Pananthropon & Pandemonium II: Live, In-Person Q&A

Summary

The Lord of Spirits

Episode: "Pananthropon & Pandemonium II: Live, In-Person Q&A"

Date: October 28, 2025

Hosts: Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick & Fr. Stephen De Young

Theme: The Seen and Unseen World in Orthodox Christian Tradition

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Episode Overview

This special live episode of Lord of Spirits was recorded at the Lord of Spirits Conference before a lively in-person audience. The hosts, Fr. Andrew Damick and Fr. Stephen De Young, fielded a wide range of audience questions relating to the interplay of the physical and spiritual worlds, enchantment, Orthodox theology, and practical spiritual life. The episode focused on demystifying how the Orthodox Christian tradition understands angels, demons, spirits, and saints as active participants in the world, exploring how these realities influence everyday life and human destiny. Woven through the humor, tangents, and banter, the episode delivers rich theological insights and practical approaches to engaging the "seen and unseen" realities of Christian Orthodoxy.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Ventriloquists, Necromancers, and Wizards in Scripture (05:23)

• Fr. Andrew shares how biblical language for "wizards" (Hebrew: yida'oni) actually refers to necromancers or those who consult the dead, and how this word relates to spiritists, ventriloquists (Greek: gastromythos), and the Delphic Oracle’s “pythoness.”
• The use of “wizard” in King James is a misleading translation; the intent is spiritist or necromancer, not a fantasy magic-user.

“So now you know, if someone says, you know, what do ventriloquists have to do with necromancers, the answer is wizards.” – Fr. Andrew [09:29]

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2. AI, Consciousness, and Intelligence (10:30–22:25)

• Fr. Stephen tackles fears around AI and the confusion between consciousness and intelligence. He suggests that “consciousness” is often misunderstood: being “smart” does not equate to being self-aware.
• He explains that computer programs, no matter how sophisticated, are akin to characters in fiction—they can be written as “self-aware” but never truly are.
• AI’s intelligence will never “click over” and become a person or develop self-will like Skynet (Terminator) or HAL (2001).

“Let me submit to you that no matter how good of a writer I am … that character [in a book] would never actually become aware that they were a character in a book.” – Fr. Stephen [20:50]

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3. The Harrowing of Hell & Psalm 24/23’s Messianic Prophecy (23:49–34:19)

Q&A: Did those reading Psalm 24 in King David's time recognize its prophetic connection with Christ's descent into Hades?

• Fr. Andrew unpacks how Orthodox tradition preserves mystical connections (like the use of Psalm 24/23’s “Lift up your heads, O gates…”) even when the explicit cultural context is lost.
• The seamless link between Christ’s descent into Hades and his Ascension (per St. Paul and liturgical usage), and how the tradition carried these understandings until scholarship “re-discovered” the ancient Near Eastern mythic context.
• Orthodox Tradition as continuity: The Church “preserves the connections” even when the reason has faded from view.

“On a very deep level, when we hear that [the Gospel], we know it’s true … you’re being invited into the cosmic story.” – Fr. Andrew [30:33]

“What David wrote was that at some future point, Yahweh, the God of Israel, was going to in person invade Sheol and the palace of its ruler and free the people held captive there.” – Fr. Stephen [33:59]

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4. Plato Brain & Christian Theology (34:31–40:28)

Q&A: What is 'Plato brain,' and how did Plato affect Christian thought?

• Fr. Stephen defines “Plato brain” as the unconscious adoption of Platonic categories:
  • Difference implies opposition (if something is good, other things must be bad)
  • Obsession with changelessness and inert perfection as divine attributes
• These Platonic concepts deeply shaped Western ethics and theology, sometimes distorting Christian teachings about virtue, morality, and God’s activity in the world.

“So Plato brain is the fact that there are certain Platonic categories that our culture has kind of fed us. So we all have a grid, an interpretive grid … Some of the categories we've got, that we use, that we filter things through are these Platonic categories.” – Fr. Stephen [35:51]

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5. Eternity and 'Eternal Conscious Torment' (41:38–52:53)

Q&A: If eternity in Orthodoxy isn’t a demonic stasis or endless time, what is it? What does this mean for the “traditional” view of hell?

• Fr. Andrew explains different “timescapes”: Linear Time (human), Timelessness (God), and Aeonic (angelic) time.
• “Eternal conscious torment” is not well-grounded biblically or in early Christian thought—it projects our present experience onto the afterlife, which misses the apophatic mystery of what is to come.
• Fr. Stephen adds: Time and space are categories of our created experience, not of God. References to “eternity” and “eternal” are symbolic or pedagogical for our understanding.
• The true Orthodox stance is humility about afterlife specifics, per St. John of Damascus and other Fathers.

“Our guide to what our life will be like in the resurrection is Christ after his resurrection … And you could very clearly see in those narratives that categories of time and space don’t really apply to him.” – Fr. Stephen [50:21]

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6. Necessity, Atonement, and Christ’s Freedom (56:30–67:54)

Q&A: If Orthodoxy rejects penal substitutionary atonement (PSA), how do we reconcile 'Jesus had to die' with Orthodox freedom from necessity?

• Fr. Andrew: Orthodox tradition frames Christ’s death not as necessary in a mechanistic, cosmic legal sense, but as the fitting, voluntary act of God. Entering Hades equals dying; Christ chooses this freely for humanity’s salvation.
• Fr. Stephen traces historical roots: Western Christianity, influenced by Platonic categories via Anselm and others, became obsessed with “necessity.” The East instead emphasized Christ’s actions as “fitting” (prepon)—appropriate and beautiful, not required.
• Christ is not subject to cosmic necessity; his actions are voluntary and loving, not compelled by cosmic “rules.”

“What comes out of that [Western] debate … is the idea of consequent necessity ... In the east … they used the language of it being fitting or another way of saying fitting would be, 'It is meet and right … this is particularly appropriate.'” – Fr. Stephen [62:23]

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7. Is Life a Game?—The Harrowing of Hell as Trickery (75:06–85:42)

Q&A: Is life a game, given how Orthodox tradition describes the Incarnation as tricking the devil?

• The hosts discuss how trickery is a recurring biblical motif—God’s defeat of evil is sometimes described (in hymns and apocryphal texts) as a “ruse” or trick, such as the fishhook imagery of Hades swallowing Christ.
• In ancient context, trickery itself is not evil—motivation is key (deceit for good is praised, cf. Jacob, Tamar, David).
• Modern discomfort with this imagery is due to inheritance of Kantian and Hobbesian ethical views.

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8. Pouring Libations for the Dead (86:43–90:26)

Q&A: Is pouring a drink on a grave akin to pagan libations or ancestor worship?

• Context and intention matter: Most people who pour for the dead don’t intend ritual feeding of spirits as in paganism—it's a vestigial custom, not explicit idolatry, but not recommended.
• Orthodox tradition distinguishes commemorative meals or offerings for the departed from actual feeding-of-spirits practices.

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9. Relics and the Integrity of the Human Body (90:30–98:52)

Q&A: Isn’t distributing relics (bones of saints) a violence akin to cremation, which is forbidden?

• Fr. Andrew: There is a categorical difference between cremation (destruction/disposal without reverence) and preparation/distribution of relics (done reverently, prayerfully for veneration and healing).
• The division of relics arose naturally (e.g., when saints decayed or their remains were disinterred); context, reverence, and purpose are essential. Dispersion of relics responds to the power of Christ working through saints’ bodies.

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10. The Filioque and the Western Doctrine of the Trinity (99:36–114:09)

Q&A: What was the real impact of the Filioque?

• Fr. Stephen exhaustively explains how the addition of "Filioque" (“and the Son”) to the Creed in the West disrupted the monarchy (single principle) of the Father in classic Trinitarian theology.
  • Original: The Father is the single source, who begets the Son and from whom the Spirit proceeds (cf. John’s Gospel).
  • Filioque muddles this, leading to confusion, “monotheist” language, and eventually to theological innovations like “created grace” and quantifiable grace as a substance.
  • The Eastern tradition preserves clarity: the Father alone is the one God (“monarchia”).
• These shifts made it difficult for many Western Christians to coherently articulate the Trinity and the relationship of God to creation.

"The biggest effect it has had in the west is that almost nobody in the west understands the doctrine of the Trinity anymore… The early Church fathers never used the term monotheist to describe themselves… they call themselves monarchists. They believe in the monarchia of the Father." – Fr. Stephen [101:07]

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11. Torah Sacrifices and Deliberate Sin (115:12–124:37)

Q&A: Did the Torah sacrificial system ever provide for intentional sins, or was that only possible under Christ?

• Fr. Andrew: “Just read Leviticus!”—multiple means for repentance are given, including for deliberate sins; it’s a modern misconception that only “unintentional” sins were covered.
• Fr. Stephen: The purpose of Torah sacrifices wasn’t the mechanistic “sin management” system later superimposed by some interpreters; repentance and restitution were central. The sacrificial system managed sin in the “landed real estate of Israel” until Christ, who fulfills and universalizes the sacramental order.

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12. Demonology, Christianization, and the Spirits of Place (126:13–133:02)

Q&A: Are the demons of places (e.g., rivers) banished at Christ’s victory, or only when the Church evangelizes a region?

• Fr. Andrew: Christ's resurrection has begun the defeat of the demons, but the full subjugation unfolds as the Church continues Christ’s ministry. Exorcism and sanctification are ongoing, participated in by believers.
• Fr. Stephen: Cites St. Paul’s language that “not all things are under his feet yet”—the battle continues as the Church claims the world for Christ, place by place.
• Use of guardian angels, praying over places, annual Theophany water blessings—these are concrete ways the Church asserts Christ’s triumph.

“The enemy has been scattered. But like any army that’s in retreat, it is sacking and burning and raping and pillaging as it goes. … What we’re engaging in is the action to pursue, to hunt down the demonic powers and to destroy them and to cleanse the world and to continue the work that he himself didn’t just begin but now is continuing to do through us.” – Fr. Andrew [131:53]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments (w/ Timestamps)

• On Biblical Wizards:
  “Now you know, if someone says, you know, what do ventriloquists have to do with necromancers, the answer is wizards.” – Fr. Andrew [09:29]

• On AI and Fictional Consciousness:
  “No matter how good of a writer I am ... that character would never actually become aware that they were a character in a book.” – Fr. Stephen [20:50]

• On the Harrowing of Hades:
  "What David wrote was that at some future point, Yahweh, the God of Israel, was going to in person invade Sheol and ... free the people held captive there." – Fr. Stephen [33:59]

• On Plato Brain:
  “We all have a grid, an interpretive grid in our minds through which we interpret the experiences we have ... some of the categories that we use ... are these Platonic categories.” – Fr. Stephen [35:51]

• On Eternity:
  “Our guide to what our life will be like in the resurrection is Christ after his resurrection.” – Fr. Stephen [50:21]

• On Atonement:
  “It is ‘meet and right’ ... that this is the way God chose to do it. ... There are certainly, because he is free, other ways he could have chosen ... but this way is particularly appropriate.” – Fr. Stephen [62:23]

• On Life as a Game & Christ's Trickery:
  "I mean, trickery is a big theme in the Bible ... and there's often this sense that trickery is the thing that's necessary to get justice to happen." – Fr. Andrew [78:33]

• On Trinitarian Confusion Post-Filioque:
  “The biggest effect [of the Filioque] is that almost nobody in the west understands the doctrine of the Trinity anymore... The early Church fathers … call themselves … monarchists.” – Fr. Stephen [101:07]

• On Defeating Demons in Creation:
  "What we’re engaging in is the action to pursue, to hunt down the demonic powers and to destroy them and to cleanse the world and to continue the work that he himself didn’t just begin but now is continuing to do through us." – Fr. Andrew [131:53]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 05:23 – Ventriloquists, Necromancers, and "Wizards" in the Bible
• 10:30 – Artificial Intelligence, Consciousness, and Intelligence
• 23:49 – The Harrowing of Hell and Psalm 24's Messianic Connection
• 34:31 – Plato Brain and Christian Theology
• 41:38 – Eternity, Aeonic Time, and "Eternal Conscious Torment"
• 56:30 – Necessity, Atonement, and Christ's Freedom vs. PSA
• 75:06 – Is Life a Game? Christ’s Trick on the Devil
• 86:43 – Ancestor Worship & Libations: Pagan or Not?
• 90:30 – Theological Meaning of Relic Veneration
• 99:36 – The Filioque and the Western Divorce from Classic Trinity
• 115:12 – Torah Sacrifices and Deliberate Sins
• 126:13 – Demons, Angels, and the Christianization of Creation

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Episode Tone & Style

The tone is lively, humorous, and candid. Both priests employ deep scholarship, dry wit, pop culture references (Skynet, Deadpool, Kant, etc.), self-deprecating humor, and occasional inside jokes—all of which keep the discussion engaging without sacrificing intellectual or spiritual depth. They model respectful disagreement, humility in the face of mystery, and a determination to make complex theology accessible for non-specialists.

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Summary

This episode is a banquet of Orthodox spiritual and theological wisdom, delivered in real time and with real laughs. Listeners new to these topics will leave with a stronger grasp on why Orthodoxy speaks of the world as layered with spiritual meaning, how it resists modern reductionist interpretations, and why faithful living is itself an ongoing exorcism and sanctification of the cosmos. Whether discussing AI, heaven and hell, ancient paganism, or the mystery of the Trinity, Fr. Andrew and Fr. Stephen make the unseen world seen.

Transcript

[A]

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

[B]

Well, good evening giant killers and dragon slayers. See, that's to let all the people at home know that this is really life. You are listening to the Lord of Spirits podcast. My co Host, Father Steven DeYoung is with me from Ligonier, Pennsylvania.

[C]

I think we're in Bolivar technically and.

[B]

I'm Father Andrew Stephen Damick in Bolivar, Pennsylvania because I think the line runs right here actually. And that's because we are here at the Lord of Spirits conference with live human beings. You can hear them breathing in the microphones right now.

[C]

Now hold on just a second. I want to peel back the curtain. Oh, you guys are all right here. Father Andrew scripts this stuff out, including. So like here's his intro and then he has in italics riotous response.

[B]

I'm an old theater guy. It's like having the big laugh and clap sign, you know. Exactly, exactly.

[C]

Now you know why I'm always interrupting him at the beginning of the show. It's just to throw him off his game before we even get started.

[B]

Lord of Spirits is taped before a live studio audience. So Mike, not exactly our biggest fan, Degan will not be taking your calls tonight. He's not even here, even though his job literally depends on it. Instead, there are some 180, 185, 200 pairs of eyes staring at us right now. Do you feel. You never feel self conscious, so I.

[C]

Feel seen if you so.

[B]

But at least 95% of you of you are sadly disappointed at how unpolcritudinous we have both turned out to be. The other 5% are probably face blind anyway and will sumptuously feast on the dulcet tones of our vocal stylings, as per usual. So, as I said, we are recording live at the Lord of Spirits conference. This episode is going to air for everyone else on October 23rd. So this is our Halloween episode. As such, we have some introductory bits to share before I share my introductory bit. And this is not in the script.

[C]

I studied uncharted territory, people.

[B]

That's right. That's right. I had to point out. And I actually told the staff, the ancient faith staff, that I was going to do this. And people were like. And they were asking me what it could possibly be that I was going to mention. So no one knows. Today is the 259th anniversary. So someone's doing math in their head. 1766, the 259th anniversary. And I'm not kidding about this. Of the Nottingham Cheese Riot. It is. Who knew about the Nottingham Cheese Riot? You. Amazing. I. I feel like there should be a prize for her. The Nottingham Cheese Ride is real. It is not a joke. It's not a joke. So there were. It's just today is this amazing anniversary. I had to point this out. I mean, last time, it was bat week. It was literally bat week the last time we recorded this conference. So the Nottingham Cheese Riot. There were food shortages going on in England at the time. And so there was a problem where particular areas that produced a lot of one thing, that merchants would come and buy it all up and then sell it at inflated prices elsewhere. And Nottingham made cheese. That's right. And so these Lincolnshire merchants, you know, we all know about Lincolnshire merchants, they came to buy these. This cheese and take it somewhere else. And so riots began to try to prevent them from doing that. And so all the Nottingham people. Nottinghamers, Nottinghammers. I don't know. All the Nottinghamians went into the various storehouses and stuff and brought out these enormous wheels of cheese. And to protest the. They rolled them through the streets. I'm not kidding. And the mayor of the town, in an attempt to stop this, got out there with his local constabulary. And you know why he failed? Why? He was not able to do it. And they had to bring in the military because he got knocked down by a wheel of cheese, actually. True.

[C]

So whenever Sheriff of Nottingham had it coming.

[B]

That's right. So whenever October 2nd rolls around, that was completely off the cuff, actually, you know, it is the grand. It is also called the Great Cheese Riots. No joke. You can look this up on the Wikipedias. It's true. The Nottingham Cheese riot. So, yes, 259 years ago today. Did that satisfy you ancient faith staffers? Was that a pretty good factoid? Yes. Okay. All right. Couple thumbs up in the back. But since it is. Since it is our Halloween episode, I actually wanted to talk. I had a question to ask you, which is, what do ventriloquists have to do with necromancers? The answer is wizards. So, right. So the Hebrew word, and I know I'm going to mispronounce this because Ben Johnson wrote of William Shakespeare that he had small Latin and less Greek. I have small Greek, less Latin and even less Hebrew. But the Hebrew word for wizards is something like yida oni. Is that pretty close? He's going to look it up.

[C]

No, I'm going to look at your. I'm going to look at my note transliterations.

[B]

Yeah, I did that.

[C]

Right.

[B]

Yida oni, wizards. This word shows up in the Bible a bunch of times. And if you've got the King James and it means something like all or very knowing ones. And so it actually is parallel. I don't have the theme music with the English word wizard, whose etymology means wise person. It doesn't mean magic user. It means a wise person. And what's interesting, though, is that this Hebrew word, yereoni, always appears in parallel with the word ob, which means a ghost or an ancestral spirit. And sometimes this gets translated as a soothsaying spirit or a familiar spirit. So the early uses of this yida oni word, which gets translated sometimes as wizard, it seems to be that they were epithets of the dead ancestors. So your ob could also be called yiddioni. And the reason is there was this idea that they had this sort of occult knowledge, Right. That the dead have knowledge that the living don't have. This is a thing. Eventually, though, this term yida oni gets referred to humans who actually are consulting the dead on behalf of the living, Right? So this shows up in. In the Bible, one of them is the Witch of Endor, you know, that Saul goes to. Right. She, you know, brings Samuel up out of the grave. And so this term, which originally was a kind of demonic necromantic term, comes to kind of be used to refer to humans who have become deeply involved in this demonic activity of consulting the dead and trying to get information from the dead. Gideoni gets translated most of the time in most modern translations of the Bible as spiritists. So you'll see that probably in a lot most Bibles that you have. But if you love the King James version of the Bible, as I Do deeply. It's wizards in the King James the Septuagint. Well, which we know there's no such thing. Right. See who the real listeners of the podcast are. Not very many giggles on that one. Yeah. Anyways, the Greek to Old Testament usually translates the word ob, this sort of ancestral spirit with which literally means speaking from the belly, but gets translated in a lot of translations. That Greek word gets translated as ventriloquist. And so often you can see in some literature the word gastro myth, which is also the name of my next band. And it's related to the pythonis of the Delphic Oracle and of course, the Delphic Oracle. The oracle, the woman who's there speaking the oracles on behalf of Apollo. She's called this python python because of this mythical snake that Apollo supposedly slew right nearby Delphi. The. The Greek Old Testament often translates as epaedos, which means conjurer. And so then this kind of collection of words is used in Leviticus and Deuteronomy and various other places in the Old Testament to kind of indicate this is a kind of person that you're not supposed to have anything to do with. And often it's indicated that if someone is like this that they should be stoned. So now, you know, if someone says, you know, what do ventriloquists have to do with necromancers, the answer is wizards.

[C]

So question I face every day, too.

[B]

I mean, it's true. I feel like next time Deacon Sarah from Roland is having some kind of weird, you know, you have to answer a riddle in one of your role playing games. Yeah.

[C]

Oh, I thought he showed you his doll. It's creepy.

[B]

Yeah. You know that this should be the kind of question that should be answered. You know, to answer a riddle to get through some door in one of your role playing games. Do you get fireball at. Oh, come on. You're fired. So, yeah. So that's my contribution to our spooky Halloween episode. Father Stephen told me that he was going to talk about A.I. is that right? I am the city of A.I. or no.

[C]

No, it was leveled a long time ago, so not a lot has happened there recently. AI has no trick or treating whatsoever. I know. Yeah. No, I was gonna say, well, we could subtitle this little section How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love AI But I don't love AI, so I kind of hate it. But I'm not worried about it, so. Take that, Pageot. Oh, shots fired. Also, I wrote nothing down. Of course, there's a story about how I learned that lesson. Mom knows, but she probably won't tell anybody. It's embarrassing for her.

[B]

Cause she's a good mom.

[C]

But yeah. So people get real worried about AI, right? They think it's a demon or a monster. I like Sam Harris's way of expressing why he's so worried about AI because it's literally, well, what if we make an AI and we tell it to make paperclips and it decides to just turn everything into paperclips, including us? Like literally. That's the example he uses. And I'm like, it seems like we could avert that at some point between it's making paperclips and it comes for you.

[B]

Isn't he supposed to be like one of the most brilliant atheists of our time or something like this?

[C]

Some people have said so. I think he's Susan Harris failson personally. Shots fired, Sam Harris, anyway. But yeah, they're worried about it for all kinds of reasons. And I think people shouldn't be. Because I think the concern people have comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of what consciousness is, how it works. So we'll be building off of a little bit of a thing that we've talked about on the show a few times with consciousness. So we've talked about on the show how anything that is an organized system that transfers information, and that's with like the broad physics definition of both of those terms has, and we've used the term in the past, level of consciousness. I'm going to problematize that term a little bit. I don't just do this to other people. I do this to myself.

[B]

Very postmodern. Using problematize.

[C]

Yes. I don't just go after other people's use of language. I go after my own from time to time. Because I started thinking more about this whole idea of level of consciousness. And like, what does that mean? And I think even that plays into a little bit of the confusion that leads to people being scared of AI because, for example, obviously, as we've talked about on the show, you don't know what it's like to be a bat. You don't know what it's like to be another thing. All we're saying when there's some consciousness there is that it's like something. It's like something to be whatever that is. So we could say, well, yeah, it's like something to be an anemone. It's like something to be a dog, right? And we look at that, we say, well, pretty clearly those are different things. But we Also then start talking about level. Well, like the anemone would be at like a lower level than the dog of consciousness. But what do we actually mean by that? Like the dog's smarter. I think that's kind of what we mean. The dog is smarter, more interactive. And that's a confusion of consciousness and intelligence, which is a very basic problem.

[B]

There's a lot of hmms in the audience when you said that.

[C]

So get this.

[B]

When we do a regular podcast, there's no hmm in the earphones.

[C]

Right.

[B]

And so, Simon, you could say once in a while into the earphones. Okay.

[C]

I think people just post in the YouTube.

[B]

Oh, okay. No, usually they're posting stuff that has nothing to do.

[C]

Well, yeah, we always, we always get. We always get the cultist who shows up and it's like Moses is returning from the grave.

[B]

I love those people. Three weeks. I love those guys.

[C]

To read Vengeance.

[B]

And if that's one of you, thank you so much for coming to the inspired.

[C]

I'm kind of hoping it's unironic, though. I'm kind of hoping it's a legit crazy person.

[B]

You haven't never told them about the email we got from the guy who is convinced. I mean, he sent us pages. Yes, pages of stuff. Convinced that his wife had been replaced by a reptilian.

[C]

No, it was a mantis.

[B]

Oh, excuse me.

[C]

It was insectoid.

[B]

And I was, I was so concerned.

[C]

That's why I was so ridiculous. I'd be reptilian.

[B]

Sure. I was, I was, I was so concerned after reading this. There's one Orthodox church in that town that this guy was from. I was actually seriously concerned. Calling up the priest and just be like, father, they walk among you. You just need to know that they're out there.

[C]

They need help.

[B]

In Nebraska somewhere. You were saying? Sorry.

[C]

Yes. So that confusion between consciousness and intelligence is, I think, part of the fear. We make a machine smart enough and then somehow by being smart to a certain degree, having a certain amount of processing power, it's going to become self aware and decide to kill everyone. Like Skynet or HAL or like that's, that's what we're thinking, you know.

[B]

Skynet became conscious on my 22nd birthday.

[C]

There you go.

[B]

Everyone's now like working back when my.

[C]

We're all still there and we're all still here.

[B]

It was 1997, was when Skynight came, became conscious. In the immortal words of Elton John, I'm still standing.

[C]

So like guy that became conscience, say John the Forerunner was beheaded and you.

[B]

Were born that's right. And on the day that I was.

[C]

Born, I'm not going to say if there's anything connecting those ideas.

[B]

Oh, well, I could connect it even more because someone died that was related to this. Recently, on the day that I was born, within three and a half weeks, two different women tried to kill the President of the United States. One of them was Sarah Jane Moore, who just died. She just died. She's like, it was in her 90s. And the other one was Lynette Squeaky Fromme of the Manson family. So if you guys, all you conspiracy thinking people out there, like, wow, all the dots are connecting now. It's true. It's also the only year that the President United States ever stood up at the State of the Union address. This is the year we were both born in. Ever stood up in the State of the Union address and said, ladies and gentlemen of Congress, members of the Supreme Court, whatever, whatever. The State of the Union is not good. Every other year. They say it's strong, it's powerful, blah, blah, blah. But good old Gerald Ford, the guy elected neither president nor vice President. Yes, he was our President.

[C]

He was from Grand Rapids, Michigan.

[B]

That's right.

[C]

He absorbed the Dutch bluntness.

[B]

That's right.

[C]

Like, I gotta be real with you folks.

[B]

That's right.

[C]

Things aren't good out there.

[B]

That's right. I telling you guys, 1975 was a mystical year. Something about it. Any other 75ers in the room? How's Turner 50 keep treating you?

[A]

Next Wednesday?

[B]

I will be 50 next Wednesday, everybody. All right. I should say, though, that the aforementioned Pageau is also a 75er. Yes. What is that all about? He is the world's second greatest Canadian.

[C]

I didn't boo the man. What was that?

[B]

He's the second greatest Canadian.

[C]

That was a. Ooh. Not a. Oh.

[B]

Okay.

[C]

So interjections aside.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

So we think like, you get intelligent and then all of a sudden you're going to become somehow conscious in a different way than it already is. But even ascribing levels of consciousness to different intelligence is assuming some things, right? It's kind of assuming we know what it's like to be an anemone and what it's like to be a dog. To be a dog is somehow a better experience. Being an anemone may be fabulous, Right? It could be like a completely blissful existence.

[B]

But they're not telling.

[C]

Exactly.

[B]

They're not telling us.

[C]

We have no way of knowing. It could also be abject screaming horror every moment. Pity the anemone. Who knows?

[B]

But it's the name of my next.

[C]

Album, actually, so we don't have the ability to do comparatives. But the more important thing for AI is if we're right about what has consciousness, then the systems on which AI runs are already conscious in some way. Oh.

[B]

He did promise he was going to make everybody more worried and less worried at the same time.

[C]

But the AI itself is software, not hardware.

[B]

Smash some more mmms.

[C]

Now I'm gonna do a poll. Who here has read Grant Morrison's Animal.

[B]

Man, Your favorite, Deacon.

[C]

Wow. Wow. Okay, I'm gonna expand this a little more. John Byrne's She Hulk. Anybody? A Deadpool comic? Seen a Deadpool movie? Okay. People don't read. That's what I just learned. People don't read. Even comics. Okay, wow. So these are all examples of fiction where, right. Characters are sort of self aware that they're a character in a comic book or a movie. Right. Or become aware of that fact. Okay. So a book or a movie we could view as the hardware, the delivery system. The software is the actual content. I could write a book or a comic book or a movie script. I can create characters if I'm a skilled writer, who seem very real, who seem like real people who seem like. You could say, well, I know this character has never been in this situation in any of the books, but here's what I think they would do in situation X, Y, Z. Right. Because they're so. And the reality is they would do anything. And that's it. Because they don't exist. But we think, right? We conjure that up. But let me submit to you that no matter how good of a writer I am, no matter how well I did it, how real I made the character seem, that character would never actually become aware that they were a character in a book. I could write them that way, I could simulate it, but they wouldn't actually become self aware. That can't happen. Bad news. I know. Skynet and HAL can't happen. That's not how this works.

[B]

That's for the Gen Xers out there.

[C]

Yeah. You know, Right. Because that doesn't click over. Right. In terms of self awareness. And this is what we now call AI has been around a long time. When I first got into computers, way back in the day of yore, when they invented it, after I got rid of my abacus and moved on, there are these things called ELIZA programs.

[B]

Oh, yes. Who remembers eliza?

[C]

Which was basically just. They coded a thing so it would do active listening, which is a psychotherapy scheme. So it would start out, it would ask you, how are you feeling? And you would say, I am feeling sad. And it would say, why are you feeling sad? And you'd say, well, because this happened. Why does that make you sad? Right. Or pick up a word. You said, you know, I just visited my mother. Oh, did you enjoy visiting you? Right. It would just keep reflecting back to you, and they've just made it more and more sophisticated, more and more sophisticated assimilation of a person. And it will probably continue to get more and more realistic as a person, but it will never be a person. It will never come and try to fold you into a paperclip. So you're fine. Although if we do ever make a robot that makes things into paperclips, I want to send it to Sam Harris's house just to see the look on his face.

[B]

Nice. Well, this is actually an all Q and A episode of the.

[C]

Well, mostly. Because that technically.

[B]

Yeah, mostly. Yeah, mostly, yes. So we have two microphones, both here up at the front. If you would like to get your question answered, don't raise your hand. That's not what we're doing. Because your voice needs to be on the recording. If you would like to ask a question, step into the aisles now, these two aisles that are right in the middle. And line up, line up. And we will simply go back and forth. And this episode, actually, and you all will know this, you can spread this to the rest of the Internet. This is only going to have two halves. See, I wanted to say the third half will be the rest of this conference, but Father Stephen said the third half is the friends we made along the way. So, anyway, so we are going to do two halves. We will have one break, and then we'll come back.

[C]

Maybe when everyone else leaves, I'll hang around and do a third half.

[B]

Oh, there you go. It's just like Father Steven's Twitch Stream. Who. Who tunes into Father Steven's Twitch Stream? That is a surprising number of people.

[C]

Why? Haven't you read Grant Morrison's Animal Man?

[B]

Okay, well, we will begin over here on the right. So step up, say your name, and then generally where you're from. And Earth is not the category you want to say you're from. Hello, my name is Mark and I'm from New Hampshire. All right. And it's really cool to be here. It's really great to be here. It is cool for you to be here.

[C]

Yeah, indeed, cool for me. It was 92 degrees in Louisiana when I left.

[B]

It shows how cool you are. That you are here. Fair enough. So I wanted to know if you can talk a little bit more about so the Lord of Spirits Goes to Hell episode. Yes, one of my favorites ever. I always think of Spinal Tap whenever I hear that title, for whatever reason, I don't know. So you talked in that episode. I think, Father Steven, you spoke about how that is exhibit A for proving the validity of the orthodox tradition. If I remember correctly, you used the. So the lift up your heads, O gates verse piece of scripture in Psalms. How that was for ages. The church just sort of spoke that this is about the harrowing of Hades, but didn't have anything to connect it. But then. So some texts were found that proved that that was part of the BAAL cycle. So I just want you guys to talk more about that subject, but if you would. But my question specifically is when David wrote that psalm and when it was read by anyone during that time period, would they have known, made the connection, that this was about the Messiah dying and descending into Hades and grabbing a hold of Adam and Eve and pulling them out and rescuing the righteous dead from death? Yeah, that's a great question. It's one of my favorite subjects. Number one, I want to point out for anyone who's listening closely to the last thing that the chanters were singing as you were leaving the church. Did anyone listen? It was Psalm 24, the exact Psalm you were just referencing. So was that deliberate? Father Anthony Cook, where are you? You were the one we found. Just. You found. I just found it somewhere. Yeah. Well, so. So I think one thing that's worth saying about those last lines from Psalm 24 or 23, I think it is in the Greek, lift up your heads. Oh, you gates be lifted up, you everlasting gates. The king of glory shall enter in. So that is. That is definitely associated with the herring of hell. I mean, that's very explicitly the case in the Gospel of Nicodemus, you know, also called the Acts of Pontius Pilate. Very, very explicit there. But it is also used. Those lines are also used in the Feast of the Ascension to refer to Christ's ascension at the same time. And I actually had a very experienced chanter kind of say that to me as a sort of correction. And I didn't at the moment realize what I should have said, which, I mean, this is going to sound very snooty, but there is this French phrase which means the spirit of the staircase. And it's when you're walking away from a conversation and that thing occurs to you, like, oh, that's the thing I should have said. Right. And so I had this experience later on.

[C]

You're just trying to get back in good with Pageot. That's what that's all about right there.

[B]

That's right. And the thing that I should have said is, I mean, is it in Ephesians where St. Paul talks about him descending into the lower parts of the earth and him ascending, Right. To say he ascended. He must have descended.

[C]

You descended also Ascended, Yeah.

[B]

That's what I should have said is like St. Paul ties those events together, the descent into the underworld and the ascension into heaven. And if you read The Gospel of St. Mark, the 40 days are basically not there. He basically, you know, he dies, rises from the dead, and then the next scene is him ascending from the Mount of Olives. Right. There's no time in between with Mark. So Mark, the way he tells the story is, is he closely associates those events together. So all of that is to say that there are a lot of stories of divine descents into the underworld in the ancient Near East. There's a lot of them. Right. So we talked. I think we talked about. Didn't we talk about Inanna going into the underworld at some point in the Sumerian myth, pretty sure where she goes down, she has to pass through the nine gates of hell and has to take off various bits of clothing to get in there. And by the end, she's naked, but also in a fetal position, which is exactly the position in which they bury their dead. And she slides in and then dethrones her sister Ereshkigal, and then she's judged and turned into a slab of meat hanging from the wall, which is what happens in Sumerian courtrooms, apparently. But then you also get. I mean, you know, in Greek myth, you've got Orpheus to sing into Hades. And one thing that's interesting if you look at all these infernal descents, is that it always turns out badly, even for gods, except in Christianity. And I think. I don't know that this is what Father meant when he said that this is proof of Christianity. But for me, one of the proofs of the truth of Christianity is that it is the highest story, right? It is the highest story. It is also, for instance, the highest ethic. There is no other ethic that says, love your enemies. You can't get higher than that. That is the highest possible ethic. Only Christianity says that. That's why, you know, a number of, like, atheist philosophers hated that. They're like, oh, this is weak. Right. But it's actually not. So to me, this particular story, you know, for modern people, a story being the highest story is. Does not constitute, like, a logical proof. Like, you couldn't submit that in a logic class or a courtroom or anything like that. But I think human beings, we know on a very deep level that this reality, you know, that the truth of the gospel, that the God who is omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, who made everything, who made you, chose to become men and suffered and died and rescued you from the power of demonic forces so that you could be elevated to be with his heavenly hosts. On a very deep level, when we hear that, we know it's true. We know it's true. And try to imagine for a second living in a world that's dominated by demons and by a pagan religion in which you've never heard that before or anything like it. And then you hear that. It's just stunning to imagine that. And the amazing thing is we have now hit another point in history, I think, where there are so many terrible stories being told that when we tell that one again, when we tell that story, when we actually speak the gospel in a way, maybe some new language, but still the exact same content as always. Because there's only the one gospel that when people hear that, I mean, I said that to somebody who was raised Christian, and they're like, well, what is the orthodox take or whatever on the gospel? I basically said what I just said, and this person started tearing up. And I think that's because they never heard it actually said that way before. They'd always been told that the gospel was like, how do I get saved? Or something like that. But actually, it's. You're. There's this cosmic story that has occurred, and you're being invited into it, the best part. So to me, that's proof in a way. That's. That kind of makes an end run around our sort of, you know, analytical minds, which I have nothing against the analytical mind, but it's not the only way to know stuff, so. So that's what I think about that.

[C]

So to summarize, girl, you know it's true. Ooh, ooh, ooh.

[B]

Wow. First Milli Vanilli reference on the podcast, I think.

[C]

Yeah, that's great. Or is it a reference to the people behind. Oh, that's true.

[B]

What is Milli Vanilli really?

[C]

Bold move, assuming the originality of the longer ending of Mark?

[B]

Well, I'm not the.

[C]

Question him further about this. See if he could back it up.

[B]

Yeah, you're the biblical scholar.

[C]

I think what I was getting at with the proving lady tradition, and frankly, until you brought that up, I didn't even remember saying it.

[B]

But it's a long podcast.

[C]

No, it's just things come out of my mouth and then stream of consciousness that things. But what I was getting at was the fact that the material and information we needed to make that connection had been lost for thousands of years. But the Orthodox Church's tradition preserved that connection such that when it was rediscovered, we could go, oh, that's why those two things are connected. Right. And so relatedly, a better answer to give that kind of obnoxious channer. This is all. This is all I know about this guy. He sounds obnoxious, but he's actually great.

[B]

And he's not in the room.

[C]

I'll take your word for it. I'd still say it if he was, is to point out that the reason we also. See you just double down. The reason we also use that psalm for the Feast of the Ascension, that the Feast of the Ascension and a lot of our liturgical hymns surrounding that are referencing the way the Ascension is depicted by the prophet Daniel in the enthronement of the Son of Man, which was a deliberate inversion of the enthroning of BAAL in the BAAL cycle.

[B]

That's right.

[C]

So the fact that we use it for Ascension also is actually further evidence of that case, that this is another case where the Old Testament is referencing the BAAL cycle and those connections have been preserved by orthodox tradition. And I think that's an important point also in answering the quasi valid criticism, we sometimes get where they're like, oh, you're acting like in order to understand the Bible or Christianity you have to read Ugaritic or something. And all this, it's like, no, you can just go to church and hear the hymns and accept this stuff. Right. But if you want to, if you want to look under the hood and see how she runs, you could go and find all these things and find out how it all makes sense.

[B]

Do you think David knew what he was writing?

[C]

So what David wrote was that at some future point, Yahweh, the God of Israel, was going to in person invade Sheol and the palace of its ruler and free the people held captive there.

[B]

Thank you. Thank you, thank you. All right, I know who you are, but tell everybody. Oh, okay. My name is Andrew and I am.

[A]

From Holly Springs, North Carolina.

[B]

That's right.

[A]

Nobody knows where that's at.

[B]

That's right.

[C]

And it's in North Carolina.

[B]

Right. And this is my godfather, everybody. So you could blame him, I guess, a little bit, you know. That's right. I had a lot, I had a lot more hair at the time. And I didn't have a beard at the time. That's right. If you look at that picture, you'll understand why I have a beard. Now into our question. My question, it's a two parter. The first part is what exactly is Plato brain? And number two is what effect does Plato have on Christianity either for ill or. Oh yeah, yeah. I mean, this is what I'd say to. The second part is read Yaroslav Pelican's Christianity and Classical Culture. That is an amazing text that really lays out sort of the collision of Christianity with classical thought. And of course his ultimate conclusion is that it wasn't that, you know, Greek classical thought reshaped Christianity, it's that Christian thinkers basically took Greek categories and terms that. And use them for their own purposes is what it came down to being. But yeah, you should definitely read that book. I mean, it's a little difficult, but it's worth it. If you're interested in this particular big question, what is Plato brain? Father Stephen De Young.

[C]

Well, I'll add to that on the second point, Vladimir Lovsky's Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, where he's talking specifically about how the Platonist tradition entered Western theology by way of St. Augustine. And he's doing that sort of in St. Augustine, who is a saint but was heavily influenced by Plato, such that there is a Platonist period in Western theology when it's taught in schools by the schoolmen themselves. There is a. You look at Boethius and several others, there's a Platonist period. So Plato brain is the fact that there are certain Platonic categories that our culture has kind of fed us. So we all have a grid, an interpretive grid in our minds through which we interpret the experiences we have. And it's not like we started out a blank slate and then we chose a grid out of a series of events, right? It's everything around us, our culture, our family, our parents, the school we went to, everything, right? All shapes that in various ways. And we could do things to, over time. And it takes time, reshape it in various ways. And so some of the categories that we've got, that we use, that we filter things through are these Platonic categories. So for example, one of those that we've talked about on the show before is that difference implies opposition, that if two things are different, they must be in some way opposed to each other. And that may not be. I mean, unless you've ever had a political discussion, it may not be immediately obvious to you like how that works. But one of the most profound places that's affect the way we think about things is how we think about ethics and morality. If we say, okay, this is good, then that means anything else, insofar as it is different from that thing must be to some degree or another, evil, sinful, bad, whatever we want to use. And so this causes things like in Roman Catholicism, if virginity and celibacy is good, then married life has to be somehow lesser because. Because it's different than that. If we say that poverty is good, then possessions must be bad, or if we say that wealth is good, then poverty must be bad. And so it becomes very hard for us if we've got those categories working. So we got a case of play doh brain then to understand. Well, no, marriage is the highest calling and way of life for some people, and celibacy is the highest. And for some people it's both at different times in their life. So this idea that there could be a variety of goods is just something that we're not used to thinking and working in that way. So that's one example. There are lots of others, like the Platonic idea of participation, where sort of independent things get muddy. Plato's categories of being and becoming are like this. That anything that's changing is somehow bad and lesser than something that is unchanging and immobile. And if you have the idea that God to be God, to be perfect and to be God, has to be kind of immobile, you're going to run into trouble with like the divine energies, with the idea that God is active in the world. That's why when you read somebody like Philo of Alexandria, the main reason Philo of Alexandria talks about there being a divine Logos is he has this very Platonic version of God where God can't be active in the world. He can't even really be that aware of the world. So there has to be some intermediary thing that is in some sense divine, but is a little lower than God and therefore could be interactive in the world. And sometimes you can see in that Platonic period in Christianity that gets fed into Christianity and they have Christ, you know, in that Philo's Logos position, or they have the divine essence, which is like up here and then the persons of the Trinity are below somehow like it does a lot of weird distortions theologically.

[B]

All right, thank you very much. Back over to the right side. What's your name? Where are you from?

[A]

Yes, I am Jonathan from Virginia. All right, so first, I do have a lead on your Mantis emailer.

[C]

Is it you? How did that work out for you? You still have your head.

[A]

I know it's something a little different, actually. Okay, I never thought I'd say this, but Father Stephen, you missed a pop culture reference. Replacing somebody with a Mantis was a plot point in the first season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

[B]

So there you go.

[C]

See, I am not a Joss Whedon fan. Oh, I did like Josh.

[B]

Wow.

[C]

I didn't like him before he got canceled. Wow.

[B]

I like Firefly. Firefly is good, right?

[C]

See, either I did. I did like Firefly. Okay, I will give you Firefly. All right.

[B]

Right.

[C]

I will give you Firefly. I thought you were going to go for the 90s superhero television show Mantis.

[B]

Oh, man.

[A]

I leave the comic books to you. I know. I am far outclassed again. I watch your twitch stream.

[B]

Okay, yes.

[A]

So I have a compound question on eternity. So the context for this. I have a Calvinist Baptist friend who is a very firm believer in eternal conscious torment. And I'm trying to talk her down from that.

[B]

I'm sorry. Yes.

[A]

So from the previous times you've discussed eternity. I know a lot of things eternity isn't. It's not a Plato brain stasis. See, previous question. It's not an endless succession of moments. I know. It is some divine energy that we can participate in now. But one, what divine energy does that mean exactly? What does that look like? And two, how does that reconception of eternity affect our view of eternal condemnation?

[B]

Yeah. The first thing I'll add to help give some of this context. I think one of the most useful things I was ever taught in seminary and we had the same dogmatics professor. So you probably heard this from Dr. Harry Bousales.

[C]

I don't know. Not in my notes.

[B]

Not in my notes. That's right. Any other tika nights you went to seeing Tikonites? Did you have Dr. Harry? Father John?

[C]

We should explain. Anytime somebody brought up some weird or vaguely heretical idea in asking him a question, he'd just respond with, I don't know. That's not in my notes.

[B]

That's right. Which is very nice of him. We had another professor that sometimes would just simply close his book and then walk out when that happened, which I respected that as well. But one of the things that he mentioned is a kind of distillation of understanding. The way that the Church Fathers talk about time is that we currently exist in linear time. It has a beginning and an end. Right. That God exists in timelessness. If you could even say he exists in something, it's just a manner of speaking. There is no time for God or whatever, but that's. We could think of that as his time zone, eternity. No beginning, no end. But then the angelic powers exist in what is called aeonic time. And if you want to continue the sort of the mathematical or geometrical analogy, it has a beginning but no end. So it's like a ray rather than a segment, but it doesn't function as a series of moments in the way that our time zone does. And what's really fascinating about this is actually we talk about aeonic time, if I may say so, all the time in our liturgical services.

[A]

Unto ages of ages.

[B]

Oh, yeah, the priest says unto ages of ages, which in Greek is the aeonic time. And so, in a sense, it's kind of we will become lifted into this time zone, which is not eternity, like God's eternity. It is this angelic experience. So we've talked a lot of times, for instance, on the show about angelic experiences or moments that we have some consciousness of that. On one level, you could say they're happening all at once, but on another level, they punctuate certain points in human history because we're experiencing linear time. Like, there's one angelic fall, but there's kind of 5ish Angelic Falls as well. As we said in, like, what was it, the third or fourth episode back in 2020, when times were great, we saw everything clearly. That's right. The rain was gone. So let that one. Yeah. Take that one for a while. But I think that the whole eternal conscious torment thing is predicated upon the idea that our experience here and now of this time and what it is like to be us in this time is simply going to be the same, but dark and fiery. I think that that's what a lot of people think, that this sort of. This idea of quote unquote, hell, that's not even the right term for it, by the way, because hell is the underworld, Hell is Hades, hell is Sheol. But that hell is this, you know, like this image of a bunch of demons sitting around poking people in the butt with, you know, tridents. Right. I mean, isn't this. I'm trying to think of who that cartoonist was. Gary Larson. Yes, this is the Gary Larson hell, which is the one that's in all of our heads, that that's what that is. But the problem is, is that our frame of reference is not the frame of reference of what it means to be in the age to come. It's just not. Number one, we're going to have the resurrection. That's going to change a lot. Number two, the righteous will be, as Christ says. One of my favorite verses, sons of God, equal to the angels. So what exactly does that mean? We don't quite know. Even St. Paul says, I don't know. So I think that all that preliminary stuff is really important to say and we have to get the Hollywood ideas, the Gary Larson ideas of what hell is out of our heads and frankly try to return to the scriptural language, right, where you've got images of insanity, you've got images of darkness, you've got images of fire, you've got images of being sort of subhuman. That is what kind of damnation is within that context. The truth is that what your average low church Protestant these days would call eternal conscious torment, that is an imposition onto the Bible. It's not even kind of a plain basic bare reading of the Bible where you get these few images put together, but they don't actually lock together to create a whole, a full orbed picture of what it means to be damned. Why? Because the whole point of describing what it means to be damned is not so that you understand all the ins and outs of the underworld and damnation and, you know, whatever. No, the whole point of describing it at all with this very cursory, very short language is don't go there. The whole point is so that you would live a faithful life for a hardcore Calvinist. I don't know, but I have known.

[C]

Calvinists said Reformed Baptist, so not a real Calvinist.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I have known people that are within that kind of theological world that in some cases, I mean, in many cases, as you pointed out, Father Stephen, you know, if you accuse a Calvinist of believing some horrible thing, their response often is, yeah, and effectively like, yes, of course I believe that terrible thing that you just said that I believe about God, you know, whatever. But many, faced with that clarity do sometimes recoil in horror and say there must be some other way. And God willing, they run into the arms of the real God and not away entirely from any kind of. Although maybe that's what they need for a while is to step away because they're so horrified by who they think God is. I think that a lot of the problem with this model is that it assumes Human understanding and knowledge that we really just do not have. Like, we don't have it all nailed down. So that's what I would say. There was a lot more to what you asked that I'm sure Father Stephen can jump on.

[C]

Well, as someone who has it all nailed down, I've not even begun to nail.

[B]

Nailed it. And in that, you have nailed it.

[C]

Yeah. So, yeah, Father Andrew's analogy breaks down at certain points.

[B]

Of course, all analogies do.

[C]

Yeah. Like, so he talked about us joining Aonic time. But the way theosis works, we don't exactly become what angels are. And as I've said on the show before, strictly speaking, time and space don't exist. They're categories that are part of that grid that we filter our experience of reality to, through, in our finitude. And so those are categories that fundamentally don't apply to God. And if you want to read some about that. Now, Saint Dumitrue Staniloid talks about how all of God's attributes are super essential. Meaning God's omnipresence doesn't mean that he's everywhere. The way I'm one place, but he's all the places that it means that spatial categories don't apply to God.

[B]

And.

[C]

The same thing is true of eternity, that temporal categories don't apply to God, strictly speaking. Now, in human speech, sometimes we have to talk that way, and sometimes even God talks that way to us because of our finitude, so we can try and have some kind of understanding. But even when we push God's words to us very hard, it gets weird. Like God was indwelling the temple in Jerusalem in 850 B.C. wasn't he indwelling everywhere in 850 B.C. well, okay, but he was especially there. Right? Like, what does that actually mean? Well, we don't know, but God speaks to us in that way to give us a certain understanding. Hey, if you want to go meet with God, that's the place to go. Not denying that he's everywhere else too, but. Right. So our guide to what our life will be like in the resurrection is Christ after his resurrection. And you could very clearly see in those narratives that categories of time and space don't really apply to him, that he doesn't have to traverse the distance between two places to get from one place to another, that sometimes it kind of looks like he's two places at once and it doesn't take him time to get from place to place. So we could generally say things like that about our state and eternity. And then beyond that, if you want to know what I think that makes the life of the Resurrection look like? There's a pageot fest video waiting on YouTube for you with a special guest appearance by Jordan Robinette Peterson.

[B]

Is that really his middle name?

[C]

No. Oh, okay. I think it's Jordan Hussein Peterson.

[B]

So, you know, I would also add. The other thing I would also add, which occurred to me as you were saying this. Saint John of Damascus is on the Orthodox faith, or the exact exposition of the Orthodox faith. If you read the first maybe 12 chapters of that, which in there. I mean, a chapter is like a page or. I mean, unless it's chapter eight, which goes on for like eight pages, there's a lot that's good in there about, from almost every single possible angle about, you know, the cataphatic and apophatic things we say about God, the things that we can possibly say about God and things we have to say. Well, not really. You know, he's on this. He's in that. He's anti that, whatever. It's a very, very thorough and. And yet also succinct, frankly, exploration of all of that stuff. So, for instance, there's one point where he quotes. I think it's Maximus the Confessor, and he says that, you know, anything we could say about God's maybe. I don't know if it was attributes, but he says that this is what we can say that's around God. That God is eternal is a thing that we say that's around God because you can't actually say what he is or who he is or how he lives or anything like that. And what's also kind of really beautiful about a lot of those passages in the beginning of that text. Are there any homeschoolers in the room? Yeah, yeah. I'm using this for homeschooling with my two teenage boys. They have to read three chapters a week, which there are moments of, you know, gnashing of teeth, you know. But I do recommend it all back.

[C]

Around to the outer darkness.

[B]

That's right, exactly. I do recommend the newish translation published by St. Vlad's Seminary. It's good, clear, and it has the Greek on the, you know, facing page. So that's nice. If you want to read the Greek, what he often does is he will go in very thorough detail about how we can and cannot talk about God and what that really means about who he is. And then often at the end of a paragraph, he may say something like, there's a whole chapter, for instance, on what do we do about all this sort of language of corporeality regarding God in the Bible, right? That he has eyes, hands, ears and stuff. And actually I was very happy when rereading that recently to learn that basically he says exactly what we said in some of our God's body episodes. That was kind of nice that we happen to be reading the Church fathers and saying what they say. How about that?

[C]

What an incredible happenstance as we make all this up.

[B]

Amazing. I know it's coincidence, but then he says, you know, so we have to understand all this language is symbolic in one way or another. And then at the end, he says, unless we're speaking about the incarnate word, our Lord Jesus Christ, who had, you know, this and this and this and this and this and this and it's great. I love. I love John of Damascus. He leaves nothing out. You know, that's a very long answer, but it's a. This is a sticky wicket, as our friends across the pond would say that you're talking about. But I think the best the cure really is humility, you know, to kind of back away from the things that we think we know about God and so forth. So, yeah, thank you very much. All right, if you want to ask a question, you have to get in line over on this side. Oh, did you have a follow up? You have to get in line. That's all good. I know, I know, I know. Well, all these people have been standing in line. Look at them. So over here, what's your questions or where are you from and what's your name?

[A]

I'm John from Seattle. Saint name Jonah.

[B]

All right, John from Seattle.

[C]

My rental car has a Washington plate.

[A]

I'm honored.

[B]

Great estate in these, this fine country.

[C]

I don't know how it got to Pittsburgh, but there it is.

[A]

I'd like you collectively to untangle a paradox that I've got about how on one hand, God isn't subject to necessity, and on the other hand, well, Jesus had to die so he could. Hello, Hades, little miniature context. I grew up evangelical and then spent a few decades in the non denom emergent world. So because of that early upbringing, I grew up taking PSA for granted. And then in the non denom emergent world, there was a lot of TSA is wrong, but it wasn't answered or filled with anything. It was just make sure you know that it's wrong. I said, okay, I got that. But growing up, it made internal coherent sense. Like it was a well sealed, logically contained thing that I could hold on to. And now I Had nothing to hold on to. I've been orthodox for three years and I feel like now I'm still being told, hey, PSA is wrong and thank you for the whole Council of God episodes, which in this Old Testament run has been illuminating about how it's just, it's, it's obviously not sacrificial, etc. It's, it's great. But I'm still left with this paradox of, in orthodoxy, the answer seems to be to why did he have to die? It's so he could go to Hades and conquer death by death. But that seems to run a ground of he's not subject to necessity. So what, what, what do I do?

[B]

Yeah, the thought that occurs to me, I don't know that this is going to be the most satisfying one, but the thought that occurs to me is, you know, reality as we know it is created by God, right? He, he made this world. He made the heavens, the earth, the underworld, right? He made all of this. Certainly also he made a lot of these beings with free will. So that's why not everything is great. But to me it's like saying, you know, it's like suggesting that a fairy tale that begins with once upon a time is subject to the necessity of beginning with once upon a time. Why does it begin that way? Because that's how fairy tales begin. Now this just might, this might seem just sort of tautological, but the story of how God rescues us from the power of the death God is not a story where he's forced into something. So when we use language, say, well, he had to die to enter Hades, it's really actually just redundant. Entering Hades is dying. Right. Now, for those who were in first century Palestine watching it happen, they watched a human being die on the cross. That's what they saw happen, right? But there's a larger cosmic story going on, just as there is for any human being who dies. It's not just this material bit shutting down or moving into decay mode or whatever, there's a lot more going on. So even though we use language like, well, this has to be this way or whatever, you know, like John Damascus would remind us now, when we say has to be, we don't really mean it in the sense of being subject to necessity. Now that's not just to take the, you know, sometimes Calvinist cop out of, say, well, in such a way as so many of them do, they're like, you know, well, God, yeah, God creates evil, but, but in such a way as he's not the author of Evil, which doesn't make any sense. But I, I think that it's. It's really comes down to this, is the way that the story is, is told. We don't actually know what the experience is of the Son of God entering into Hades. We use this language of him going to a place, and that place is the underworld. But even human beings who, their souls go to the underworld, it's not like there's some kind of, you know, cave or. I like to think of it as like a gray bureaucratic office down underneath, you know, that. That they're traveling to. But that is the language that we have. And even St. Paul mentions, you know, as we said earlier, this language of Christ descending into the. The depths of the earth. He doesn't mean that Jesus started to drill down and is burrowing. That's not what's going on there. But it's using this mythic language to tell the story in that particular way. And so the addition of death to the human body, which is done in Genesis, Christ voluntarily subjects himself to that. He lays his life down of his own accord. No one takes it from him. It's not necessity. No one kills Jesus. He bows his head and then gives up his spirit. Right? It's not that someone stabbed him or shot him or anything like that. So it's all voluntary. It is paradoxical, right? Because you could, like, if you want to be very cynical about it, you could say, well, he set up this whole system of death, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And so he wrote this story, and so now this is what has to happen, whatever. But I don't think that that's the right way to understand how the story goes, because fundamentally what we have is a story, and that doesn't mean it's not real. I have people tell me sometimes when I describe Christianity as being mythic, they're like saying, they'll say, so you don't think it really happened? Like, no, it happened. But the way in which it happened, this is the way we understand what happened. It's in these mythic terms. So, yeah, Christ is definitely not subject to necessity. And even if we use language that sounds like that, there's so much other language that explicitly denies that. That means that we can't read it as being about necessity. We don't have permission to read it that way because he himself said it's voluntary. It's voluntary. So that's what I would say to that.

[C]

So I love this.

[B]

I can just gesture at you. I don't have to actually, like. Because you guys don't know this, maybe, but when we actually record the show for regular, we don't see each other. So that's why I say Father Stephen, because.

[C]

Because he has got to wake me up after.

[B]

And. And sometimes you or I will just pause in the middle of saying something, but not actually be done, you know, so that's why we.

[C]

Now I can just kind of go over to you.

[B]

Yeah, exactly. Sorry.

[C]

Yeah. So part of the necessity thing is actually historical Plato brain.

[B]

Ooh, dun, dun, dun, dun.

[C]

But we've got to go back to the 11th century. This was part of a big 11th century debate, which is really late for me.

[B]

Yeah, I usually don't care about anything that happens after about four.

[C]

The book I'm working on writing right now, and this is news to ancient faith people in the back probably, but not to my twitch. Not to my twitch stream. Interestingly enough, we will consider this manuscript. Not. Not. Not the next book I have coming out, but the book I'm writing right now to potentially come out, I don't know, sometime next year or something, is on Atonement.

[B]

And. Oh, I knew about this one. Actually.

[C]

This is gonna be. This is gonna be kind of a fat one because I'm going through everything, like, historically, like as many as they'll let me put. So I've had to revisit the 11th century. So in the 11th century, this argument breaks out. And Anselm was involved in it, because in Plato, you especially see this. If you ever read the Timaeus, and I'm the weirdo who did a Greek independence study in undergrad. And part of it was I was going to do a translation of the Timaeus. And at one point in the semester, I was just beating my head against the wall trying to translate this section until I finally gave up and went and looked it up, and there was a note that said, this section of the text is hopelessly corrupt. And I was like, oh, thank you. But in the Timaeus, So you may know that for Plato, he does the creation of the world in the Timaeus. And there's this thing, the demiurge, that actually creates everything, because again, his sort of the good for Plato can't be directly involved. And so there's this demiurge thing, and it looks at the good, so it kind of looks at what's good, and then it kind of sticks its hands into the material world that's not so good and shapes things after those patterns. Right. And as it's doing that Plato has these categories where it's either by necessity, which is anaki in Greek, or by chance. So there are some things that sort of have to be for Plato and then other things that could be otherwise. So if you're working with those categories, as somebody like Anselm was philosophically, and you look at the death of Christ, you don't want to say that's by chance, that the way that all happened was by chance. You want to say, well, obviously this had to be necessary. It had to be necessary that Christ did it in exactly this way. And that's sort of the launching off point for Curdeus Homo, which is his work on atonement. Translates why the God man? And that's really the question he's asking, why? Why did it have to be this way? That, as you point out, runs right up against the idea of God's freedom. Plato didn't have that problem because his God wasn't free. His God didn't move or do anything. But the Christian God obviously is free. And so those butt up against each other. And what comes out of that debate in the west is the idea of consequent necessity. This is one of those great make a distinction things. It wasn't strictly speaking necessary, but God decided to do it this way. And once he decided to do it this way, then it became necessary by virtue of him having made the decision that allowed them to work around the category and try to maintain both. Now, in the east, people don't realize how much communication there actually was going on at that time, partly because it was mostly one way, because almost nobody in Western Europe could read Greek, but anybody educated in the Byzantine Empire could read Latin. And so things tend to go one way. So at the time, for example, Thomas Aquinas was writing, we have comments on his work from like the patriarch of Constantinople at the time, right? So there was more of that than you think. And the language that the east chose to use instead, they sort of necessity, they used the language of it being fitting or another way of saying fitting would be. It is meet and right, to coin a phrase, that it's kind of appropriate that this is the way God chose to do it. There are certainly, because he is free, other ways he could have chosen to do it. But this way is particularly appropriate. And so when you approach it from that angle, then when they talk about it, it's not why did he have to do it this way, it's why was this appropriate? And so you get meditations on Christ is the second Adam. You get Meditations On Jonah, you get meditations about the movement so that we could look at it and marvel and say, this is wonderful and beautiful and fitting that God chose to. To accomplish our redemption this way without making any claim as to whether he could have come up with something else. Right. Does that help?

[A]

Very much so. Thank you.

[C]

All righty.

[B]

Okay, so we are going to take a short break, but what I want all of you people who are in line to do.

[C]

Have we got a commercial to play?

[B]

Man, I even did a commercial last time. Anyone remember that? I did a commercial last time, man. It'll get. It'll get patched in.

[C]

I mean, I could. I could do one. I do free commercials now and then, like for rootless coffee in Flint, Michigan.

[B]

That's true. That's right.

[C]

Best coffee ever. And they can't make it themselves because there's no good water in Flint, Michigan. Imagine that. Making the most beautiful coffee roasts ever, and you can't drink them yourself.

[B]

Wow.

[C]

Rootless coffee.

[B]

That's very dark. All right, so with that, wow, where do we go from there? We'll be right back with this episode of the Lord of Spirits podcast.

[A]

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 DeYoung 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.

[B]

To find this book and others like.

[A]

It, you can go to store.ancientfaith.com again, that is store.ancient faith.com.

[B]

Brothers and sisters, giant killers, dragon slayers, serpent stompers, Scorpion. Scorpion squishers. I should have brought with me, actually, you know, I'm sure I've mentioned before on the podcast that Armenian priests, Armenian Apostolic Church priests, that they wear these special slippers. Anyone seen these special slippers that have liturgical slippers that have a scorpion in one heel and a serpent in the other? And so while they're celebrating the liturgy, they are literally stomping on scorpions and serpents? And I always love. I saw a picture of this. I thought it was so great. I loved it so much. And I mentioned this a number of times on the pod on various places. Anyway, and anyways, I was giving a talk earlier this year in Dallas for. For some reason I went to three times this year. Deacon Seraphim is not here. Is not to. To make a snotty remark. Here he comes in. Yeah, yeah, I was just mentioning that I went to Dallas three times this year and the first time I met an Armenian priest. And I said to him, father, I just have to say I love Yalls shoes. He's like, what? And I said, you know the slippers you wear when you're. He's like, oh, oh, oh. I said, that is the most metal thing ever. And I said, where do you. Where do you get those? You know? He's like, let me look into this for you. Whatever. And then I didn't think much about it. And then like, it wasn't the next visit, but maybe the third visit. He wasn't there, but I gave a talk at another church and this young Armenian woman came up to me and handed me this bag. And I open it up and inside of this beautiful purple pair of slippers with embroidered. Gold. Embroidered scorpion and serpent in each of the heels. And. And he wrote me a note saying, I'm not sure if this is your size. And I'm like, my size? I'm not going to wear these. I'm going to show them to everybody. So, yes, I love that. And actually, if you ever come visit me at my studio, they are on display right next to the front door. So you can see my Armenian, you know, scorpion, serpent, stompers.

[C]

You can also get them from the system of a down merch shop. Oh.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. This is my opportunity, though, to tell my Armenian joke. Any Armenians in the room? No Armenians in the room. This is sad.

[C]

Don't you have to put a bag on your head if you're going to be an Armenian comedian? Wow, Gong show reference.

[B]

Oh, yes.

[C]

Wow. Gong Show.

[B]

But so anyway, so one time I was passing by, I passed by. So there are. There's the people belong to the Armenian Apostolic Church, but there are also. There are Armenian Protestants. And I was driving through Manhattan, which is always an exciting experience, and I drove by this Armenian Protestant church. I couldn't. I couldn't believe it. I was like, wow, I've heard of this. You know, I knew it existed, but I didn't think I'd actually see one. It was. It was so Kind of haphazard. And. And then it occurred to me, I was like, wow, you know, Manhattan, this is an area with a lot of investors, a lot of very, very wealthy people. And so it's entirely possible that if you were to walk into that church on a Sunday morning, you could meet an Armenian. Armenian in Armani. Thank you very much. And I told that joke on the Internet and was contacted by an Armenian who said Armani was an Armenian. And that's actually where the name comes from. And it's just an Italianate version of the name of Armenia. So everything works together. So we're back. It's the second half of Lord of Spirit's podcast.

[C]

Definitely a dad.

[B]

Yes. I make no. No apologies about making dad jokes. I have four children, three of whom are sons, so they deserve it, and.

[C]

Three of whom he likes, which is so discorded. Your whole family. Which three of my children do I actually like? What's funny is they won't argue about it. They'll think they know.

[B]

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So, yes. So we're back. It's the second half of this episode of Lord of Spirits podcast right here live at the Lord of Spirits conference. So that was the appropriate amount of woo. That's very good. I'm very proud of you.

[C]

They've stepped up their game.

[B]

That's right. The Woos have it. So we're back here on the right. So go ahead, say your name and where you're from.

[A]

Yes, but we don't want too much woo, as Jonathan Vageau would say.

[B]

No, we like woo on the Lord of Spirits podcast.

[C]

Just one woo.

[A]

Hi. My birth name is Kendall Stauffer. My name, as of joining the Orthodox Church last December is Daniel David Kendall Stauffer. But, yeah, so much learning and laughter. I'm trying to remember my question. I'm gonna start simple and expound until you stop me. Is life a game? What I mean is, the best way I can describe this is I didn't understand the heroine of hell very well. I don't understand. Understand it perfectly, but I understood it better once I thought about it being a trick or a game that Jesus played on Satan. Like, there's the garden, there's God and Adam and Eve, and he's leading them towards life. And then Satan tricks them into making a wrong move that gets them kicked out, so on and so forth, and then the incarnation happens, and then Jesus. There's the phrase, hell took a body and met God. And the idea of that being like a surprise.

[B]

Yeah, right. Yeah.

[A]

The idea of that in the context of, especially when I think about people saying life is unfair or that like, like as if the following the rules is the point of the game. Whereas from what I understand about God's intention for creation is to. Is to experience relationship with us, which is the purpose of any game anyway.

[B]

Do you know what I mean? I don't think I totally know what you mean. However, I will say so. There is, there is a lot of language in the orthodox tradition about the idea of the Incarnation and particularly the suffering and death of Christ being a trick that God is playing on the devil. And a lot of the hymns of the church actually make reference to a fish hook. And so the devil is kind of depicted as a, as a fish swallowing this hook. Shades of Jonah, anyone? And. But yeah, I'll be talking about that a little bit more on Saturday. But anyway, I think it's, you know, there's also this language of that, the, the, the heavenly powers even not really knowing exactly what Jesus was about. Right. And sometimes I know people will say, oh, well, you know, they'll talk about the, the demonic powers not knowing who he is. That's when someone says that. That betrays that they never really read the Gospels closely because how many times do these demons speaking out of people, you know, call him Son of the Most High and this kind of thing, like, they, they know. Yeah, they know who he is, but what they don't know is what he's doing there. Right? They don't have a clear sense of that at all. And so, so, yeah, it's, it's just another image about the defeat of the Devil. And this, this language is used, for instance, we mentioned earlier the, the Gospel of Nicodemus. This language is used there in the Gospel of Nicodemus. And the way that it plays out in that case is so Hades and the Devil are two separate entities in this version of the story. And the Devil is saying to Hades, you know, look, you're going to swallow Jesus and it's going to be the best thing ever. You know, I've been having big problems with this guy, and I'm going to bring him down here. And Hades is like, is this the guy that, like, last week just his voice caused me to have to vomit up Lazarus. And he didn't actually have to pray or anything. He could just say, come forth. And the Devil's like, yeah, I mean, it's that guy. And, and Hades is like, I don't think this is a good idea. You know, and the Devil's like, no, no, it's going to be fine. You know, I've got him where I want him. And. And then when he shows up, he basically flattens him. And so it's really. Is this idea of this kind of, of trickery, you know, that they don't know what's, they don't know what hit them. Right. You know, Jesus, Jesus's mission is very aggressive towards the demonic powers. He's casting them out all the time. You know, there's exorcisms going on all the time and it's definitely not, they definitely don't expect it. Like, like for instance, when he talks to the, the demons in Legion, they say, have you come to torment us before the time? Like, what are you doing here? I mean, the answer, of course is, guess what, guys, it's time. You know, your time has come. So it's not a game in the sense of, like a game of chess or the royal game of Ur, which everyone should have signed up for by this point in the, you know, to hopefully play. We have 32 players. Sorry, I couldn't help myself. You know, little commercial there. But. Well, Ellie made me do it. She just looked at me like, what? But, yeah, so it's not that kind of game. Right, but it is this sense of trickery. I mean, trickery is a big theme in the Bible. Like Jacob, of course, tricks his brother, tricks his father and his brother actually. And there's often this sense that trickery is the thing that's necessary to get justice to happen. So, so, so that is, that is there. But again, it's, it's, it's, it's an image that's used to help us try to understand realities that we really cannot grasp. So what do you think? Kabuna?

[C]

All wrong.

[B]

Oh, thanks. Oh, wow. There was disappointment in your voices. Thank you so much.

[C]

Well, I mean, any analogy, right, if you push it too far, it breaks down. Right? So that's every single analogy. To quote Thomas Aquinas, an analogy is a comparison in one respect only, not in all respects. Right, good.

[B]

You said something positive about Thomas Aquinas.

[C]

I mean, sort of. I just quoted him for what it's worth. But yeah, I think it's important to. Dovetailing with what Father Andrew said, it's important to remember that for ancient cultures, including ancient Judaism, deceit, deceit in terms of deception, deception and treachery were not innately evil or sinful. Why would they be?

[B]

No, I mean, the classic example is it was about.

[C]

I mean, there's tons of examples.

[B]

Yeah, but like, but But a really obvious one from our own time, for instance, would be, you know, you're living in Nazi Germany.

[C]

Oh, here we go. I thought we'd agree to stop with the Hitler and use Pol Pot or something. Somebody like, whatever, you're in Cambodia and Pol Pot shows up at your door.

[B]

Someone comes to your door and says, where are the people that I want to kill? And you say, they're not here even though they are here. Is that, is that a good lie? Absolutely. You're saving someone's life. You're doing the right thing by telling that lie.

[C]

Because.

[B]

But you can't say, oh, I cannot tell a lie. Take them. I'm sorry.

[C]

For them. For them, it was about motive. It's what you're doing, right? So if you're a grifter and you're deceiving and tricking people to enrich yourself at their expense, or to take advantage of people or to, then that is a sin. But if you're using deception or trickery as tools to accomplish some good end, or some just end, like Jacob, Tamar, David, several times, like on and on and on, right. Then that's not seen as a bad thing. This whole idea that having a word come out of your mouth that isn't absolutely truthful. Right. Accurate to reality, is by nature wrong. Comes from an 18th century German named Immanuel Kant.

[B]

Immanuel Kant was original. Sing that song.

[C]

And they make all the jokes about how I can't even. And Kant had a very powerful argument for this. Are you ready? What if everyone always lied all the time? Society couldn't function.

[B]

True.

[C]

Yes, that is a true statement. But again, it has nothing to do with particulars. Right. Kant's categorical imperative, he could only come up with like one or two categorical imperatives because everything else he tried to do that with in morality, like, there were obvious exceptions where you would have to say, well, okay, that rule doesn't apply here. Right? And he was trying really hard to make this system work. So, yeah, and we've inherited a lot of that. The other piece of it is another way people get to it, at least is another fellow from around the same era, and that's Thomas Hobbs. Boo. Him too. That's the only Calvin and Hobbes you should have anything to do with. So Thomas Hobbes, when he's talking about ethics, said, there are two springs of human action, self interest and the interest of others. Anything you do that benefits you is innately bad or tainted. And so for an action to be moral, it has to be purely motivated by other people. And you can see how a lot of people have internalized that.

[B]

Mixed motives.

[C]

Oh, you're only doing that to make money. And it's like, well, yes, that's how I pay my mortgage or rent or. Right. Like somehow that makes it bad or.

[B]

Taints you're feeding the homeless because it makes you feel good.

[C]

So for the church fathers being in Greek and Roman culture, the idea that Christ would trick the devil was not problematic because of what he brought about through that kind of trickery and deception. But if we've got Kant or Hobbes going on in the back of our brains, that causes us this issue.

[A]

Last comment. And you can answer yes or no. Is this what's happening in the parable of the. What is it the shrewd servant that, like, the one who, like, essentially steals money from his master.

[B]

Yes.

[C]

He knows he's getting fired, so he basically cancels the debt of a whole bunch of his master's debtors so that once he's fired. Right. He will have a golden parachute.

[B]

Right.

[C]

He'll have these other people who are grateful to him. Right. And Christ says, look, you know, these wicked people, they could figure this out. Why can't you figure this out? Right.

[B]

All right, thank you very much. Okay, back over to this side.

[A]

I'm Ephraim from Emmaus, Pennsylvania.

[C]

Hey.

[B]

That was not very enthusiastic. Yay for Emmaus.

[C]

Well, you're fleeing the place, so, I mean, not tomorrow.

[B]

I love Emmaus. All right, so if you serve food.

[A]

To a spirit such that the spirit is going to eat the food, and then you consume the food with the spirit, that's pagan and bad. Right.

[C]

So go out on a limb and say, yes.

[A]

Therefore, how bad is it for Christians to pour out a drink.

[B]

On somebody's grave.

[C]

Or just the asphalt for your dead homies?

[B]

That's right. Yeah. You know, I think. Yeah, we've. I feel like we've gotten this one before, or at least it's been addressed before. Maybe it's just in the group. I don't know. I think, number one, the. Like, I don't. Number one, I don't do that. Like, why would you. Why would you do that?

[C]

But anyway, it's a waste of alcohol.

[B]

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It does look like a libation offering, you know, But. But I would say also that, like, there is no there. If a person is just pouring that out in the grave of their dead loved one or whatever, without. Without sort of the ritual package that goes with that. Traditionally in paganism, is There understanding that they are in some way feeding that spirit. Probably not. It is a like this links me to you kind of thing. But I don't think. There's not usually the sense of, I'm feeding you. Right. It's not the way that idolatry works. It is definitely adjacent on some level. For sure. The action is similar, but it's very reduced.

[C]

It's just low grade ancestor worship.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

Who doesn't dabble in a little bit of that.

[B]

Or just sort of ancestor veneration on some level? That's the problem is when you've got something that looks like or just partakes in one or two elements of something that used to be a much larger system. Right. It's hard to analyze exactly what is the intention, what's going on there. Are there ritual prayers that are being said as part of that? Probably not. Probably not. And then on top of that, you actually have the very traditional Christian practice of eating meals in cemeteries as a way of commemorating the dead. This is definitely a thing. But you're not feeding your relatives by doing that. You know, just as when you get Koleva blessed and then you eat it as part of a memorial. You're not feeding a God feeding a spirit, you know, but there is an eating that goes along with that on the part of the people who are. Who are there. I mean, that's what I would say. I don't know. It's a grayish area, in my opinion. But it's so reduced. It's so hard to know, like, what exactly is supposed to be going on.

[C]

I think it's just one dimension of the Irish problem, and it's about time our government did something about it. I'm just going old school racist now. Like, wow, early 19th century.

[B]

Wow. Wow. That's three wows.

[C]

Yeah. They're waiting for me to say I'm joking. I'm just letting it hang there. Just letting it.

[B]

Dutch Irish cattiness.

[C]

Oh, yeah, yeah. No. Most of the racist things I ever heard my dad say were about other white people. It's true, isn't it?

[B]

It's loud, awkward, nodding by the family, all back there in a corner.

[C]

They're not happy to affirm that, but they feel forced by Kant's categorical imperative.

[B]

The dead hand of Immanuel Kant.

[C]

No, I mean, I wouldn't do it.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

But you know.

[B]

Yeah. All right.

[C]

Wow.

[B]

That might be the shortest. Okay. All right.

[C]

I didn't say anything about that.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. Okay. Over here on this side. Hey, I'm Matthew from Raleigh, North Carolina. All right. My future location there. Yes, yes. So I have a question about saints relics. So I know that as orthodox, we don't practice cremation because it does harm to the body. It is disrespectful to the human person, and we are anticipating the resurrection. Given that, I struggle a little bit with understanding pieces of saints being spread around, because in order to get a piece of a saint, it feels like it would require, unless it's just natural decomposition, doing violence to the body of a holy person. And it also feels like it would require or just kind of the disintegration of that by literally literal disintegration. Right. Taking that apart, I would love to be. Get better understanding of that. Maybe there's some context I'm missing and be enlightened on why having pieces of saints around is not showing disrespect to the body of that holy person. All right. Well, it's. Kant's categorical imperative has come back. Here's why. I think that because it is a very different thing to incinerate and smash with a grinder for the purposes of frankly reducing a person to a much smaller space and make it easier to dispose of their remains.

[C]

Whatever.

[B]

It is a very different thing than it is to very carefully, very painstakingly, with a lot of prayer, remove a piece of bone from another piece of bone, enshrining in a beautiful golden reliquary for the veneration of the faithful. These are two very different actions. I have taken the second action in the building where I currently podcast from, not this moment, but that I normally podcast from. They actually did the first action down in the basement. So it was actually a funeral home and crematorium, which is why I often say that I am perched above a disused gateway to the underworld, because I literally mean that. Yeah. So. So I mean, preparing relics, which is something that I've had the blessing of doing actually a bunch of times now. It is a very, very careful and painstaking process that it's done with a lot of respect and a lot of love and a lot of honor. It's something that, like, when I do it, because I'm, you know, no one's given me, like, a whole saint's body to deal with. So I'm dealing with, you know, smaller relics. I place it on the altar in the church, and I'm wearing vestments, and I have tools that I use only for that purpose. Right. That's very, very different than, you know, is this your most modestly priced receptacle? Checking to see who's watched certain Coen brothers film. You know, it's interesting actually in the film that the guy that they cremate has a Greek name. What's that all about? But yeah, so if you say it is bad to take a body apart categorically true, then you have a problem, you know, because we see, you know, the practice of distributing relics for veneration comes because there are, number one, you know, when the body is completely decayed, there are multiple bones. And so the bones would get distributed and then sometimes they would get subdivided. Right. So yeah, this is a very natural thing to do. Another good example, of course, is the true cross, right where there's this. Actually, was it Calvin who claimed, you know, that there's enough pieces of the true cross out there you could build three Noah's arks? Was that him?

[C]

Well, Calvin, one of the most entertaining. Well, no, the most entertaining thing he ever wrote by a lot was he did a catalog of all the relics in western Europe in the 16th century. And so it's a lot of, you know, did St. John the Forerunner have four legs and three arms?

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So what's funny is that kind of thing. There is. And you can still hear that claim repeated. There's so many pieces, you know, claim pieces of the cross out there, you could build three Noah's arks. And so actually I can't remember who it was now that did this, but someone decided to do the best possible estimate that they could of the volume of all claimed relics of the true cross without any kind of question of authentication, and then compared that against the estimated volume of a first century Roman cross. And you know what they came up with that about 1/10 of the true cross is probably still around.

[C]

If they're all legit.

[B]

If they're all legit. So. So it is. That claim is a complete joke, for one thing. But if you have pieces of the true cross, of course they are. It's wood. So it's coming apart. Why wouldn't you have a place piece here and a piece here? And actually it just so happens that I brought a hand blessing cross with me that has a piece of the true cross that everyone's going to get to venerate on Saturday night? So, yes, I mean, once you understand the resurrection, once you understand the power of God working through the relics of the saints, it makes complete sense that you would want to distribute that for the veneration of the faithful, for their, in many cases, healing. And we say this, of course, in the Shadow of one of the great saints of America. Literally. Just on the other side of some of those walls are the relics of Saint Raphael of Brooklyn, which I can attest, by the way, that when it was when those relics were lifted up out of the ground here at the Antiochian village a little over a year ago, there was suddenly a sweet smell that the hundreds of people who were standing there all smelled for about 10, 15 minutes. And so, you know, and the purpose of our bringing them out of the ground was so that they might be distributed and venerated and so forth. And it was clear that he himself, through the blessing of God, showed up to let us know that what we were doing was totally cool. Really. So, yeah, that's what I would say about that. Anything to add?

[C]

Yeah. Well, you got to remember, also, cremation was a pagan practice. Was an actual pagan practice. So the Church's historical condemnation of cremation was a condemnation of the pagan practice, not this modern way of disposing of the dead.

[B]

It still applies, which is worse.

[C]

But there's a. Yeah, the modern way is worse.

[B]

Look up the real process sometime and see how horrifyingly bad it is.

[C]

Yeah. The other. You also have to remember, with saints, it's a fraction of saints who are incorruptible. Right. So it's not that we have this wholly formed incorrupt body, and we're. You know, the Crusaders did some of that, but that's not the common.

[B]

Mostly it's bones practice.

[C]

And then third, I can't believe I have to defend John Calvin.

[B]

But.

[C]

No, it's his fault. But part of. Part of the Counter Reformation, that was one of the points that Rome kind of took as like, yeah, yeah, this is kind of true. And the Counter Reformation, they cracked down on.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

Selling relics in general. So now the current policy Rome has is if a relic has ever been sold for money, it is invalid, period. Doesn't matter what kind of chain of evidence you have. So they. They really cracked down on that. And so that invalidated a lot of the fakes that Calvin was pointing to. But a lot of that was like, folks grifting crusaders, Right. Like, hey, you want a piece of the true cross to bring home with you? They have some driftwood they found on the way to the stall that day. Yeah.

[B]

All right. Thank you. Okay. Over here. Evening. Fathers Philip from Williamsport, Pennsylvania. All right. North Central. That's right. Fracking country.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

And I was raised in the Old Dominion, another Commonwealth, so Tidewater region, the land of my birth. I Was born down there. I was born in Newport News. Okay. I grew up in Virginia Beach. All right.

[A]

Just across the way.

[C]

Hey, neighbor, get a room.

[B]

You were fist pumping for Grand Rapids earlier, so come on.

[C]

Right. No, they were fist puppets.

[B]

Oh, okay.

[C]

I just brought it up.

[B]

Go ahead. Sorry, sorry.

[A]

So my question has to do with.

[B]

Something you touched on in one of your earlier podcasts about the impact of filioque on the understanding and the expression of the Trinity, the Holy Trinity. I was hoping you could expand on that maybe broadly. I'm interested in the impact that the development of filioque in particularly the Latin Catholic tradition and the traditions that came out of it. How did it impact not just the doctrinal theological experience.

[A]

Of this understanding, but.

[B]

How did it impact the way people lived? How did it impact their practice of the faith? How did it impact the way in which those traditions developed? And then the second part of my question is, was there any impact on the east? Kind of in reaction to that, in response to it. Wow, this is like bigger than a dissertation kind of question. This is a multi volume magnum opus. I, I mean, I. There's things that I could say, I don't know. Do you have something about this in particular on your mind about how the.

[C]

Filioque became the source of all heresies?

[B]

There you go. Yeah. Oh, you're just going to channel John, Father John Romanes now? All right, stop.

[C]

The source of all heresies, by the way, at least three came from Joseph Smith, for example.

[B]

Jr. So we do have at least one former Mormon in the room, actually.

[C]

So the, the core issue with the filioque is that it fundamentally misunderstands the doctrine of the Trinity. The biggest effect it has had in the west is that almost nobody in the west understands the doctrine of the Trinity anymore. And you can test this very easily. Walk into any Protestant or Roman Catholic church and ask them to explain the Trinity. Ask the pastor, ask the priest. Because the structure of the Trinity as it existed as laid out by the first and second Ecumenical Councils, is that, as we say in the Nicene Creed, there's one God, the Father, one God, namely the Father.

[B]

Right.

[C]

That's in the Bible, St. John's Gospel. Christ said that they may know you, the only true God. And Jesus Christ, whom you have said, God the Father is the only one, referred to as O Theos in the Greek, where the article is put in front of God. God is predicated of the Son and of the Spirit. And that's because we believe in what's called the monarchy, the monarchia in Greek, of the Father. There's one Archie, the Father, from whom the Son is generated, is begotten, and from whom the Spirit proceeds. Which is also in St. John's gospel, right? Just directly quoted from it. Okay, and so then you read St. Gregory, and this is why there are not three gods, right? You read St. Basil the Great on this. St. Basil the Great, in talking about the Trinity, this is where he lays out the principle that we've talked about on the show before, that the worship given to the image passes to the prototype, right? Meaning the Son and the Spirit as the direct image of the Father, the precise image of the Father. When they are worshiped, that worship passes to the Father. Saint Craig of Nyssa uses that argument to say, this is why there are not three Gods. There is one worship. So Father, Son begotten, the source of all things. The early Church fathers never used the term monotheist to describe themselves, which is important because Monos and Theos are both Greek words, and they call pagans polytheists all the time, but they never call themselves monotheists. They call themselves, effectively, monarchists. They believe in the monarchia of the Father. There's one first principle, the Father. So in trying to respond to Arians, the Church in Spain first, where there were a lot of Arians, right, Because the Goths, right, the Visigoths in particular in Spain, converted to Arianism, One of the arguments the Arians would use was they would say, well, you say God the Father begets the Son and the Spirit proceeds, right? So they would say, well, that means God, the Father is really God and the Son is therefore somehow lesser, because no persons come right from the Son. So what they're doing is they're taking part of the definition of the Father, not the definition of God, but the definition of the person of the Father. And they're applying that to the definition of God. That's the sort of ledger domain they're using. But rather than pointing that out, as for example, Saint Photius the Great would in spade, they just make this argument. Well, the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, see? So a person does proceed from the Son. So checkmate Arians, right? Saint Photius the Great also points out that this just begs a bunch of questions, even though that's not correct, that's not what begging the question is as a logical fallacy. But it incites a number of other questions, like, well, okay, now, no one proceeds from the Holy Spirit. So is the Holy Spirit not God, or do we have to Have a fourth person now who proceeds from the Spirit. How long do we keep this going? This is literally the argument St. Photius makes. So it's wrongheaded for all of these reasons. And Roman Catholicism, for example, is aware of this. If you read the Catechism in the Catholic Church, they say this is one of those weasel words like Father Andrew was talking about. We affirm the filioque in a way that does not deny the monarchy of the Father. Three card mani. Right. So they're aware of the problem, but now we have to take another piece. I'm going to get to the practical stuff here in a minute because we need a second piece. And that's St. Augustine's de Trinitate. St. Augustine is a saint and a father of the church according to the fourth Ecumenical Council. That doesn't mean he was right at fifth. That doesn't mean he was right about everything. That doesn't mean he never made an error. And in fact, St. Augustine, at the end of his life, disavowed the De Trinitate, his work on the Trinity. He refused to have any more copies made when people asked him for it because he said it wasn't worth reading. And if you actually read it in the introduction, he says, it probably would have been better if I had said nothing on this topic, but people asked me to say something and so I tried to say something. Right, okay. So I would not use this as the basis for my whole theology personally. But in the west, nobody read any Greek, they only knew Latin, and he wrote it in Latin. And so all of the peculiarities of his view, regardless of how he felt about them later, came to characterize view of the Western tradition. And the problem with his detritate, the biggest one, I mean, he affirms the filioque in it too. But the biggest problem with it is actually that he reduces the persons to relationships. Meaning instead of having one God, who is the Father, who generates the Son, from whom the Spirit proceeds, he has there's one God, which is sort of the whole thing, the divine essence. And then within the divine essence, there are these relationships of filiation and fatherhood and procession. So they're just sort of relationships that exist within the divine nature, which relativizes their personhood. Right? Because in his mind, the Eastern view, I think, was a little too close to tritheism. Because remember, St. Augustine has a case of Plato brain that he inherited if we distinguish them too far apart. So he sort of muddies the distinctions. So once you do that, right, you end up with. And this is the way a lot of people speak, both Roman Catholic and Protestant. They'll just talk about God and it's not super clear. Are you talking about the Father? Are you talking about Christ? Are you talking about the Holy Spirit? When you just say God, who are you talking about? And I've had people who I asked, I'd say, wait, which person of the tree are you talking about? Oh, I'm talking about God in his unity. Who dat? Right. Is that like a fourth person? Right. I mean, Cornelius Van Til Slag's one of my own people. Right. Because he was Dutch. Right. Said, yeah, we have a real problem in Western theology because we have these three persons, but then we have this impersonal divine essence. What should we do about this? Oh, I know. The divine essence is a person, too. It's like, wow, worst possible solution to our problem. Cool.

[B]

I mean, there's. There's the Benny Hinn version with it, which is. There's a trinity of trinities. So he actually has nine persons.

[C]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[B]

Benny Hinn was raised Orthodox, by the way. What happened.

[C]

Here's what happened to Betty Hinn.

[B]

He went to Canada and became Pentecostal.

[C]

That's not it.

[B]

No, it's true.

[C]

He moved in with his cousin Larry. That. Wow. No one. No one watched Perfect Strangers. That Betty Hinn is balky. Like, no one. Anyway, okay, actually, that guy lives, you.

[B]

Know, that he's been. Bronson Pinchot, lives in northeastern Pennsylvania now. Somewhere, like, near Scranton.

[C]

Okay, I was not aware of that. Okay, so. But. So you've got this. You've got this sort of God in his unity, and then still got Plato lingering around. You get this profound disconnect between God and the world. And so this is where the Protestants go after sainthood in the Roman Catholic Church. That's not where I go. This is where I go after created grace. So in the Roman Catholic world, in Roman Catholic theology, for example, an icon, right? They have icons, right? They use icons. They believe that an icon is sort of a container or a holder for a finite amount of grace. And you go and you venerate and you pray before that icon. And some quantity of that grace, because grace is kind of quantifiable, is transmitted to you or the relics of a saint. There's a certain amount of grace, right, from that saint's life. You go, you venerate it. Some of that grace comes to you. And I was taught this by Roman Catholics. This isn't just me characterizing them like actual Cistercian monks are the ones who told me that this is how it works. And so that means grace is not the activity of God, it's this sort of medicine, right, for the forgiveness of sins. It's sort of quantifiable and you get this whole sort of spiritual economy by the time you get to the 16th century. And that's what the reformers were reacting to in large part because that's where things like indulgences come in. Right, here's some grace to forgive some sins, all that, that's what they're reacting to. And so in classical Protestantism, grace is just God's unmerited favor which we would call something like his mercy or just blessings, right? But they're pushing back on the grace is a thing to. Grace is now kind of nothing. That's kind of nothing. And again not the activity of God. So the very short version of that that I could have just said was the filioque is part of a series of dominoes that fall that create this rift between God and creat that then gets bridged but not really by God himself, by things God sends, namely grace. And those graces are then mediated in different ways.

[B]

We'll be expecting your three volume work on the subject.

[C]

What would you like to add to that, Father?

[B]

Yeah, thank you. Yeah, okay. Well it is, it is 10:10pm so we're gonna take 10:10:1, 10:10:2.

[C]

There's an obscure reference.

[B]

We're gonna take two more questions, one from here, one from here. So I'm very sorry for everybody else who's in line, but I will be. But there will be more opportunities.

[C]

I may linger.

[B]

Oh yeah, you can linger, whatever.

[C]

This guy linger.

[B]

He only sleeps two hours a night.

[C]

Anyways, so this guy like goes at 3:30 in the afternoon, has a nice dinner at Bob Evans and then the.

[B]

Bob Evans reference before. But, but yeah, there will be more Q and A after our various talks and of course you can catch us, you know, in the halls and so forth. But yeah, we're going to take two more and then you know, everybody get up, wake up early for 7am or.

[C]

If I linger, you could ask your questions off the record.

[B]

There you go.

[C]

No one will know what we say.

[B]

Very spicy things. But there's a lot of microphones around, Father Steven. You never know what could happen, what's.

[C]

Not going to stop me.

[B]

Yeah, right, exactly. That's true, that's true.

[A]

All right, I'm Scott from Grand Rapids, Michigan.

[C]

There we go.

[A]

I called a couple weeks ago and threw shade at Dutch people. So I won't do that again. But being from Grand Rapids, things like the atonement and sacrifice come up quite a bit locally. So my question is, it's become. And you've spoken about this before, but maybe you could expand on it. And I'm very happy to hear you've got a book about atonement coming out, so maybe we'll get a little bit of a preview for that. Of that is the question of does the Torah, does the sacrificial system in the Torah account for what we would call deliberate sense? Because it's become very common now, if not just now, standard, even amongst, like, Jewish commentators like Milgram or Baruch Levine, that there is no mechanism, if you will, in the Torah for sins that I do deliberately in the. Within the sacrificial system. And you've even had. You even have some Orthodox authors essentially relaying that as well, that this is a distinction between the Old and New Covenants. Is that in the Old Covenant, intentional sins, there is no forgiveness within the sacrificial system. It's a special gift from God versus in the New Covenant that is now on the table. Okay, so I guess the question is, how is that maybe not accurate? And then what do you think of a statement like the sacrificial system in the Torah, if it's a sin management system, that it fundamentally fails? And then what does it look like then for this to overflow in the New Covenant, if it's not a. This wasn't on offer at all in the Old Covenant, but it is on offer now in the New Covenant. If it's not that, if it's a fulfillment of what was on offer in the Old Covenant, what does that look like now? Wow.

[B]

I mean, the first thing I've been hearing about this idea that the Old Covenant, it doesn't cover deliberate sins. And it just makes, like, a little part of me dies every time I hear that because it's like, have you read Leviticus? Like, really just read it. Because there's all kinds of stuff in there. It's not like, whoops, accidentally, I committed adultery. You know, whoops, I accidentally. You know, like, there's all kinds of means for repentance that are given for things that there's no way you could do unintentionally. No way. Right.

[C]

Oops, I coveted your cow.

[B]

Right. You know, it's just. It blows my mind, honestly, because. But I think really there's so much theology going on that is in profound ignorance of what it simply says in the text, you know, I mean, another classic example is one you mentioned, Atonement, Father Stephen likes to point out is, you know, there is this, this very strong idea out there that, you know, in the Old Covenant, sins were placed on an animal and then that animal was sacrificed. Literally. That never happens anywhere in the Old Testament. That's never commanded anywhere. Again, you know, very boring book, Leviticus. But, like, if you're going to make planes about. About sight, I mean, it's not my opinion it's boring. If you're going to make. Make claims about what happens, how sacrifices work and what they're for, you should read that book very closely because that's the book that really covers that kind of thing. So, yeah, I mean, a lot of it is just. I'm sad to say it because I criticize people who basically say, well, everyone who disagrees with me is either uninformed, stupid, or evil. But in this case, it's really uninformed. It really is uninformed because it really just like read what it says about various kinds of sins and then what you do in order to deal with them, you know, what can actually be done for repentance for them. It's. It is there. You know, if you just read it, it's not the most. You know, I don't consider Leviticus boring, but it can be difficult to read because it's a whole lot of detail about stuff that. That often that people can kind of get lost in. You know, it's more riveting than numbers, for sure. You know, Although. Although numbers has. Although numbers has the whole korra story in it, which is just great, you.

[C]

Know, and the snake being lifted up in the wilderness.

[B]

Yeah, I know, I know. But in between all that census data.

[C]

You know, what could be more exciting than census data?

[B]

Almost anything. Yeah. So, yeah, incredulity is probably the first way I would respond to the.

[C]

That. Right. So here's where they're getting that, and then here's why their entire argument makes no sense whatsoever. So where they're getting that is they're looking at a couple of passages in Leviticus and numbers that deal with the daily sin offering, the one that they just do every day. So priests come, they offer a sin offering for themselves, and they offer one for the sins of the people. And that was considered as covering their sins and the involuntary unknown sins of the people. If you committed a sin that you knew about, there are other procedures in the Torah for dealing with it. Right. Many of which include sacrifice.

[B]

Right.

[C]

But. So that's what they're getting, they're reading those. Not that any scholar would ever just read a couple passages in isolation and make a broad conclusion from them and ignore everything else, but that's what they're doing. Right? And that's why we could point out all these examples like, oh, well, I stole from this guy involuntarily, so I have to pay back five times. But if I do it voluntarily, I don't have to bother to pay it back because I'm going to hell anyway, I guess. Right? Like, it just literally makes no sense. But here's the bigger reason their argument makes no sense. We have to kind of dissect what they're saying. So what they're saying is, number one, the sacrifices in the Old Testament took care of people's sins. What does that mean? Because when I read the Old Testament, especially when you get to the prophets, God's like, hey, you're not repentant. Stop with the sacrifices. I don't want them. Seems like the sacrifices don't do anything in and of themselves in the Old Testament. That's not a New Testament reading back. That's in the Old Testament itself. Right. The way sacrifices worked in the Old Testament with voluntary sin is that you repented Allah, David, who did not accidentally murder a man after impregnating his wife. Accidentally, Right? That's.

[B]

Oops.

[C]

Right.

[B]

You.

[C]

You repent. Right? You repent. And that repentance had a concrete structure of things you did. It wasn't just feeling bad. Right? Like if you stole, you paid back five times, which. Right. You did all of these things, and then at the end of that process, you went and you offered sacrifices to God, which enacted the reconciliation between you and other people and you and God, which were the same thing. And then they're implying that something in the New Testament, and I'm not sure exactly what, because we're talking about Protestants, so they're not talking about, like, the Eucharist or sacraments or anything or baptism, by and large, unless they're Lutherans. Maybe something in the New Testament now takes care of all those sins. Well, what does that mean? You don't have to repent in the New Testament. You could just do whatever you want. It's all taken care of by something, by Christ 2000 years ago. So now it doesn't matter what I do and I never have to. Obviously they don't think that. So the very argument falls apart. Whereas I would point out in the Orthodox Church, it works fundamentally the same way in the New Testament. I sin I repent. I receive forgiveness from God. It culminates at the celebration of the Eucharist. That's why if there's still repenting, that needs to be done. We restrict people from receiving the Eucharist until it's done.

[B]

Done.

[C]

That's when you go and offer the sacrifice. Celebrate being reconciled with your brothers and sisters and with God, which are the same thing. So I think there's a fundamental continuity there. Now, the fulfillment part is not that the Old Testament sin management system didn't work. It worked. But working means it accomplished its goal. What was its goal? To manage sin in a particular piece of landed real estate until the Messiah could come and deal with sin permanently. So I think St. Paul's argument about the sacrifices and about the Old Covenant in general is, no, it did what it was supposed to do, but it was never aimed at those other things. It was never aimed at giving people eternal life. It was never aimed at. Right. It did what it was supposed to do in the time it was supposed to do it. Right. Now we've received the fulfillment of it. Right. And it's expanded beyond a little parcel of land. One people group. Right.

[B]

All right, thank you now for our final question in this live Q and A episode here at the recorded live. Recorded live. The.

[C]

This episode exists in a liminal space, it's true, between life and memory, because.

[B]

Time and space don't exist.

[C]

Right.

[B]

So. But. But lunchtime anyway. Doubly so. So. Yes. What's your question? What? What's your name? Where are you from? What's your question?

[A]

I'm Brian. I'm from Pittsburgh and a local boy.

[C]

Yes, finally.

[A]

And I am one of your Roman Catholic listeners.

[C]

Oh.

[A]

So I don't know. Maybe we could throw down about creative grace later. But honestly, I learned very little of it when I was once in seminary, so that was actually somewhat news to me. But anyway, my question has nothing to do with that. My question is in the west, it's the feast of the Guardian angels today. And I was prompted to think about angelic guardians of creation because I think I asked this question in the Facebook group once, but I'd like to ask it here again just because I'm still kind of wrestling with it. How does the conquest of the physical world work under Christ? Is it at the baptism, like the waters are purified? The whole earth is purified? All the demons that were being worshiped by the pagans and the springs and the hills and the mountains just kind of vanish and the angels take over? Or does it have to Be that the church has to evangelize the people of a place first. And then. And like, maybe to use a concrete example of this, say, if I'm whitewater rafting down on the Yakaganya river down at Powell State park an hour south of here, am I praying to God to save me from the demon of the river, or am I praying to the guardian angel of the river? And maybe that's overthinking it. Maybe that's like a tongue in cheek example. Yes, but how does that work? How does the scattering of the demons that have power over creation work? Sort of in real time.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

Please weigh in on the metaphysical status of the Allegheny River.

[B]

Right. I'm a Susquehanna guy. I don't know what to tell you. Right. So we see Jesus doing a lot of exorcisms, and yet somehow there are still demons around. Did he not finish the job? Well, I think the clue is the beginning of the Book of Acts, right, Where Jesus ascends into heaven. And St. Luke tells us, you know, in the previous book I was writing, you know, the Gospel According to St. Luke, I wrote about all that Jesus began to do and to teach, meaning that the Book of Acts, which is basically the first collection of Christian saints lives, is about what Jesus continued to do and to teach. And so Christ is still doing all of that. And he's doing it through the church, he's doing it through the saints. And, you know, this is part of the point of sending out the apostles and saying, now, you know, all authority in heaven and in earth has been given to me. Go therefore, and make disciples. You know, baptize all nations and so forth, that they are continuing the work that He Himself has begun. And that now Christ rules, as it says in the Scripture, in the midst of his enemies until they will. Until they will all be put under his feet. That has not yet occurred. And the reason why we know that that hasn't occurred yet is because demonic activity is still happening in the world. Right. So, you know, could God have simply snapped his fingers and made all the demons instantly disappear into the abyss and it would just be game over? Of course he could do that. But. But God's love for us is that we participate in his ministry. We participate in him by doing his works. This is what it means to be imagers of God. And so when we live the faithful Christian life, we are engaging in this exorcistic way of living that drives out demonic powers from us, from those around us, and invites the presence of God, the power of God. You Know, with us. So, you know, I can't tell you the specifics of what is going on with the Allegheny river, but take a stand, man. Yeah, but what I can say is that, you know, misfortune and difficulty and suffering in the world is associated with demonic activity. That doesn't mean that there's some devil somewhere pressing a button and making the river do X, Y and Z. Right. But that, you know, this is the origin of human suffering. And, you know, when we ask for God's help and talk to a guardian angel, whatever, I mean, these are. It's not like we're saying, well, I'm not going to talk to God today. I'm just going to talk to my guardian angel. Like, look, I'm on. I serve him. I'm on his team. Like, what do you. How would that even work? You can't say, well, I want to talk to you and not him. That's not a thing. Right. So even if you do talk to a saint or an angel and ask for their help, you are asking for God's help because. And it may well be that God decides to send that angel or saint as the help that he's going to give you. Certainly the prayer tradition, the Orthodox Church, and certainly your own, you know, Roman Catholic tradition, praying to God, praying to saints. By no means are these things mutually exclusive. You know, this is all part of the whole community of, you know, as you all like to call it, the Church Triumphant. Right. So, yeah, it's not over. The enemy has been scattered. But like any army that's in retreat, it is sacking and burning and raping and pillaging as it goes. And so, you know, what we're engaging in is the action to pursue, to hunt down the demonic powers and to destroy them and to cleanse the world and to continue the work that he himself didn't just begin but now is continuing to do through us. Right. So that's where we are in the timeline, is he rules in the midst of his enemies.

[C]

We also know things aren't all under his feet yet because St. Paul explicitly says, now we do not yet see all things under his feet.

[B]

Oh, there you go. That's pretty straightforward.

[C]

But he says we see Christ risen above the powers and principalities and. Right. So he's above them. Right. But they're not yet completely subjugated to him. That that is something that is happening. And as Father Andrew said, we share in that activity. And I will be bolder. Who's in charge of the Allegheny River? Depends on how close you are to January 6th, because there are a lot of.

[B]

You are January 6th.

[C]

There are a lot of Orthodox churches in Pittsburgh. Gotta be two or three priests out there blessed the Allegheny river at least. So, you know, if you're close, you know, but then a lot of sinning goes on in and around the Allegheny River. So if you're, you know, if it's December or something, you could be in trouble. So if you're gonna go rafting, say in January, February, just to be safe.

[B]

Right. Thank you, fathers. That's our show for tonight. Thank you for coming live. If I happen to callously send you away while you were still waiting so fervently in line, we'd still like to hear from you. You can email us, send all the hate mail to lordofspirits and ancient faith.com.

[C]

That'S your phone right now. And email us. That's right.

[B]

You can message us at our Facebook page or leave us a [e-mail] sort of spirits. And if you have basic questions about the Orthodox faith or you need help to find a parish, go to orthodoxintro.org we actually have one of our Orthodox, a former orthodoxintro.org responding priest with us today. Who could it be? Not me.

[C]

Yeah, he couldn't take it anymore. And join us for our live broadcast on the second and fourth Thursdays of the month at 7pm Eastern, 4pm Pacific Civic. I have it on good authority that rock and roll ain't noise pollution.

[B]

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[C]

And finally, be sure to go to ancientfaith.comsupport and help make sure we and lots of other AFR podcasters stay on the air. Rock and roll will never die.

[B]

Thank you, good night and God bless.

[A]

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