking an audience with him, but finding him hidden and inaccessible in prayers in the dark. Father Lawrence Farley paraphrases the book of Lamentations and interprets each passage, following it with a meditation on human suffering, not to explain it, but to point a way forward into hope. In the words of the sacred text, we find assurance that we are not unique in our suffering and that the way home to the kingdom brings pain as well as joy. Find prayers in the dark today@store.ancientfaith.com that's store.ancientfaith.com. FOREIGN.
- [141:00]
Narrator
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.
- [141:17]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Hey, welcome back, everybody. The question actually that we're getting from our producers right now is whether we are going to outstrip the mammoth episode of the Amen Sul podcast that Michael Haldis did as a guest with Father Anthony Cook, which I think is like 4 hours and 36 minutes long. No, I think we can beat that tonight, Father.
- [141:40]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Oh, we can. No, I mean, challenge accepted if that's what. Oh, no, I shouldn't have said that.
- [141:51]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Okay.
- [141:51]
Father Stephen DeYoung
It's two or three hour third half, everybody. Yeah, that was a poor choice of words there. Oh, man.
- [142:00]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
I shouldn't have revealed that was discussion was going on.
- [142:02]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Yes. No, no.
- [142:06]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
That was a nice tidy second half. So good job. Good job.
- [142:10]
Father Stephen DeYoung
And thinking that words are just, you know, names applies to things. Nominalism. If you want a test case of nominalism, here come the Protestants with the imputation of righteousness all right, Segment.
- [142:25]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Literally what that's. That's about.
- [142:29]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Yeah, yeah. So 16th century Protestantism. Wow. So damn.
- [142:38]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Wow.
- [142:39]
Father Stephen DeYoung
The Protestant Reformation happens, and you get a take from a lot of people, even Orthodox folks. Sometimes they'll say, like, oh, the Protestants, they wanted to get rid of the bad stuff that Roman added since the split, but they threw out the baby with the bath water. I hope no one has ever actually done that, by the way. Like, just forgot your baby was in the tub.
- [143:05]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
What a weirdly violent expression.
- [143:08]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Yes, but I actually think the opposite. I think the actual case is quite the opposite. I think they did get rid of enough.
- [143:18]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah.
- [143:18]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Theologically speaking. So essentially, you know, some of our Protestant listeners who identify as Protestant, especially those who are more evangelical bent, may think all this talk of merit and stuff is. May feel completely foreign to them. Like, yeah, we don't have any of that stuff. That's a weird Catholic stuff. Actually. You do.
- [143:44]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah. Actually, we have a super relevant to this very moment call coming from Louisville, Kentucky, so.
- [143:53]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Okay.
- [143:53]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Michael, Michael, welcome to the Lord of Spirits podcast.
- [143:58]
Caller Eddie
Hello. Can you hear me?
- [144:00]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
We hear you. Why does everyone say that? It's a question that they have.
- [144:06]
Caller Eddie
I just want to make sure I'm not speaking to the void.
- [144:09]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
I mean, do you have that problem?
- [144:11]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Normally, a very Nietzschean of you coming.
- [144:15]
Caller Eddie
Up again, usually not, but you never know.
- [144:18]
Father Stephen DeYoung
You never know.
- [144:23]
Caller Eddie
Yeah, I just wanted to ask specifically about, like, righteousness. You're probably going to talk about it, but I just wanted to get a clarification about this because I always hear about, especially like, Lutheran theologians, they talk about, like, this righteousness, like, you know, like, we can never merit it up to, like, the word phrase. I've heard, like, you know, the righteous can't cut mustard. And I'm trying. I was trying to figure out, like, how compared to orthodoxy, like, what does that righteousness mean? And like, how orthodoxy kind of answers that. Like, you know, if that makes sense to, like, righteousness, like, what does it mean to be righteous? And, you know, like, how does it make sense? Because I know Luther, you know, he kept conflicting, like, I can never be perfect or I can never be because I'll be an idol. If that makes any sense.
- [145:10]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah, yeah. Well, this is where we're going now, so.
- [145:14]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Yeah. How long do you have to leave the mustard out before it can't be cut?
- [145:19]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
I want to know how you. I mean, mustard is not usually that viscous that you could cut it. Like, what kind of mustard are we dealing with here? I think it has been left out that's the problem is when you leave it out, that's when it can be, that's too long.
- [145:32]
Father Stephen DeYoung
That's when you can cut.
- [145:34]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Right. I say this as a big mustard lover. It is probably my favorite condiment.
- [145:40]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Yeah. So we will answer this call and simultaneously move ahead.
- [145:47]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
All right. Brilliant, Michael, in that.
- [145:51]
Father Stephen DeYoung
So righteousness would, within the system we just described, within the medieval Latin system, righteousness would be sort of that bar we mentioned, right. That righteousness would be sort of infused over time, right? Through the sacraments, through the doing of good deeds. Right. Acts of charity, acts of love, all these things. And that would kind of pile up, right. And when it reached a certain point where you were in a state of grace, that would be you were righteous in the sight of God. At that point you were one of the righteous. And so the shift with Luther, right, is not to get rid of the idea of merit, not to get rid of the idea of there being a bar, not to get rid of really any of the stuff we were just talking about. It's just that he makes it a one time thing that the merits of Christ are transferred all at once into your account and all of your demerits, right? All of your sin, all that wickedness is transferred into Christ all at once. So, boom, you are justified, you are righteous.
- [147:24]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yes.
- [147:27]
Father Stephen DeYoung
And doesn't get taken away from you. Right? So you can say, right, then you're saved. You can't lose that state of grace in the Lutheran and then the Calvinist system, right? So it's just all at once swap. That's called double imputation. Your sin is imputed to Christ. Christ's righteousness is imputed to you wholesale. Boom, all at once. And that, I mean, that is the core of Protestantism. That is the core of Protestant soteriology. And so in terms of the orthodox view, over against this. Stay tuned. We're gonna get to that at the very end.
- [148:12]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Are you gonna stick with us to the end, Michael?
- [148:15]
Caller Eddie
Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I just wanted to, I just wanted to clarify that because always, like I always hear about the Lutheran view about like, you know, I can never be perfect. So I'm always like, I was trying to figure out like, what does that righteousness mean, like orthodox. Because they, like you said, I didn't really define it. I'm like, because especially I understand, I can, I can see Luther's fear of like, I never can be perfect because I come from an agnostic background. So I, I kind of understand that fear somewhat. I agree it's like exaggerated, but I understand it.
- [148:44]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
- [148:46]
Father Stephen DeYoung
And so Luther was living in this fear that he was in and out of this state of grace. Right. He'd be in a state of grace and then he would sin and then he'd have to run to confession and then he'd sin again and he'd have to run confession again. And so this view allowed him a sense of reassurance and security that he didn't have before.
- [149:06]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah, right.
- [149:08]
Father Stephen DeYoung
They're saying no, it just happens all at once. Right?
- [149:12]
Caller Eddie
Yeah. So I was just. Yeah, I'll definitely listen to see like with orthodoxy and should like the explanation with that because I definitely entered because it, it seems always. It feels like lost because I'm trying to figure it out. But thank you. I appreciate you answering.
- [149:24]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah, thanks for calling. Michael, you're tracking with us as we like to say.
- [149:29]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Yes.
- [149:30]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
All right, well, let's continue rolling down the track.
- [149:33]
Father Stephen DeYoung
So. So that Lutheran view we just described is definitely definitionally extrinsic and transactional. The transactional should be obvious, Right. Your double imputation is obviously a transaction. Right. But it's also extrinsic. In fact, Luther is going to directly say that. He's going to say salvation is extra nose. It's outside of yourself. Right. It is not a change in you. Okay. This is his famous example of the snow covered dung heap. Right. So you're justified. You're still a pile of crap, but. But now pure white snow has fallen all over you. So you look like beautiful and white and pure when God looks at you.
- [150:26]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
There was a few years ago when we were doing a lot more gardening at my house, We accidentally ordered rather more manure than we had intended to. Like, I think that we thought we were getting cubic feet, but we were getting cubic yards, which is literally nine times as. Nine times as much. And so as a result, we were not able to use it all right away. And so there's this big pile of dung in my backyard and it snowed. And I remember looking at that, I'm like, and there it is, there it is.
- [151:05]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Snow covered some German street near you.
- [151:07]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yes, it's true. It's amazing. Symbolism happens. Isn't that what the man says?
- [151:15]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Yes, yes. So then this is this all at once, one time thing. Boom, it's done. Anyone who tries to come and tell you you need to do anything else or you need to stop doing anything else or anything at all, right? You tell them to go pound sand. They're trying to bind your conscience. They're preaching works righteousness at you. And as we said, part of the goal here for Luther was assurance, right? It's. It's what he lacked, right. It's the, the neurosis of constantly being afraid that he was going to spend eternity in hell because he had an unconfessed sin. Right. And so changing to this view allowed him to actually, you know, live his life. Right. But here's the problem. It kind of. It kind of doesn't work that way, the whole assurance thing, Right. Because even if you say. Right, even if you go really evangelical on it and just, you know, you just have to believe and not even believe in anything in particular, Right. That's all you have to do. All you have to do. Do you ever believe completely, sincerely?
- [152:39]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah.
- [152:40]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Do you ever trust Christ just totally, wholeheartedly?
- [152:44]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
I mean, you know, I was raised in a tradition which really emphasized this idea. And I knew multiple people who went back and kind of quote, unquote, got saved again because they doubted their sincerity the first time. Yeah.
- [153:03]
Father Stephen DeYoung
I asked, I knew a guy who was a former assembly of God preacher, and I asked him if he had the day he got saved written in the front of his Bible. And he said, yeah, I got all the dates written there.
- [153:13]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
No, man. I mean, some of them will get baptized over and over again.
- [153:19]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Yeah, yeah.
- [153:20]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
In connection with that.
- [153:21]
Father Stephen DeYoung
So. Yeah. How do you know if you really meant it? Right. This is real life, Right. Be honest. Have you ever really done your best at anything, your absolute best? There was no way you could have devoted one more second, one more iota of effort, really. That's iota for those. Insist on the modern. Yeah, now you're talking about Baby Yoda. I don't know how we got there anyway. Yeah. Like, who really puts forth maximum effort. Right. And so there's still a massive gap for doubt to shift through. This is also where in the Reformation, particularly the Calvinist Reformation, where you get penal, substitutionary atonement, it does not exist before this. Because here is where you get the shift to the idea of guilt as forensic, legal, criminal guilt. Right. Where Calvin begins teaching that everyone is born guilty of Adam's sin and the penalty that is due for it is eternal hell.
- [154:45]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
And this is why, by the way, I just have to take this little aside that sometimes when orthodox are, you know, trying to do apologetics against, quote unquote, Western theology, they will say this about Roman Catholics that they believe in, you know, the inherited guilt, legal guilt of Adam, but it is a Reformation era thing.
- [155:13]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Yeah. Catholics will straighten you out on that. Usually.
- [155:17]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
You mean you can't just tell another person what they actually believe.
- [155:21]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Oh, no, you could totally, as a layperson in a completely different church, come and absolutely tell clergy what their church teaches.
- [155:28]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah, yeah.
- [155:29]
Father Stephen DeYoung
As long as you got quotes, as long as you got a lot of quotes, got some quotes in English, you could do that.
- [155:39]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah.
- [155:39]
Father Stephen DeYoung
But so here's where, where guilty saw that particular forensic legal flair. It's also important that you know what we were just saying, you know, about, you know, sincerity and all this and believing the reformers were not unaware of this problem. Right. And so. Well, how do you do that? Well, we can't have faith be the one act that you do, Right. Because then it opens all those problems. So what sola fide originally meant was not all you have to do is believe, but sola fide originally meant was that faith is. Was not conceived as an act. Faith was something God gave you that it was an empty virtue. And what that means is it is not a virtue you acquired. It is not something you practiced, it is not something you did. It's just given to you. And it is purely a receptive faculty. God gives you a faculty called faith through which you receive your salvation passively. Okay, that doesn't get around the problem either. How do you know you've got it?
- [156:53]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah.
- [156:55]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Especially when you're told you can't do it, Right. You can't believe harder or trust harder because, you know, it's not an act, it's an empty virtue. Right. So again, attempted problem not solved. So even though obviously you have detected our critical tone, I am sure through the second half and the formation of the Roman Catholic side of Latin theology and now the classical Protestant side of Latin theology. Now we get to the point where even that all starts to fall apart. Right? Good old Aristotle again. You have generation and then you have corruption. And we're done with generation in Latin theology. We're going to start with the. The descent of Protestantism, which ends up being fairly steep. First, we're talking about Protestantism in the United States, proselytism in the United States. The two big watershed events are the first and second Great Awakenings. The first Great Awakening happens before technically the United States is founded as the United States. It happens within the British colonies and is puritan and Calvinist. That is the URLair of sort of American Protestantism. Think the Mathers continent increase. Think Jonathan Edwards. Not just sinners in the hands of an angry God, but also Jonathan Edwards, who said the only thing people contribute to their salvation is the sin that they need to be saved from. So that's sort of the First Great Awakening that lays this undergirding and so that the 18th and 19th centuries are actually sometimes referred to as the Calvinist period in American cultural life. That's how much that form of religion sort of permeated American culture in those years. But then in the 19th century, middle of the 19th century, you get to the Second Great Awakening, which is bluntly, a disaster on all counts, unless you're part of one of the groups that comes out of it, in which case, sorry, not sorry, still a disaster. The Second Great Awakening is essentially revivalist. Okay. In. On Revival now, his name just vanished from my head. Finney. And On Revival, Charles Finney. Yeah. Says that there is nothing supernatural about conversion. It takes place through the application of particular techniques.
- [159:56]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah. There's, you know, it's really, frankly, about manipulating emotions. I mean, these are the people that put together what they. What was called the Anxious Bench, where you would have. You would put this bench right up near where the preacher is and get some of these, you know, sinners to sit up there so that they would be extremely close to the preaching and would feel a sense of conviction as a result of the powerful rhetoric that's being preached and have a big emotional experience. And that was. I mean, that's what they were trying to engender, is to set up all the conditions so they could have this big emotional experience, and that's how conversion would. Would occur.
- [160:38]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Right. And what we're talking about here with conversion. Right. Because we're. We're talking about a fundamentally, again, a culture that's Puritan, Calvinist. Right. Christianity. Right. Remember, the Baptists were one of the groups of English Puritans. Right. And the early Baptists were all particular Baptists. They're all Calvinists to an extent. Right. That's the culture. Right. So we're not talking about atheists in the United States in the Second Great Awakening. We're talking about people who, you know, probably we're taken to Sunday school as kids. Right. We're baptized as either kids or teenagers and just have drifted away from the church. Right. Are living riotously. Right. Et cetera. Right. Things have gone wrong. And so they're just being called upon to just sort of recommit to Christ. To recommit to Christianity. And what that does is combined with Finney's sort of very pragmatic approach and that of the other tent revivalists, is basically theology becomes completely unimportant to the movie.
- [161:53]
Caller Eddie
Yeah.
- [161:53]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
You have to have that experience.
- [161:56]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Right. Yeah. And we're Trying to be broad. Right. To cover everybody. Right. So it's just believe and trust in Christ, not anything particular about Christ. We're not going to go into a lot of definition of who he is, what he does. Even the Trinity falls out. Right. All these things. And the groups that spit out of this are not only denominations that are now considered Evangelical Protestant denominations, but also the Mormons, the Jehovah's Witnesses, the Seventh Day Adventists, all come out of this kind of weird fervor. Right. And the fact that there's no emphasis on any kind of doctrine or theology. Right. Allows for that. Right. It allows for just enthusiasm. Okay. Now, while that's going on in the United States, stuff's going wrong in Europe too. Right. Because that's the other place where we got a lot of Protestants. Okay. We've got the Protestant churches in, in northern European countries which at this point are, have become or are becoming state churches. And we've also got German idealism going on. So we're not, we've talked about these guys before. We're not going to go super into detail, but from kant in the 18th century to Hegel in the 19th century. Right. We have philosophy going on. Right. And Hegel is very much a Lutheran, very much a Protestant. Lutherans don't want him. I know, but he's a Lutheran through and through. Anyway, I'm not going to go down that rabbit trail right now. But so he sets forth this philosophical and frankly theological vision of a whole world order that's infused with the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is drawing the whole world order toward perfection. Everything is evolving toward perfection. God and humanity coming together. Dogs and cats, mass hysteria. Anyway, Right. But all progressing. Right. Everything is progressing. God is unfolding himself in ongoing self revelation. The world is being transformed by modern, by the forces of modernism and Enlightenment into a greater and greater place full of freedom and learning and reason. Everything is beautiful. Right. And so the Protestantism in Europe becomes what we now call, refer to generally as liberal Protestantism.
- [164:52]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah.
- [164:54]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Not because they have political views related to the American quote unquote, left, but liberal in the sense of Enlightenment liberalism. Right. Liberal philosophy, classical liberalism. So that happens in Europe and in the United States at this point in the 19th century, the best and the brightest Right. Of the educated among American Protestants go to Europe to study at European universities. And so pastors and seminary professors are coming back from Europe steeped in this liberal Protestantism, bringing it to the United States. This starts to shift the sort of classical Protestant denominations in the US in this liberal direction. And so you have this kind of fracturing where the Second Great Awakening movements we were talking about before become deeply suspicious of education because of this. Yeah, yeah, right. But also the more traditional Protestants or conservative Protestants, guys like Jay Gresham, Machen et al, who are at Princeton, Harvard, Yale and see this change happening, want their traditional, more classical Protestantism to survive. And so they start to. They make common cause with a lot of the Second Great Awakening uneducated folks, at least the ones who have kept some semblance of Christian theology around. And you get the publication of the books, the fundamentals, and this becomes evangelicalism. Yeah, right. Which has this sort of curious mix of anti intellectualism and than several intellectuals who are seen as leaders and deferred to Right. At the same time.
- [167:08]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Still hasn't. It's still that way. Yeah, yeah, right.
- [167:13]
Father Stephen DeYoung
And so this forms. But in the process, in this rise of evangelicalism, because it is this sort of weird big tent, right. Of all these groups, you lose some things. You lose any kind of ecclesiology, you lose any sense that there's a visible church and there's a church with some kind of visible boundaries that can be determined objectively. Right. You lose that. You also lose the idea of any kind of unity in theology because you've got to cross lines. You've got to include your Presbyterians and your dispensationalists, you got to include your premillennialists and your amillennialists. You got to include your people who baptize babies and people who don't. Right. They've all got to be in this big tent, which means all of those issues that are in any way controversial. Right. Have to get demoted to secondary issues. Yeah.
- [168:09]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
You can just agree to disagree, you know.
- [168:13]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Yes. And then arbitrary lines are drawn in terms of what are the primary issues, what are the issues we have to agree on to be in the tent.
- [168:20]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
And it's why, like when you see, frankly, when you see Protestants arguing with each other on the Internet and one of them calls the other one a heretic, there's no immediate basis for understanding why they're using that word. Like, on what basis is this one a heretic and this one isn't, you know.
- [168:40]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Yeah.
- [168:40]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
It's like you said, it just drew.
- [168:41]
Father Stephen DeYoung
The line on the, on the seat, in the back seat of the car and said everyone on that side is a heretic.
- [168:47]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Right.
- [168:47]
Father Stephen DeYoung
This is the line. Everyone over there is a heretic. Yeah. And more and more I have what I think is a good analogy for this. You may have heard in political discussions, people make the argument that, like the founding documents of the United States, the Constitution, et al, kind of only work if you have sort of a unified Christian culture.
- [169:14]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah. I mean, I think one of the early founding fathers said something like, this Constitution is only for a Christian and moral people.
- [169:20]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Yeah. Now, regardless of what you think of that argument in terms of politically in the United States, we may not even be in the United States as you listen to this, and you may not care, but I think that is true of what we see in Protestantism. I think when you look at the first generation of the Reformation, things like sola scriptura. Right. And things like the distinctions they were making worked fine because you have broadly Christian people who had come out of Latin Christendom. Right.
- [169:54]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah.
- [169:54]
Father Stephen DeYoung
And who had made some changes.
- [169:56]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Christian culture.
- [169:58]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Yeah. But we're still within that envelope. Still within that culture. Right. So, yeah, yeah. If you push this whole theology and aversion to works righteousness, you could end up in a very antinomian place. Right. Where people don't do good. But we all know Protestants who have a theology that seems to suggest they should be like that, who nonetheless do a lot of charitable and good things.
- [170:21]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Oh. I mean, like the kind that I was raised in, very firmly believed and taught explicitly, like, once you are genuinely saved and have that conversion experience that you are going to heaven no matter what you do after that. Once saved, always saved. But none of them would also say. And that means you should not bother going to church. None of them would say that. They would never, ever say that.
- [170:49]
Father Stephen DeYoung
And so when you have a broadly Christian people. Yeah. Steeped in Christian culture, you can ideologically hold to those kind of ideas and not follow them out. Right. You could ideologically hold a sola scriptura. And still, as all the Reformers did, believe in not only the doctrine of the Holy Trinity as they understood it and had received it in Latin theology, but things like the perpetual virginity of the Theotokos, which all the Reformers still held to. Oh, yeah, right. Because they were just broadly Christian. And in this Christian culture, there was no reason to doubt those things. Right. But when you don't have that anymore, when you don't have that understanding anymore and you just have the principle. Right. Only what can be shown in the Scriptures incontrovertibly or by good and necessary inference, and I'm the judge of what is a good and necessary inference, it all breaks down. It all starts to break down. Now, the Trinity is negotiable. Right. I at a Protestant seminary that I won't name suggested that if someone does not believe the contents of the Nicene Creed, they're not a Christian. And I was laughed at. They thought that was ridiculous. Not a couple people, everyone.
- [172:12]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
I mean, this to me is why as long as we're throwing out somewhat spicy takes this to me is why this whole kind of the idea of the reconquista of the mainline in the US is a doomed project.
- [172:27]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Well, you got to call that kid. It's because the kid looks like Irvin Engin from head of the class.
- [172:34]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Really?
- [172:34]
Father Stephen DeYoung
And now you gotta dog him on this show?
- [172:36]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah. No, it's because it's like, okay, the idea is we want to turn the clock back and restore these denominations to where they used to be. Like, well, how do you think they got where they are now? It's not because someone came in and like hijacked the whole nine yards. It's because they developed into the direction that they were going as we've, as, you know, as frankly we've spent the last three hours showing, honestly. So, like, you know, if you can turn the clock back, I mean, that's nice. But like just going to end up.
- [173:11]
Father Stephen DeYoung
This is where it goes. This is the problem with the whole thing we said at the beginning about the West. Right. You roll it back to right before the Enlightenment, guess what happens. The Enlightenment again?
- [173:21]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah.
- [173:23]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Okay. All this quote unquote woke stuff you hate, that's Western culture in its final form. And the only reason it's the final form is that it's about to collapse.
- [173:33]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah. Which, I mean, I don't want people to get hurt or die or whatever. But, but I think that some collapse might well be helpful.
- [173:43]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Yeah. So we've talked about how evangelicalism in particular and Protestantism in general has become a mess. And in some cases with evangelicalism only vaguely Christian, and our Roman Catholic friends have probably been, whew, finally off the hook. I got some bad news for you guys.
- [174:06]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Dun, dun, dun, dun.
- [174:09]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Because Rome during this time has just gotten completely Protestantized. And that's both in the US And Europe.
- [174:19]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
This is true.
- [174:20]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Like this happened.
- [174:22]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
I mean, again, I, I, I love my Roman Catholic friends. I do have Roman Catholic friends. I love them. But like the Roman Catholic services I have been to over the last 30 years, all of them, frankly feel like kind of watered down Lutheran services. That's how it, that's how. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, and you know, like, it's weird, it seems like it seems like there's this at least in America, American Catholicism in terms of its existential reality. There's this kind of battle on the ground between, like, will a parish be like mainline Protestants or would they be like evangelical Protestants? You know, and then of course you've got, you know, charismatic Catholics, which is. But the funny thing is, as long as we're being spicy, I guess I've said this twice now. You know, I always thought in the 80s and 90s when. When. When evangelicals were trying to make their own versions of rock and pop music, especially when I became a stagehand and was doing, you know, especially in the summers, doing big concerts down at the arena and stuff, I always felt like the pop and the rock at the evangelical church that I went to was like, eh, by comparison. I feel like these sort of either mainliner or evangelical or occasionally charismatic stuff that the Catholics are doing at their parishes is kind of eh. In comparison to sort of the real versions of those things that are in Protestantism. Like, I watched a video of charismatic Catholics. I'm like, come on, give me some real holy Rollers here. Like, come on, give me some real Pentecostals. Like, show me some people that mean it, you know. But, yeah, this is what you're saying.
- [176:11]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we're not, we're not here. Look, we're not here talking about abuses.
- [176:16]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
No, no, this is.
- [176:18]
Father Stephen DeYoung
I know Roman Catholics get tired of that. Right.
- [176:20]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Sanctioned by bishops.
- [176:21]
Father Stephen DeYoung
I'm talking about the mainstream. Mainstream Roman Catholicism.
- [176:26]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah.
- [176:26]
Father Stephen DeYoung
In the United States has been evangelicalized. God bless them. Go to the Novus Ordo. I know you don't want to go to the Novus Ordo, okay? None of the Roman Catholic apologists on YouTube go to the Novus Ordo. They all go to Byzantine Rite churches. It's pretend they're Orthodox.
- [176:41]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
That is the case. Yeah.
- [176:44]
Father Stephen DeYoung
But go to the Novus Ordo, okay? Your hymnal has a mighty fortress in our. Is our God in it. I know Martin Luther.
- [176:51]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
That was amazing to me. Like one of the last Catholic masses I went to. I went with my. I had a Catholic roommate for a while and. And sometimes when he had an event or something, I would go with him, you know, because he was my friend. And I remember, you know, pulling the hymnal out of the pew and kind of thumbing through it, and there was a Mighty Fortress by, frankly, the world's most famous ex Catholic. I couldn't believe it. Amazing. Amazing.
- [177:18]
Father Stephen DeYoung
The music, right, is evangelical worship music now, right? The. Yeah, you're celebrating the Eucharist at every Mass. But Lutherans do that too. So do Anglicans. It's just become Protestantized. And it's not only become Protestantized in terms of the worship, but culturally it's now being Protestantized because evangelicalism, that big tent we were talking about part of what has happened to keep the movement together since the late 70s and specifically the election of 1980. I'm blaming Reagan for this in large part. Since there isn't any shared theology holding evangelicalism together anymore as a big tent. Right. There's no shared theology holding it together. There's no ecclesiology holding it together. No structures, no ecclesial structures holding it together. It's now held together by politics.
- [178:27]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah.
- [178:27]
Father Stephen DeYoung
I think that it's essentially become a political movement now. And in the United States, Novus ordo Roman Catholicism has basically joined that political movement, which is a very strange bedfellows type situation. Right. Because you've got Bible pounded Baptists who say that the Roman Catholic Church is the whore of Babylon, but who will line up to go vote for a Roman Catholic government representative because they're pro life and they've got an R after their name. Right.
- [179:07]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
So.
- [179:09]
Father Stephen DeYoung
The American Roman Catholic Church is very quickly just attaching itself. Right. And, and that's the better half. Right. The ones who haven't just gone liberal and flaked. Right. We won't even talk about them because then we get into the abuses. Right. And we're not wanting to beat up on Roman Catholics with the abuses. Honestly.
- [179:32]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
No, it's, it's.
- [179:33]
Father Stephen DeYoung
I know you get sick of that. I'm talking about the best parts. The best parts are problematic now. And in Europe, it's frankly far worse in Europe. It's also been Protestantized, but it's European Protestantism, meaning it's been hagelized, if that's not a word. It is now.
- [179:56]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah. Which probably explains never go full Hegel, especially a lot of the, the sort of. The rainbow coalition gets a lot more truck and a lot less resistance in European Catholicism than it does in American Catholicism.
- [180:10]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Right. And, and Newman, who was no, no liberal by much of any definition, but Newman with his development of doctrine hypothesis, which he used to solve various problems, played right into this, I'm pretty sure, thoroughly unintentionally, but played right into this because that was seized upon by our Hegel friends. And chief among our Hegel friends in this case for Roman Catholicism is Carl Rahner. So there's this phenomenon in Europe where anytime you have a philosopher who is profound and respected and makes some kind of impact in the philosophical world, you then get the Timu Theology version of that philosopher shortly thereafter. And the philosopher himself usually doesn't like him if he knows it.
- [181:06]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
It's like first you get the Beatles and then you have the monkeys.
- [181:11]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Except I have some respect for the monkeys.
- [181:14]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
I will admit there's some monkey songs that I really like.
- [181:18]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Yes. But still, you have to admit there's.
- [181:20]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
A similar kind of relationship going on there.
- [181:23]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Yeah. So Heidegger shows up, you get Rudolph Bultmann. Right?
- [181:30]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah, yeah.
- [181:32]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Hegel gives you Karl Rahner and Carl Rahner you may not have heard of. Even if you're a Roman Catholic, you may not have heard of him unless you studied theology somewhere. Specifically modern Roman Catholic theology. He's sometimes referred to as the Holy Ghost writer of Vatican II because he took this approach which he called transcendental Thomism.
- [182:00]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Wow.
- [182:02]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Because the victory of Thomas Aquitus at Trent meant no matter how far out your view is, you gotta, you gotta pretend you're a Thomas. Right. So transcendental Thomas, but. Which is basically Hagel. It is basically God is unfolding his knowledge of himself into the world. Right. We grow, things change. He seizes upon Newman's. Yes, things develop, but that development now is not like Newman argued, like, you know, the acorn becomes the oak tree, but everything that's in the oak tree was present in the acorn. It could be actual. Change can be actual. We know better now. Right? So in this view, what you have in the New Testament in St. Paul's writings is St. Paul's first century view of these things. It is a stage in the evolution of the unfolding of the knowledge of God. Right. An important stage. Right. But a stage that's been surpassed. So Rotter will argue that the Church now, and by that he means the Roman Catholic Church, he means Rome. That the Church of Rome now in its self understanding, in its internal understanding, understands the mystery of Christ. Better than St. Paul.
- [183:29]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah.
- [183:31]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Better than St. Peter.
- [183:33]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah.
- [183:33]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Okay. And this is an ongoing process. And the reason he's called that vis a vis Vatican II is that Vatican II really enshrines his views. Okay. All, all, all the Roman Catholic folks who hate Vatican II are right to hate Vatican ii. It's a fundamental change. A fundamental European Protestant, Protestantization of your religion. Okay. That's what it did. But I mean, bad news for you. You're not getting that repealed. Yeah. Current Bishop of Rome has said now's the time where we need to really implement Vatican ii. That is the vision. That's now where Rome is. Right. And those conservatives, even if now it's Primarily political, a mix of political conservatives and whatever in the US Are viewed as a problem because they're associated by European Roman Catholics with the fundamentalists. Right, the Protestant fundamentalists who opposed the more illumined Protestantism that came out of Europe. Okay, so time fails, obviously. There's a ton of stuff we left out. Major figures we left out. We didn't talk about the papacy, we didn't talk about all kinds of elements. You can't cover all of the history of Latin theology in one episode, no matter how long I keep Father Andrew up. But we wanted to take this trajectory through it. And there are probably elements of this that we talked about and that we didn't talk about that we'll return to in future episodes, inevitably, if the show goes long enough. But we wanted to go down this one trajectory, this one winding historical road, right. To show this thread so we could make a particular contrast. Right. Liberalization. The place where we ended up is the. The fruit of the tree. It's not this weird thing that's cut in. It's not this foreign thing.
- [185:46]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah, right. It's not a hijacking.
- [185:48]
Father Stephen DeYoung
It is along this trajectory, right. That Latin theology has taken and this trajectory that accelerated after the split with the east. And that liberalization, that sense of development, that sense that, oh, now we understand. It's cool to have 16 year old girls hand out the Eucharist in a Roman Catholic church, which is.
- [186:15]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
I mean, they're called extraordinary Eucharistic ministers, but it's ordinary.
- [186:21]
Father Stephen DeYoung
It's ordinary now.
- [186:22]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
It's completely normal. The vast majority, at least in the us the vast majority of Roman Catholics are not receiving communion from a priest, they're receiving it from a layman, often in one kind.
- [186:35]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Still, can you imagine Thomas aquinas, let alone St. Augustine, seeing that? Yeah, right. And unless your response to me is, well, of course not. They were sexist and didn't understand God as well as we do. Right. Then you're not on board with the program. They're going to be drumming you out as soon as they can. In contrast, in the east, in the Orthodox Church, right, everything is oriented toward preservationism, toward keeping things the way they are and keeping them alive. And if you want to be like certain apologists online and say, well, it didn't really achieve the form you have it in exactly until like the 5th century. I'll give you that. Right, I'll give you 5th century church versus, you know, 21st century church, any, any day of the year. Which one do you want to be part of Right. We'll just take Latin. Right. You offer me the choice. Do I want to be a member of a, of the Roman Catholic Church today or a Protestant church today or a member of St. Augustine's Church in North Africa in the fifth century? I'm going to take his every day, St. Augustine's every day of the week, twice on Sunday, although I can't receive the Eucharist twice on Sunday, so I guess I just hang around. But you get the point, right? There is over time in Latin theology, redefinition, slippage, loss. Right. And it's not something you could just correct. It's not something where you can just roll back the clock. I would love it if we could just go into the Church of Rome, sweep things up, clean things up and come back into Communion. But it's, it's not possible. I'm sorry. It's not possible. The, the things that would have to change would dismantle, would be what it is. Same thing with any Protestant church you name. And so you end up with. Right. People need to just join the Orthodox Church.
- [188:54]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Yeah, I, I mean, I, I think that it's on balance a good thing that, you know, there are like official conversations that go on between Orthodox and Protestants and Orthodox and Roman Catholics. I, I don't like if, you know, some of them have the stated goal of restoring communion. I don't think that that's going to happen. And I don't think that they can actually achieve that through dialogues. I mean, there's these commissions and it seems pretty clear that even when one of these commissions puts out another agreed statement or whatever, that, that literally no one follows it, like, no one who's actually in charge, you know, signs it or anything like that. But I still think it's good for the sake of friendship. I think it's good for the sake of witnessing to the ortho, the Orthodox faith, to non Orthodox people, you know, to show that we're open and that we care about people who are in other religious groups. That said, when I, you know, like, a lot of the work that I do is, is connecting with people who are learning about the Orthodox Church for the first time, considering it for the first time, becoming Orthodox, trying to convert, trying to tell other people about it. And overwhelmingly the thing that people say that they're coming for is not what you read in some media accounts. They're not coming because, like, oh, here I know that my political views will, will have a, a hearing or whatever. I'm sure there are people like that, but that Is not my experience. No. The thing that they keep saying over and over again, both men and women, is that they're there because they want a deep spiritual life, which means that they're not getting it somewhere else. And I think that when you have this, this recipe for change that we've been discussing for the last three plus hours, that what ends up happening is that you don't actually have depth. You might have accumulated lots of stuff over the centuries, but what you've accumulated ends up becoming this kind of moving target of confusion that's not consistent with itself.
- [191:39]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Right.
- [191:40]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
And so you can't grasp onto that. And then on the other side you get the sort of non accumulating groups, you know, the kinds that say, well, history is bunk and it doesn't matter any of that. Just, you know, believe in Jesus, trust Jesus and you're good. Then what you end up getting is something that's deep, that's deeply. No, that is very shallow. Can't be deeply shallow. And why would people become Orthodox Christians? Because they know from their experience, not just because some apologist, whoever told them they know from their experience that it's, it's going to be the same. And we've, we've done whole episodes on this podcast about what, how the Orthodox Church changes. And that's a very different kind of thing that, than what we've been talking about for the last, for this episode. The ways that the Orthodox Church changes are not fundamental to its identity. And so I think one of the reasons why many people are, are showing up at our doors and knocking on our doors, even though there has not been some big evangelistic push that we've been all working on together, is a sense that the changing of the world and on many of the changes that have been wrought, particularly by a lot of the stuff that happened in the Protestant Reformation really picked up then. And then it feels like it's accelerating now that this, it feels like society is collapsing. And I don't know what that means exactly. You can have different levels of collapse and different kinds of collapse. Collapse doesn't necessarily mean we're going to have civil war or anything like that, or big financial crisis, although who knows? I don't know about those things. I don't know how to predict those things. But I think that there is definitely a collapse of the sense of the narrative of our culture, a collapse of the sense of what we are together. And the feeling that this has been accelerating, especially over the last five years, particularly five, six years, I think is what led a lot of people to say, hold on a second. I want to be part of the story. That is the story. And I know that probably in the days and weeks that follow this episode getting published, there'll probably be some people that will listen to it and they probably will not get to this point of the episode and it'll be, you know, quite unhappy. But I think, I hope, I hope that whatever unhappiness they might have in listening to some of these criticisms that we've leveled will at least make them think for a moment about whether or not they might be true. If they don't think they're true, I mean, I pray that they are as faithful to God as they can be, wherever it is that they are. But if they might be true, I think it's worth looking into and it's very worth looking into what it is that the Orthodox Church truly is. It is not a committee, a community of perfect people. It's not a community of perfect church leaders. We got as, you know, as many failures as anybody else in terms of who we are as persons. But it has definitely a different mentality about what it means for the church to sojourn in this world. And so, you know, to all of you who are escaping the confusion and the chaos and the weirdness and coming to the Orthodox Church, however you got here, welcome, welcome home and dig in because this, this is the place to be.
- [195:44]
Father Stephen DeYoung
So aside from blackmailing everyone, Latin theology and its lack of a future.
- [195:55]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
I.
- [195:55]
Father Stephen DeYoung
Want to make clear, you know, as we went through this, this sort of genealogy, and I hope in vain, I know it's in vain that people won't actually take it, as Father Andrew said, as criticisms, but take it as descriptive. So what I was trying to do, right, to be descriptive of currents and cross currents and things and is explanatory sort of how we got here. Because, because I don't, I don't mean a lot of Roman Catholic people who say, I'm super happy with the way the Roman Catholic Church is going and I live in a 70% Roman Catholic area, right? So I meet, I meet some trads who. It reminds me of the movie Gladiator, right? They believe in the dream that was once held of a place called Rome, right? There is this thing that they believe in, there is this thing, but they probably most of all people are painfully aware that it doesn't correspond to the day to day reality. And that's why they try to find, they try to find their Latin Mass, they try to find their trad parish, they Try to find they go to a Byzantine, right. Parish, right. Something. But those places are getting closed down. Let's be honest that, you know, they're the enemy as far as their hierarchy is concerned. I don't run into Protestants, right? Whether we're talking about confessional Protestants, of whom I know a fair number from my seminary days and beyond, I don't know a lot of conventional Protestants who are looking around. I don't know what he says online, but I bet you if you got Jordan Cooper, got a couple beers in him, he'd admit that the prospects of American Lutheranism and the current scene is not filling in with hope. The evangelical scene. I know people who are fired up politically on the evangelical scene, and some of them are fired up at a particular church plant, but that church plan is usually the fifth or sixth church plant they've been a part of. And that's sort of their pattern is just going to do church plants and getting fired up. And when the fire dies down, they bolt. I. I just. I don't know anybody who looks out at the Protestant or evangelical or Roman Catholic religious scene today and is filled with positivity about it thinks it's in a good place. And I have to be honest with you, I can honestly say that when I look at the Orthodox Church today, I could be happy to think it's in a good place. That doesn't mean it's perfect, right? We got problems. We got all kinds of problems, right? We got scandals, too. Our scandals are dealt with a little differently than some of the scandals in other parts, in other communions. But we have them. We have flaws. But the flaws we have and the problems we have, the difficulties we have are the flaws and difficulties that the church has faced in every generation, forever. They're not new problems. They're not problems that result from an abandonment of core Christian teachings. They're not problems that result from having lost elements of traditional Christian praxis. People who are fervent and traditional about the Orthodox faith are not considered the enemy by the hierarchy of the Orthodox Church. They may want to rein in their zeal once in a while. They're not the enemy. They're not trying to drive them out of the church for being traditional. Right. Or conservative. Right. That. That's not a thing in the Orthodox Church. So again, I'm not trying to be critical, trying to be descriptive. And all of this is aimed at the movements, not the individuals, right? St. Augustine is a saint, but Thomas Aquinas was a good man. He was a good man. He was a godly man. He was trying to follow God. He was a brilliant man who was trying to follow God. That's not just Father Stephen DeYoung going off the reservation. Okay, Read the early Orthodox responses. When Orthodox bishops read Thomas Aquinas, you know what they say about him? They say, if only he had been born here instead of in the West. They said, think of what he could have done if he had been born here with that mind and that desire to serve God, if he hadn't been burdened with things like the Filioque and these other doctrines. Right. If he hadn't had to work within the framework of 13th century Latin theology. Think of how glorious that could have been. That's. There is no negative statement in there about Thomas Aquinas as a person. None. Right. So this is not about. I mean, there are a couple people we've named Charles Finney I have some issues with. Right. Carl Rahner. Hegel seems like an interesting cat. I don't know. I might have a beer with him. Kant, boring as heck. But this isn't about people and this isn't about. If you're listening to this, this isn't about you. When I talk about evangelicalism becoming a political movement more than a religious movement, I'm not criticizing you. Right. I'm trying hopefully, to give you some clarity about what's happening around you, what's going on at your church, what's going on with the culture of your church, what's going on with the way Christ is talked about by political figures today in the United States. If you're a Roman Catholic, I'm not here to criticize you or put you down. Right. Again, I'm trying to be descriptive and say, hey, where did this come from? Why are these things happening in your parish? Why are people leaving your parish? Right. Why did your bishop get fired if you live across the border in Texas?
- [202:21]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Right.
- [202:21]
Father Stephen DeYoung
What's happening? What are these things I'm hearing from Europe, coming out of the Vatican?
- [202:25]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Right.
- [202:25]
Father Stephen DeYoung
How does this all fit together? How does this make sense? That's. That's what I hope we did with this episode. Right. This was not. I'm going to say a bunch of bad things about your church and then tell you you need to join mine because mine's better. Okay? This is us trying to describe what's happening to you, hopefully give you some clarity and some understanding, some things to think about, and then say there's a safe haven from all of that here in the Orthodox Church. Doesn't mean your life's going to be easy, right? Once you become an Orthodox Christian and really devote yourself to the Christian life, that's when the hard part begins. But the difficulties will be the difficulty of working out your salvation, not the difficulty of reconciling bad theology, not the difficulty of being persecuted by your own bishop, not the difficulty of hearing political rally speeches instead of a sermon, not the inability to get basic doctrinal questions answered. Right? It's gonna be a different kind of difficult. And a kind of difficult that's salvific, that makes people holy, right, and leads them to the Kingdom of God. So address all your hate mail to father andrew@eggsyourfaith.com.
- [203:46]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Well, thank you very much everyone for tuning in. That's our show for tonight. If you didn't happen to get us on the phone live, you can still get in touch with us. You can email us at Lord of spirits@ancient faith.com you can send a message to our Facebook page. You can also leave us a voicemail@speakpipe.com Lord of Spirits if you have basic questions about Orthodox Christian or you need help to find a parish to live that life the Father was just talking about, go to orthodoxintro.org and join us.
- [204:15]
Father Stephen DeYoung
For our live broadcast on the second and fourth Thursdays of the month at 6pm Eastern, 3pm Pacific. 47 deadbeats living in the Backstreet, Northeast, west, south, all in the same house.
- [204:25]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
If you're on Facebook, you can follow our page. You can also join our discussion group and leave ratings and reviews so that other people can see them and share the show directly with a friend who you know is going to love it.
- [204:40]
Father Stephen DeYoung
And finally, be sure to go to ancientfaith.com support and help make sure we and lots of other AFR podcasters stay on the air. Sitting in a back room waiting for the big boom. I'm in a bedroom waiting for my baby.
- [204:51]
Father Andrew Stephen Damick
Thank you, good night and God bless you.
- [204:59]
Narrator
You've been listening to the Lord of Spirits with Orthodox Christian priests Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick and Fr. 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 words, 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.