Pantheon and Pandemonium XII: Live Q&A Aug 2024

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Lord of Spirits — Pantheon and Pandemonium XII: Live Q&A (August 30, 2024)

Hosts: Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick & Fr. Stephen De Young
Theme: The Seen and Unseen World in Orthodox Christian Tradition
Format: Live Call-In, Questions from Listeners

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Episode Overview

This episode of The Lord of Spirits is an all-live Q&A session where listeners called in with a broad range of questions related to Orthodox Christianity, biblical interpretation, spiritual realities, church history, and the relationship between seen and unseen worlds. The episode is lively, informative, and often humorous, as the hosts bounce between deep theological insights and lighthearted banter.

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Key Discussion Points

1. Abraham’s Bosom & the Fate of the Righteous Dead Before Christ

Timestamps: [05:51] – [08:56]

• Question: Did the death of Abraham change anything in the underworld for the righteous?
• Fr. Stephen: There’s a tendency to think too linearly. Texts like 1 Enoch depict “caves” for the dead before Abraham — Abel is cited as an example.
  • “Abraham becomes the paradigmatic righteous dead, but he was not the first one.” ([07:55])
• Fr. Andrew: It’s called “Abraham’s Bosom” because Abraham becomes the father-figure of all faithful, not because he changed metaphysical reality.

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2. Galatians 3:1 and Early Christian Iconography

Timestamps: [10:52] – [17:24]

• Question: When St. Paul says Christ was “publicly portrayed as crucified,” is he referring to icons?
• Fr. Stephen: While not definitive proof, there’s a “cumulative case” that visual representations (icons) were present from early on.
  • Notes pagan homes used iconographic images; Christians would have replaced or repurposed these, not simply whitewashed their homes.
  • “To imagine that Christians did not have iconography from the earliest period...is to either imagine that they just left that stuff up after becoming Christians...or maybe, I guess, they whitewashed.” ([15:43])
• Fr. Andrew: The difference between veneration and worship is rooted in what constitutes “worship” in the ancient world—sacrifice, not simply gestures like kissing or bowing.

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3. Priesthood and Patriarchy Across Cultures

Timestamps: [19:46] – [28:22]

• Question: Is the link between priesthood and fatherhood universal in ancient cultures?
• Fr. Stephen:
  • In less developed/nomadic societies, the patriarch served as priest.
  • In complex civilizations (Egypt, Rome), specializations emerged (e.g., lector priests, keepers of sacred books), but high priests/kings retained the father-leader role.
  • Pagan kings often seen as “divine” members of the council of gods, not merely as intermediaries.

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4. The Repentance of the Good Thief (St. Dismas)

Timestamps: [28:32] – [38:10]

• Question: How is the thief on the cross received into Paradise if he had no opportunity for “restorative repentance”?
• Fr. Andrew: Tradition exists that Dismas previously encountered Christ as a child; however, ultimate point is that honest, last-moment repentance is real repentance.
• Fr. Stephen: Differentiates “ordinary” from “extraordinary”; Stresses there’s no “mechanism of salvation”—God can save whomever He pleases.
  • “Christ can look at St. Dismas and say, today you'll be with me in Paradise, and that's it...that doesn't mean Jesus will say that to you.” ([34:17])
• On baptism/works: Obedience to Christ is necessary, but God is not bound by mechanisms—He is merciful beyond our categories.

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5. Cain’s Descendants and Technology in Genesis 4

Timestamps: [38:24] – [44:45]

• Question: Why is civilization (music, metallurgy) associated with Cain’s line?
• Fr. Andrew: Ancient context links technology to the “gift” (or curse) of spirits. Genesis frames these developments as morally ambiguous, even dangerous—humans are not ready for such power, which tends toward evil early use.
• Fr. Stephen: Humanity’s downward progression: fruit-eating (least harm) → farming → animal husbandry → eating animals. Early use of new technology tends toward evil.

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6. Would the Incarnation Have Happened Without Sin?

Timestamps: [48:22] – [56:20]

• Question: If Adam had not sinned, would Christ still have become incarnate?
• Fr. Andrew: The Incarnation is the purpose/end-point of creation: union of God and man was always intended.
• Fr. Stephen: Incarnation is not “plan B”; dealing with sin is a “speed bump,” not the main reason. The union of God and creation is greater aim—echoing St. Maximus the Confessor.

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7. Resurrection, Identity, and Healing in the Age to Come

Timestamps: [56:51] – [70:51]

• Question: Are relationships and identities “fixed” in eternity? Do saints change after death?
• Hosts: In the age to come, identity persists, growth continues in relationship/knowledge of God, but not as temporal “becoming” as we know it.
• “Time doesn’t work in the age to come the way it does here.” ([67:00])
• The “burning away” of sin for the damned is most properly understood through metaphor, not mathematics or mechanism.

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8. On “Mati” (Evil Eye Charms) and Superstitious Objects

Timestamps: [71:22] – [76:49]

• Question: Is it spiritually dangerous to keep an Evil Eye bead as a trinket?
• Fr. Andrew: The object itself is not magical; the issue is how it’s regarded or used. Best not to keep it for superstitious reasons, but it’s also a matter of honesty in relationships and Christian witness.
• Fr. Stephen: Lightly jokes: “Hit it with holy water and put it in a desk drawer.” ([76:30])

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9. “Lion-like Men” of Moab and Demonic Possession

Timestamps: [77:44] – [85:47]

• Question: Are the “lion-like men” of Moab in 2 Samuel 23 related to the Nephilim?
• Fr. Stephen: Yes—these are described as Nephilim-like; their emergence is a sign Moab became as corrupted as the pre-flood lawless.
• Ancient languages in these passages suggest “divine/heroic” men; the important point is moral/spiritual corruption rather than genetics or physical size.

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10. Modern Astronomy vs. Ancient Cosmology & Angels/Stars

Timestamps: [103:59] – [118:15]

• Question: How do we reconcile ancient understanding of stars (as spiritual/angelic beings) with modern astronomy?
• Fr. Andrew: Ancient cosmologies are relational/phenomenological, focusing on man's connection to cosmos, while modern science addresses material composition—these approaches are not in conflict but address different questions.
  • “There’s a whole world of spiritual experience our culture pushes to the side...It’s a kind of knowledge we've been shoving off…” ([112:08])
• Fr. Stephen: Science and theology are answering fundamentally different questions. Science can’t comment on spiritual significance or meaning.

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11. Recommended Books for Ancient and Church History

Timestamps: [118:43] – [124:41]

• Hosts:
  • Early Church: Metropolitan Kallistos Ware, Eusebius’ Church History, Apostolic Fathers, St. Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Yaroslav Pelikan, NT Wright for 1st century.
  • Bronze Age/Ancient: Eric Cline’s 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed, relevant books on individual civilizations.

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12. Orthodox Prayer: Spontaneity, Authenticity, and Tradition

Timestamps: [131:02] – [145:47]

• Question: Is praying from pre-written prayers “authentic” compared to spontaneous prayer?
• Fr. Andrew: The notion that “spontaneity = authenticity” is an innovation. Most of history regards learned, repeatable prayer (Psalms, etc.) as normative.
  • “Best love songs are not spontaneous… Why would we think prayer shouldn’t take work of that kind?” ([137:01])
• Fr. Stephen: Sincerity and self-expression are modern idols. Structured prayer molds and changes us; God already knows our heart.
  • “God doesn’t need our self-expression—He knows what you think and how you feel… Structured prayer shapes me.” ([146:04])

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Abraham’s Death & The Afterlife:
  “Abraham… becomes paradigmatic of the righteous dead…but that doesn’t mean he was the first one.” – Fr. Stephen ([07:55])

• “Publicly Portrayed as Crucified”:
  “There’s a very good cumulative case… that the same thing was happening in the homes of Christians from that early period…” – Fr. Stephen ([16:44])

• Mechanism of Salvation?
  “There is no mechanism of salvation. Christ can save anyone and everyone if he wants to—he’s God. God can do whatever he wants.” – Fr. Stephen ([36:44])

• Pride and Virtue:
  “If you do the right thing… I don't really care if your motives were at some level tainted by xyz.” – Fr. Stephen ([96:39])

• Science vs. Meaning:
  “The question when pagans and Jewish people are arguing about the sun and moon and stars… they're arguing about significance… not about what a star is.” – Fr. Stephen ([115:16])

• Prayer and Authenticity:
  “Most of humanity, for most of history, of any religion, has regarded pre-written prayers as what constitutes the authenticity of religion.” – Fr. Andrew ([137:52])

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Tone and Style

• Warm, witty, often irreverently lighthearted.
• Deeply knowledgeable, yet accessible.
• Frequent pop culture references, and occasional wrestling debates for levity.
• Honest about not always having a single, black-or-white answer.

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• Abraham’s Bosom, Pre-Resurrection Dead: [05:51] – [08:56]
• Iconography in Early Church: [10:52] – [17:24]
• Priesthood & Fatherhood Across Cultures: [19:46] – [28:22]
• Repentance, The Good Thief: [28:32] – [38:10]
• Genesis 4 & Civilization: [38:24] – [44:45]
• Incarnation w/ or w/o Sin: [48:22] – [56:20]
• Resurrection, Identity, The Age to Come: [56:51] – [70:51]
• Evil Eye/Mati & Superstition: [71:22] – [76:49]
• Lion-like Men & The Nephilim: [77:44] – [85:47]
• Angels, Stars, and Astronomy: [103:59] – [118:15]
• Books on Church/Ancient History: [118:43] – [124:41]
• Orthodox Prayer: [131:02] – [145:47]

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Conclusion

This episode is a rich journey through Orthodox Christian understandings of the spiritual world, lived tradition, and practical theology. The hosts blend solid scholarship and lived pastoral wisdom—making even arcane discussions (giants, spirits, prayer discipline) relevant, occasionally funny, and always grounded in the living Tradition of the Church.

Transcript

[Narrator]

He will be a staff for the righteous with which for them to stand and not to fall. And he will be the light of the nations and the hope of those whose hearts are troubled. All who dwell on the earth will fall down and worship him. And they will praise and bless and celebrate with song the lord of spirits. First Enoch, chapter 48, verses 4 through 5. The modern world doesn't acknowledge, but is nevertheless haunted by spirits and 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.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Hey. Good evening. Giant killers, dragon slayers, scorpion stompers, serpent stranglers, demon defenestrators, lovers of alliteration. You are listening to the Lord of Spirits podcast. My co Host, the Very Reverend Doctor and a Half, Father Stephen DeYoung is with me from Lafayette, Louisiana and I am Father Andrew Stephen Damick in Emmaus, Pennsylvania. And we are, and it's an all Q and A all live program tonight. So if you are listening to us live, you can call us at 855-237-2346 just like you heard the voice of Steve say and which he will say many times this evening.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So your reference to defenestrating demons, was that a deliberate Constantine starring Keanu Reeves reference?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Actually no. I don't recall having viewed that program.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

They're making a sequel all these years.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Are you serious?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Maybe I should see the original.

I don't know.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

It is the best comic book based exorcism movie that co stars Shia LaBeouf.

Of several.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I'm sure that.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Wow. Actual cannibal Shia LaBeouf.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. So this episode. This episode is sponsored by the Orthodox Studies Institute at St Constantine College which exists to advance the study and application of orthodox Christianity in faithfulness to holy tradition. OSI is offering online courses this fall, including a five week course on the book of Enoch taught by our very own very beloved Father Stephen DeYoung. Registration ends on September 1st. And if you're listening to us live, that is three days from today. So this is it. This is the moment to sign up everybody. You can learn about the courses and you can [e-mail] Los and if you register using that link, you will get a free copy of Father Stephen's Apocrypha ebook from Ancient Faith Publishing. Also, and this is new. This is new this time. Registration is now open for OSI's next course, which is Holy Women of Byzantium. So go to orthodoxstudies.org Los Angeles to learn more. So that's the patch.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah. Earlier today we did kind of a dry run on the technology, like for teaching it online, and it was a debacle. So if you're a big fan of this show and our early technical difficulties, like, wow, wait a second. You don't want to miss this.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Will there be Mexican radio?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah. Who knows what's going to happen next Tuesday?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Wow, I'm very exited for this.

Yeah. So this is indeed an all caller episode. So let's just go straight to the phone.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So, listener.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

That's right, a caller is you. So we're just going to go straight to the phone. So we've got Rory calling from La Verne, California. Rory, welcome to Lord of Spears podcast.

[Caller]

Caller, semi, longtime listener, and recently Chrismated on Holy Saturday this year.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Hey, congratulations. God grant you all the years you need to repent.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Question for you first, Corey. Are you now or have you ever been either an Auton and. Or a Roman Centurion?

[Caller]

No.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Okay.

[Caller]

Or yes.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Not that. Not that.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Rory.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Never. Go ahead.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Different Rory.

See, he's testing you. Rory.

[Caller]

Did I fail?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I don't know. I think he's.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Well, no, you're just a different Rory than I thought you were.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

That's okay.

[Caller]

Yeah. As long as you didn't think I was the Gilmore Girl. I consider that ahead in my book.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

No, why would you think I would know about Gilmore Girls?

[Caller]

I was testing you.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Oh, okay. Oh, there he goes. Okay. So, Rory, what is your. Your question? Comment, Concern, Outrageous criticism.

[Caller]

Okay, so I have a question. So I have a whole list of esoteric questions I've been planning to ask you guys since I started listening.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

You get one.

[Caller]

I had to go through the backlog because I did not want to call up. I didn't want to call up and have it be answered on a previous episode. So I think I got a good one.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

You get one. Don't be like some of our other callers who are like, oh, and by the way, I have six other questions not related to the first thing I just said. Can you cover those now or be impolite if you don't just, you know, One.

[Caller]

Well, we got one of those and it's wrestling related, so it's okay. Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Okay, cool. Yeah, no, wrestling stuff is always on topic.

[Caller]

Perfect. Okay. So my actual question, though is. So regarding the dead, prior to the heroine, I understand that everybody who died went to Hades, but the righteous dead had it a little bit easier in Abraham's bosom. And I know, but prior to Abraham dying, does that mean that everybody kind of suffered the same fate? Or do I need to go back and re. Listen to the time episode because thinking too linearly.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Oh, wow. So is the question, like, does Abraham's death alter the underworld?

[Caller]

Yes. Yes.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I'm going to say no. That's just me shooting from the hip, though, with zero research.

But it's hard to imagine that it would because he's not Jesus, you know?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Well, I assume you're asking because Abraham's bosom.

[Caller]

I'm wondering what that actually meant. Or is that just, you know, like.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right, right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

He took it.

[Caller]

I don't know. I. It's just.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

What.

[Caller]

Like I said, it's one of the things that's just been on my mind.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Like he showed up and his name was already on the wall and he's like, hey.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Well, yeah, so there is. There is an element of over linearity there. Right. But we can say more than that in that. So the picture that we're getting, for example, the way it's laid out in. In the Book of Enoch, in first Enoch, when it describes the different caves.

Remember, there's the cave with Abel, right. Who of course predates Abraham.

So there were those kind of sources that describe Hades in that way, acknowledge that there were righteous dead before Abraham. But I think the reason that it becomes known as Abraham's bosom is that Abraham then becomes the father of all of the subsequent faithful.

And so they have Abraham as their father. And when you read like the patriarchal narratives in Genesis, and then even going forward in the Hebrew scriptures, it'll talk about when they bury, someone will say they rested with their fathers.

Right? And their fathers after those generations become Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Right? And so Abraham sort of becomes paradigmatic of the righteous dead, but that doesn't mean that he was the first one.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Does that make sense, Rory?

[Caller]

Yeah, it makes sense. And like, as. And I knew that the cave. The caves from the Book of Enoch as well, but I'm just wondering, because that's how they refer to it, if there was any kind of like, change in there. But then also, I know that I'm thinking. I'm thinking to linearity.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right, Right. So Abraham's wisdom just becomes a way to describe it. I'm going to go to the place where Abraham is, where Isaac is, where Jacob is. Right. Where my fathers are.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

He's not like running.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

What's your wrestling question?

[Caller]

See, you get this question is one. See, I'm so. I'm so good. Well, also, I just want to let you know that I'm a SoCal guy, too, and I pair. I kind of parallel you and a lot of my interest and everything. But I'm so SoCal that I was baptized at the Christian Cathedral way.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah, my wife grew up right next.

[Caller]

To it, which technically made me a Calvinist, but no one held it against me.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes, technically, you were baptized Dutch Reformed.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Whoever remembers that that was a Dutch.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Reformed Christian Cathedral's rca.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I know.

[Caller]

Well, you know, I only asked once I learned AP European History about the Protestant Reformation, and I knew we weren't Catholic, and I was like, what is the Crystal Cathedral? Well, and yeah. So wrestling question, and there is no wrong answer. And Sean Michaels or Bret Hart?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

In what respect? Just in general, broadly.

[Caller]

Who's better? What do you prefer? Who's better?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Well, so it depends on what aspect. So in ring, like, there's nobody better than Bret Hart, but as a. As a. As an entertainer and an overall wrestler, as a promo, as everything else, Shawn Michaels.

[Caller]

But this includes the. Are you remembering the promo at WCW where Fred Hart said, who are you to doubt El Dandy?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

I am. Are you forgetting the Sunny Days promo?

[Caller]

You're talking to a man who has Wrestling with Shadows on vhs. Okay.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I'm not sure what show this is anymore, but that's okay.

All right, thank you very much, Rory from La Verne, California.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Hopefully, Rory, you never lose your smile.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

All right, next up, we have Lisa, who has a question about Galatians, Chapter three. Lisa, welcome to the Lord of Spirits podcast.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Hi, Fathers.

[Caller]

I want to thank you first for this podcast. I'm a new catechumen. Hey, I know it's exciting. It's been my husband. I just started going to Orthodox services right around Pasca. So brand new.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

That's a nice time to go.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah.

[Caller]

And I have to say, one of my first episodes I listened to you guys made. I think it was Father Stephen made a reference to Mr. Bungle. And I knew this was a podcast for me.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Wow.

[Caller]

Yeah.

So my question is. So the first verse of Galatians in chapter three, when Paul says, he talks about how.

What does he say before his eyes? Jesus Christ was clearly portrayed among you. Crucified. I've always been curious about that language that he uses portrayed. And just the iconography thing is very, very new to me. Is, is that maybe a reference to two icons in. In the church that early, or is he just saying, I told you about this?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. So what it says for everybody who's not sure what Lisa's talking about, this is Galatians, chapter three, verse one, where St. Paul writes, oh, foolish Galatians, who has bewitched you? It was before your eyes that Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified. So clearly the issue would be like, wait a minute, were the Galatians at the crucifixion? Answer.

[Caller]

Right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

No, they were. They were not present. I mean, this is sometime later, right? So. So are you're asking, does this. Is this a reference to iconography? Is that what you're saying?

[Caller]

Yeah, what? Yeah, what? I mean, what, what? I just really. I'm wondering what he means by that.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I don't know. I mean, what do you think, Father? Do you think this is referring to icons of the crucifixion or is this a little more metaphorical or.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So I think so right. Now, of course, our iconoclast friends will want to say, right, that. No, it's just talking about him describing it. And it's not just this verse, right? So you look at me and say, well, you can't prove from this verse that it's referring to iconography, but you can make a cumulative case from a couple of things. One is there are other similar references in St. Paul's epistles.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. Isn't it the one about seeing the glory of the face of Christ? I can't remember what that is.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

They've seen the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ to the Corinthians, who never saw the face of Jesus while he was walking the earth. Right.

And so from a number of those verses seem to imply.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Unless you're going to argue that, like, St. Paul is just constantly using this weird mixed metaphor, that they've seen things that they haven't literally seen.

That they're seeing something. That piece one, Piece two is.

We have very early depictions of Christ and the crucifixion, Right? And we have them so early into the second century that even people who, you know, popular, you know, Protestant apologists on YouTube who are obsessed with iconography. I don't know who I'm talking about.

Will.

Will even admit that they were there, right? So they. They'll. They'll. They'll kind of try to Split this out and say, well, okay, yeah, they were there, but, you know, they. They didn't kiss them. Right. You know. Okay. But even they acknowledge that they're very, very early. As early as we can go. Right. That's part two. Part three is understanding. And this is the part. This is the biggest part that most people miss in this argument is they don't understand what pagan homes looked like, and they don't understand the existence of pagan iconography.

In our. In our episodes on iconography and idolatry. That's why we structured them the way we did. Because.

If you just think like, well, pagans had idols and Christians have these things and they call them icons, what's the difference? Right. It's very different when you understand that. No, like, they had pagan iconography on their walls. They didn't worship it. Right. Like they went to the pagan temple to worship, but they had these scenes from these pagan stories and pagan myths that were reenacted ritually at the temples. They had them all over their walls in their homes.

Some of them extremely violent or extremely sexually graphic or both.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And so to imagine that Christians did not have iconography from the earliest period in their homes is to either imagine that they just left that stuff up there after becoming Christians and didn't see an issue with it, or maybe, I guess that they whitewashed. Just whitewashed their walls. Right. But if you're going to argue they whitewashed their walls, I say show me some evidence of that.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. And I mean, we don't have any.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Archaeological remains of that.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

And we see. I mean, you know, we see the instructions from God about how to build the tabernacle explicitly including imagery on the walls.

[Caller]

Yeah.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

And not ever saying, and, oh, by the way, you shouldn't have any other imagery anywhere ever.

[Caller]

Right, right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah. So it seems to me there's a very good cumulative case, including that verse, another verse of St. Paul, that from the very beginning there were visual depictions of Christ and the life of Christ and probably Old Testament stories and that kind of thing too, which were in synagogues. Right, yeah. That shows up in iconography and synagogues at the time of Old Testament figures and Old Testament stories. Right. So there's a very good cumulative case that the same thing was happening in the homes of Christians from that. That very early period.

[Caller]

Wow.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah. St. Paul's argument is. It's. The argument St. Paul is making is this isn't just like, oh, I came and told you one thing, and now someone else has showed up and is telling you another thing. Right. It's. There was this whole transformation of your life. Right. You saw this, Right. This. This shaped who you are. And now they're coming in with this other thing, and you're just jumping to that.

[Caller]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So it's a stronger argument that St. Paul's making than the other way would have it.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

That makes sense, Lisa.

[Caller]

Yeah, that. That makes even more sense than I thought it would. Thank you.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

You're welcome. You're welcome. You know, I. My. My experience has been in thinking about these references to, like, in this verse that may well be about imagery.

And I was just. I just saw this again the other day. You know, like, there's a whole.

There's a whole world of people ridiculing the idea that there's any difference between veneration and worship. Right. They'll use those, you know, ridicule caps or whatever, whatever you call that, mockery caps.

As though, you know, veneration is just sort of milder form of worship. But I think the. One of the big problems is that people don't understand what exactly constitutes worship, and that is that it's about putting sacrifices in front of the one you're worshiping.

And so, I don't know it. Once you understand that, like, what worship really is in the ancient world, a lot of this other stuff kind of falls into place and makes a whole lot more sense. You know, that kissing or saluting or bowing or whatever, those things are not worship. And I mean, there's a lot of stuff that. It's kind of buried under translation problems. But that's why I always say, look at the actual actions being done. You know, it's all about the actions. So. All right, thank you, Lisa. Okay, we're gonna take another caller because this is an all caller, all live Q and A. So we've got Emilian, who has a. About the priesthood. Emilian, welcome to the Lord of Spirits podcast.

[Caller]

Good evening, Fathers. Thanks for having me.

So. Thanks. I actually have two questions, if that's all right. But my main one is about priesthood.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Okay.

[Caller]

And it is about the relationship between priesthood and the fatherhood or masculinity.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Okay.

[Caller]

Because you've talked about this several times, and I was wondering if the relationship was ubiquitous around the ancient world or it was present only in some cultures. So the Israelites, they had as priests at the beginning.

The elders of their clans and tribes, or in the Roman religion, the emperor was the great priest, the high priest, but he was also the father of his people. But what about other priests? So, for example, the pharaohs lecter priests in Egypt, were they also related to.

The fatherhood of their people?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Okay, so if I understand your question correctly, you're asking is even in paganism, is the idea of priesthood and fatherhood bound up together everywhere that's ubiquitous.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Or if that's just.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right, right, right. I mean, one thing that I would add to maybe to help us think about this more clearly is that, like you mentioned the Roman Empire, you mentioned, you know, ancient Egypt.

Both of these are very highly developed.

Big civilizations.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

With one guy at the top.

And are not necessarily representative like the earliest, earliest forms of paganism. But yeah, I mean, there is, I think, this sense of fatherhood even at those kind of more developed stages of paganism. Isn't that right, Father?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah, there's so part of it is that there's a lot of equivocation on the word priest.

So like Emilian mentioned, like the lecter priests in Egypt or whether they had a kind of fatherhood.

And they were a fundamentally different kind of priest than Pharaoh was.

Right. So when we've talked about the kind of priesthood that's connected to fatherhood, it's the kind of priesthood that means representing the people under your authority to God and God to the people under your authority.

Whereas what we call the lector priests or the magicians in.

The Torah. Right. The.

Lucer Pharaoh were really the reason they're called lector priests is they were literate, they knew how to read. And so their job was to sort of keep ancient, sacred, esoteric information to be able to supply that information to Pharaoh to allow Pharaoh to fulfill his function.

And you see a similar kind of thing, the priests of Jupiter in Rome who took care of the Sibylline books is a similar kind of thing. Right.

Emperor is the Pontifex Maximus. But.

They'Re there, they keep those books and use those books to advise him, to allow him to carry out that office.

Priesthood in Rome.

Though, in general, like the broader sense of priesthood, not that particular sense of priesthood of those particular priests who kept the books.

[Caller]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Was enmeshed with the idea of authority. And all authority in Roman culture was really seen in terms of the paterfamilias. That was sort of especially true in Rome.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. I mean, the ruling class were called patricians.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Which. Which, you know, means the father class, basically.

[Caller]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And people don't know Julius Caesar began his rise to power by being made a priest.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And the early stages of working your way up to be a senator, a consul. Right. You started out by gaining certain priesthoods.

Right. So that was part of the authority structure. Now, in terms of when you go to, as Father Andrew mentioned, if you're talking about less developed cultures, if you're talking about nomadic cultures, that very much it is the patriarch of sort of the larger extended household who was serving the priestly functions like we see with the Midianites, with the Israelites before Sinai, before there was a special priesthood that we've talked about on the show that you see with the Moabites, etc. But the king is at sort of the top of that Sumeria. You have priest kings.

It seems pretty clear in the early stages of Indian civilization that it was.

The leaders who were also the priests, that there wasn't sort of a.

Kingly kind of leadership and then a separate priesthood. Right. That those things were commingled also in the Indus River Valley in the early stages. And of course, Hinduism has developed into a whole bunch of different things. Hinduism isn't really one religion. It's a very diverse thing now.

And so, like, I'm not, I'm not a super expert like in early levels of Chinese and Japanese culture, but based on all of the earlier cultures I know about, I would imagine the same thing would be true. That.

If there is later a separate priesthood that develops, it was probably specialized like the lector priests, and it probably broke off from.

Figures originally holding both a. Because.

So.

We talk about this connection between priesthood and fatherhood, again, to reiterate as representing God before the people and the people before God.

But okay, that's in our Christian situation, that's in the Jewish situation.

Move yourself for the sake of thought experiment into a polytheistic situation.

Right.

So priesthood still being that in a polytheistic situation, takes on this other piece where the ruler, the leader is himself divine in some sense.

And so it is generally not a question of that leader being a representative of some God or the priest of some God. Like in a Dungeons and Dragons sense, he's a cleric of this. Right? But of the. The king, the ruler, the leader being a member of the council of gods in this polytheistic situation, yeah, he's one of the gods. He's one of the gods himself.

And so he represents. When he. Instead of representing the people before God in prayer, the way we would think of it, right? It's him representing the people in the council of the gods.

Right? And instead of him representing the.

Representing a particular God to the people, it's him representing the council of the gods, the divine as a whole. Right?

To the people.

So that makes sense a million it is different.

Yeah, yeah, but there's also a through line, right?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. A million.

[Caller]

Yeah, yeah, sure. Thank you.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Okay, what is your, what is your second question?

[Caller]

Yeah, it's about repentance.

And exactly about the, the wise thief, Saint Dismas. So you always said that repentance is not just feeling sorry about what you've done, but about action and restoration. So in his case, was he received in, in paradise as a one time offer or.

How exactly did he receive salvation? Yeah, because he didn't have time for anything more than testifying that Christ is the son of God.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

You know, it's, it's interesting that you ask that because even though it's not in the scripture, there are these traditions about Saint Dismas that this was actually not the first time that he encountered Jesus.

That, so there's a tradition about him which is that when the Lord and his mother and St. Joseph were on their way to Egypt, when Jesus was quite young, you know, they're fleeing Herod, that a band of robbers approaches the family and.

They want to rob them. And Dismas is one of the robbers and sees the baby Jesus and says, leave them alone. Right. And it kind of makes you wonder, was this tradition an attempt to represent some kind of repentance that God would have worked with as a result? I tend to think so.

I'm not saying I disbelieve or to me the question is not did that really happen? That doesn't kind of matter that much.

But also like repentance is not only like, for instance, if someone is on their deathbed, right, and they have a genuine conversion experience, like, you know, oh my, I've lived a horrible life, God forgive me.

Right. That is an act of repentance to ask for forgiveness. And so when Dismas asks the Lord, remember me when you come into your, in your kingdom, when you come in your kingdom, that is an act of repentance to pray to God to have mercy on him.

You know, saying Lord, have mercy is an act of repentance on all of our parts. So I mean, I, you know, you don't have to accept this extra canonical tradition about saintismas, although I find it really interesting and I really rather like it actually. I think it provides a kind of interesting sort of poetic frame to his life. But the fact that he says, remember me when you come in your kingdom, that is a repentant act. Right? So I don't know. Father, do you have anything you wanted to add or subtract?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

I mean, I think we have to talk about the ordinary and the extraordinary, right? Because Saint Dismas gets used in all kinds of weird apologetic arguments.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yes, yes.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Baptism isn't necessary because he didn't get baptized, right?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

This isn't necessary because he didn't do that. Let me submit to you that if our Lord Jesus Christ, who is the one who is going to judge the living and the dead, looks at you and tells you your sins are forgiven, your sins are forgiven.

Right? If you're paralyzed and he tells you rise up and walk, you get up and walk, right? But most people who are paralyzed don't have that happen to them.

And most people who are sinners don't have that happen to them, right?

So.

Part of it is a. Is a basic flaw in the way a lot of.

Folks look at theology.

Because.

Again, and we've talked about this before, but they look at salvation, for example, right? So you talk to your average American Protestant about salvation. They have an understanding of penal substitutionary atonement. They have an idea of the way it works. Here's how it works.

Jesus gets punished for your sins, therefore you don't, right? Therefore your sins are forgiven. That's how it works. And it works that way. The only way to get there is they're going to have to argue at some point that God has to do it that way.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Like God has to punish sin. He can't let it go. He can't. It has to be that way, right? Has to be that way. So then when someone who believes that way and thinks that way, you say to them, hey, Christians need to get baptized. They're going to go, well, wait a minute. You're saying God can't save you unless you get baptized. But here, look, Saint Dismas, he gets saved and he wasn't baptized. So therefore Christians don't have to get baptized.

Because God could save you without it. God doesn't have to do or have to have to this whole have to idea, right? As we've said again and again on the show, God doesn't have to do anything.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Christ can look at Saint Dismas and say, today you'll be with me in paradise, and that's it. And he could do that because he's God.

Right? That doesn't mean that I. Right, as a fellow sinner like Saint Dismas, right. A human who is a sinner and who has lived a sinful life, that I can just think, oh, well, Jesus is going to say the same thing to me when I die, because why Would I think that, right?

So I look at the scriptures that say, well, what do the scriptures say I need to do, right? I need to go and get baptized for the remission of my sins, right? I need to start living a new life as a Christian. I need to start.

Worshiping, right? The true God. I need to start receiving the sacraments. I need to do all these things. I need to look at my sins and repent and try to make amends and try to fix the things I broke. I need to do all these things, right? Because these are the ways that I will experience forgiveness and salvation. Nowhere there am I saying if I don't do these things, God can't save me.

God can do whatever he wants.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. The problem is like thinking that the scriptures are describing some, as you said, some kind of mechanism, right? Like necessary, sufficient, insufficient conditions, you know.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Like, because those same folks will listen to what I just said and they'll say, oh, that's works righteousness. You're saying you earn your salvation.

Which I'm not. Yeah, right. I'm clearly not. Because I'm not saying any of this is has to, right? This is what God has told me to do. I'm going to do it. And guess what? My repentance is never going to be complete. I will die with it. Incomplete, guaranteed.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. I mean, repentance does not for salvation.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

I will never worship God perfectly. I will never on and on and on. I'm never going to do any of that perfectly.

Right? But this is what God has told me to do. And so this is what I do and this is how I pursue it, right?

And then Christ will render his judgment, right? And I pray that he will accept my feeble efforts, but that he will also forgive all of the efforts I didn't make.

Right? And everything else. So there is no mechanism of salvation.

Christ can save anyone and everyone if he wants to. He's God. God can do whatever he wants, right? But it's very clear in scripture, if I want to experience forgiveness, if I want to experience salvation, it's very clear what I need to do. Those are not rules placed on God. Those are rules that God has placed on me.

And if I don't follow them, then I have no cause to expect.

Any kind of positive judgment when I stand before the judgment seat of Christ.

Right? I should expect condemnation if God tells me to do these things and I just decide not to do them them.

Now, hopefully, Lord willing, there will be people like that who decided not to do them, who God still in his mercy will grant salvation.

I have to hope that, because that's the best shot I have is that there's that much mercy.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But that doesn't mean I can expect it.

We say I could count it doesn't mean I deserve it, doesn't mean I'm entitled to it.

Because I made some half hearted efforts during part of my life that doesn't entitle me to anything.

Does that make sense?

[Caller]

Yeah, sure. Very much. Thank you.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Good. All right. Thank you, Melian. All right, we're going to take one more call before we take our first break. So we have Patrick calling and he has a question about Genesis 4. Patrick, welcome to the Lord of Spirits podcast.

[Caller]

Hi. Hi, Fathers. My question is related to the children of Lamech. So why are. Why is music making and living in tents and making bronze and iron tools, why is that associated with the children of Cain? Are those like evil things or like what's going on there?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, so I don't know if you listened to our series on the various falls of mankind.

But this isn't. This is in there. Yeah, it's. So there's a little bit of subtext that is not explicit in Genesis 4, but is in pretty much almost every other tale in the ancient world about the rise of technology, Right. Which is that this kind of knowledge comes to mankind through the visitation of spirits. And you know, in the pagan context, that's depicted as being very good. Right. So, like, think about Greek paganism. You've got Prometheus, he comes along, he gives mankind fire. And of course, he also brings Pandora's box and all kinds of other fun stuff like that jar.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

It's a jar, not a box, a jar.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Excuse me, in English, it's a box.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Badly translated.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

English. Badly translated, yes.

Yeah. You know, that he brings technology is a gift of the gods, literally. Right. Whereas the rise of technology in Genesis 4 is associated with the line of Cain, which should strongly suggest to you that this is a problematic context in which technology arises. And so.

The implication there is. Well, we kind of all know that technology comes from visitation from spirits, and that's not good. Spirits, giving knowledge to mankind is not a good thing. They don't have our best interests at heart. And so, like, if you think about the list of things that's. That's given there in Genesis 4, right, you've got.

Not just living in tents. So there's, there's the rise of music, there's the rise of metallurgy, there's the rise of keeping of livestock. All these things which are Kind of basic to what we think of as civilization. And it's not that those actions are evil. Those technologies are evil in themselves. Right. It's rather that mankind is not ready for that. And so he's going to tend to misuse it. And I mean, metallurgy is probably the obvious one because it has to do with weapons. First off, keeping livestock, maybe not as obvious, but if you think about that as the pooling of resources, Right. It's the hoarding of food, frankly.

And then music is often associated. You can see this in Saint Irenaeus. The rise of music is often associated with sorcery and seduction and that kind of thing. Right. So these are all about, you know, controlling other people and getting your will over other people, disadvantaging other people for your own advantage if you, you know, misuse those things. And since it's the line of Cain, the very strong implication is that they're being misused. Right. There's no talk in there about. And this was to the benefit of mankind and everything was good. No, this is Cain's line, Lamech, the murderer, all this kind of stuff. Right. So that's the context. It's not explicit in the biblical text that this knowledge comes through the visitation of spirits. But that is the way that that story goes in the ancient near east. And the Bible is essentially commenting on that story. That's my understanding of it, anyway. Is there anything else, Father, that needs to be mentioned?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Well, just a tidbit of that. Remember with the livestock, that they weren't supposed to be eating meat yet.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

There you go. That too.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

There's this movement in Genesis where humanity starts out eating fruit from trees, where you're not even harming the tree, really. Right. And then.

The tree just sort of offers its fruit in its season to growing food, where you're having to work and toil and grow food out of the ground. And then, of course, you're killing the plants and eating them.

And then humanity moves to. He's finally given permission after the flood to eat animals. But that's where all the prohibitions have been against blood eating and drinking blood come in. Because it's this idea that humanity should not go all the way into becoming a predator.

So they were herding and eating animals before they had permission to. Right. And so the idea is about humans becoming. Becoming predators. So this is about the sort of descent of humanity in. In Kane's line. And again, like Father Andrew said, it's not that the technology is bad, it's just that this technology gets revealed to humans before they're ready for it. Which is the same dynamic that happens. Right. There's nothing evil about the Tree of Knowledge of good and evil.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

The tree is not evil. God made it. It's that humanity was not ready for that knowledge, was not ready to eat from that tree, and they jumped ahead and took it. Right. And so when humanity receives something they're not ready for, we can see this over and over again. In human history, the first use to which humans put new technology is pretty much always evil.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

We unlock the secrets of nuclear power and we build bombs, we invent the Internet, and it becomes a means to distribute pornography, like, just instantly. That's our first use. And then hopefully down the road, humanity matures a little and finds actual productive, good, useful things to do with that technology.

But not always. And so that's. That's more what's. What's going on there. Right. And these spirits are revealing it to humanity because they want humanity to destroy itself.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yep.

Does that make sense, Patrick?

[Caller]

Yes. Yeah.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

All right. Very good. Well, thanks for calling. Okay, we're gonna go ahead and take our first break, and we'll be right back with this all live Q and A episode of the Lord of Spirits.

[Narrator]

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

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Saint Dorothea of Caesarea. Saint Dorothea was known for her beauty and wisdom. Even at a young age, she was filled with great faith and drew the attention of the local ruler, Sapricus. He asked two sisters, Christina and Calista, to convince St Dorothea to abandon Christ and make sacrifices to pagan gods. Instead, Dorothea renewed the sisters faith, enraging Sapricus, who ordered them to be killed. When Saint Dorothea was sentenced to death, she rejoiced aloud, causing a lawyer named Theophilus to mock her. He asked her to bring him fruit or roses from her bridegroom's garden. When she reached it, Saint Dorothea agreed. When she was at the place of execution, a beautiful angel appeared to her with three bright apples and three roses. Even though it was wintertime, Saint Dorothea asked the angel to take the gifts to Theophilus and say, behold, here is what you desired. The angel did so, and Theophilus was amazed and believed in Christ. Saint Dorothea was beheaded and received a martyr's Crown taken from 102orthodox, an illustrated guide by Sarah Wright and Alexandra Schmaltzbach, illustrated by Nicholas Molara. Available [e-mail].

[Narrator]

We'Re back now with the Lord of Spirits with Father Andrew, Stephen Damick, and Father Stephen DeYoung. If you have a question, call now at 855-237-2346. That's 8-55-AF-RADIO.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Hey, welcome back, everyone. The second half of this all live Q and A episode here at the tail end of August 2024, and lots of good chatter on the YouTubes and a little bit on Facebook. And I should say, by the way, if you call and you get voicemail or it says unavailable or something like that, it is because the lines are full. So just keep calling if you want to try to get through. We can basically hold four people in the line at a time, and after that, you'll get those messages.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

What kind of rinky dink operation is this?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I know, I know. Well, Father C, would you like to make a big donation so we can have a bigger call board for a lot more phone?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

As soon as I win the Publishers Clearinghouse Sweepstakes for the fourth time, I will do so.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

It's my understanding that you enter every day. Is that true?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

I do. Multiple times.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Have you ever had anyone show up at your door with like a gigantic check?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

No, because I've never gotten a gigantic check. I've gotten a very small check.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Disappointing. Disappointing. So. All right, well, our first caller for the second half is Roger. So, Roger, welcome to the Lord of Spirits podcast.

[Caller]

Thank you, Fathers, for taking my call.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

You're welcome.

[Caller]

My question is.

Would. Would God would have came even though Adam would not have sinned and to reunite his creation? But then I'm wondering, to unified it against who is. Is it against the serpent? It's kind of not too clear for me. If you can clarify that, please. Thank you.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. So the question is basically, would the incarnation have happened even if there had not been sin? And also kind of like, what is the purpose of the incarnation? Is that correct?

[Caller]

Yes, because I heard it from you priests who quoted from Fathers of Church, but I don't know which Father, and I'm not able to find the sources to go through it. So it's perfect timing here to get the information.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Caller]

Thank you.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. I mean, I can't quote anybody offhand myself, but it is my understanding, at least some of the fathers do suggest that the incarnation would have happened even if there had not been sin. But I think one of the problems, of course, is that we don't. We don't live in a reality in which that didn't happen. We have this reality. Right. So then the question would be. The question I would have would be like, what would be the implication of trying to figure out what would have happened.

Even if there had not been sin? And I mean, to me, the creation by itself, the very fact of creation, that there is the uncreated God who out of love creates everything, out of. Out of. From nothing, from nothingness.

Which means that there's the uncreated God and then the created creation, including mankind, that God and his love for mankind is going to become man so as to.

Bring about that union between God and man. And that what sin does, is. Makes it so that there needs to be forgiveness and healing and so forth in order for that to come about. But that, that was all that, the incarnation, that Christ was always, in a sense, the end point of creation. He was always the purpose. That Christ is, is, in a sense.

I don't want to say baked into that seems a little irreverent, but that's the best I've got. That the Incarnation is baked into the creation from the beginning, that creation implies the incarnation. I don't know. Am I being an accidental heretic on anything? Father Stephen, try not.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

I mean, not a grave heresy.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Oh, okay.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

No, I mean, I think ultimately the question there, when the Fathers are talking about this, it's not really the what if question.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

The core of the question is why maybe is, does the Incarnation of Christ do more than just deal with sin?

Right.

And I think that's an important point to make because.

And I'm going to be fair here, right? I'm going to be as fair as I can here. If you delve into even most Protestant traditions.

They will talk about that. They will say that the, the Incarnation, Christ, redemption of Christ does more than just deal with sin, right? But if you ask the average just American Christian.

Why did God become man in the person of Jesus Christ? What was the purpose of his life, death, resurrection? They will say it was to deal with sin.

Because that's how it's sort of been presented, right? Four spiritual laws. There's this. You've got this problem. God loves you, has this wonderful plan for your life, but there's a problem. He can't do it because you're a sinner, but he did this to take care of your sin, right?

And so, but, but so sort of posing that draws us to these other things. And as, as Father Andrew was pointing to, right. In the person of Jesus Christ, God unites himself.

Within the person of Jesus Christ with our shared humanity. And by uniting himself with us and our shared humanity, he unites himself to the entire created order, the entire cosmos. Because it's. Saint Maximus talks about this a lot. Because in humanity the whole cosmos is summed up.

Right, in the one being. Because all of creation is created according to the Logos, who is Jesus Christ, who is human.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And so this sort of comes around in a circle, right?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

So.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Dealing with sin is something that happens on the way to that. Right. Because sin came into the world, it has to be dealt with. But this is why part of the problem with seeing the purpose of Christ as, and his incarnation is, is just dealing with sin is it kind of frames it almost as if it was like plan B. Yeah. Like God had this one plan, but then, oh no, like humans are sinful now, so now he comes up with plan B to try to fix it. Right. And when we understand the full scope of what's going on in Christ's incarnation, then you see, like sin is a low grade speed bump, right. On the way to God fulfilling his plan. It doesn't frustrate him or stop him at all. Right.

Our worst sins, our worst rebellion. Right. And, and.

Part of the reason why I think some of the other views are popular is our pride.

Right. Like we like to think, you know, like, ah, I'm a sinner. I've done these horrible things, I've, you know, flaunted in the face of God. Take that God. And he who sits in the heavens laughs, you know, at the raging of the nations and their nonsense.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Like.

I'm, I'm kind of pathetic, right. Like you get, you get these atheists who act like, you know, or Satanists who act like, you know, they're, they're, I'm, I'm an affront to the creator of the universe. And it's like not, not really.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Are you though?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah, like, no, there's just a sense of self importance about it. Right?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And.

So, yeah, so very much so. The, the incarnation is about this much bigger thing and dealing with our sin is a piece of that.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Does that make sense, Roger?

[Caller]

Oh, absolutely. Can I just jump in a small question?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Sure.

[Caller]

So when God created Adam as a humankind, not the person Adam.

And then he put them in Eden, he would have still incarnate to unite, but not necessarily with the flesh that we have today. Pretty much we can say that.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Well, if we're, if we're legitimately asking the what if question.

[Caller]

Right, right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Which, how valid that Is. I mean, presumably if humanity weren't mortal, then Christ would not have taken on. Yeah, yeah.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

It'll be material, though, for sure. I mean, mankind is made material, but not mortal. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right.

[Caller]

Okay. Thank you so much.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, yeah. All right. Thank you very much, Roger. Okay, we've got Nicholas next. So, Nicholas, welcome to Laura Spears podcast.

[Caller]

Hi. Thank you for bringing me on. My question is trying to better understand the view of the bodily resurrection that you guys presented last week. Fathers.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

I thought it was totally clear and simple.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

There was a lot of discussion about this as a Facebook group. Father, as I'm sure you well know. Yeah. Father Stephen's not on Facebook, but we know he lurks in the background.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

I hear things.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

Sorry, Nicholas, we're not messing with you.

[Caller]

No worries.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Are we, though?

[Caller]

I'm wondering if the saints in glory now and then everybody after the second coming, if they're going to continue to build new relationships or if we're sort of going to be limited to the relationships we had in this life.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Oh, yeah. This was one of the big things, I think, that bedeviled a lot of people is there was this sense that the image of the age to come that we were discussing was this sort of fixed or static or crystallized thing. Right. Yeah.

[Caller]

Almost Platonic.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes. Which you should have known.

I shake my fist at Plato angrily.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

No, Plato brain. Yeah. I mean, here's the basic thing. We're creatures. That means that we're always changing.

Right. So now the. The. The mode of change is going to be different.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah, yeah.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

The mode of change is going to be different, but it will still. There will still be change.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah, it's. You got to be careful with change. Right. Because, for example, angels are creatures.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

They don't continue to change.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. But there's motion, so.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah, so. Yeah, but. So here's. Here's the thing. So when I'm talking about. When we were talking about relationships and experiences, we're talking about the relationships, experiences of this life that contribute to your identity, to who you are.

Right. And so the idea is that.

In eternity understood as a timeless state. Right.

There is not going to be a change in who you are.

Right. You're not going to become a different person. You're still you.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But that doesn't mean that you're not going to encounter people you haven't encountered before. Right. And that kind of thing. Right. But.

It'S hard for us to talk about from this perspective because even, like what I just said, you're probably thinking, oh, I'M I'm. I'm meeting someone new, right? And so you're thinking about that in like temporal and spatial categories that belong to this life, right?

To the way we experience time and space now.

Right?

And those things are going to be different in a way that we can't totally understand now. In the age to come, the only way we can speak about things is in our present terms, right? And so that's why what I was proposing in that episode, I'm proposing as a way of thinking about it alongside other ways of thinking about it. It not. This is how it is, right? That's. But here's a way of thinking about it, right? So, but I'll get. But I'll give you an example, right?

I think we have firm biblical basis to say, for example, that in the life of the world to come, I will be reunited with my grandmother, right? And I will be me and she will be my grandmother, right? We won't be different people, we won't have lost our memories, we won't write, etc, etc, right?

[Caller]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But right now, right, in this world, even when my grandmother was alive, right now, she's not alive in this world, right? So we're separated by time, right? For me to get to my grandmother, I would have to go back in time, right Now. But when my grandmother was still alive in this world, we were very often separated by space.

Right? Like she was in Ohio and I was somewhere else, right? So there's still this removal. So in the life of the world to come, I expect that there will be no separation in time or space between me and my grandmother.

[Caller]

Right?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But what does that mean? Does that mean me and all the people I've ever known are going to be in a big pile, right? Well, no, right. That's not it. Right. But what we're doing there is. It's. It's a kind of apophaticism, right? We can't say what it's actually going to be like because we can't fathom it. But we can talk about the way things are now and then we can negate them.

Right? I'm not going to be separated by time from any of the people I love in the life of the world to come, I'm not going to be separated by space from any of the people I love in the world to come.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But that's just a negation, right? So what does that mean? We're all going to be in the same place? There are the same time. Are we going to experience a succession of moments like we do now? Well, I would say no, but what will that be like? I can't say.

Right. And this is what the scriptures tell us. What we will be has not yet been made known.

We know we'll be like Christ because we'll see him as he is.

[Caller]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

We don't know. We can't make positive statements really about what it's going to be like. Only.

Sort of negations.

[Caller]

So is the identity of the saints in glory now not changing as they interact with people and.

Are conduits for God's miracles and become the patrons of things?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Well, no, that's part of their identity. That's part of who they are. But this is why the saints like angels. It's not like they could fall into sin again.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But St. Nicholas is not going to three years from now take on new character traits.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Caller]

Well, I can't remember where I've read it, but I've read in one of the Fathers that we know the saints progress after their death because some become wonder workers when they never were wonder workers on earth.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. God works wonders through them. Yeah, God works wonders through them. But that doesn't make them a different person.

That doesn't make them a different person.

[Caller]

Presumably they take on more virtues than they had before. If they continue to progress in glory.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Well.

I don't know what that means.

Like they continuously become more kind.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

They.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Continuously become more self controlled. What does that mean in terms of.

Being in glory?

[Caller]

Maybe they were still a very angry person and had other things under control. And now in glory they're becoming less angry.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I mean, so like in the 13th century.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So a saint who died in the 6th century was more angry in the 13th century than they are today.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, I mean it also suggests, I mean that suggests repentance after death, which is not a thing. Like there's no sin.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

For the Savior. That's my point.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

The virtues are kind of polarity sin. Now it is true. It is true that you will find fathers talking about the saints continue to grow in their relationship with God because God is inexhaustible in their knowledge of God and their relationship with God.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But again, it's very important to our view of theosis that, that, that doesn't mean that they stop being who they are.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

They don't sort of lose their human identity in that process.

[Caller]

I'm sorry, as we change here on earth, we don't stop being who we are. It's all part of who we are. So why wouldn't our whole life on earth, bodily resurrection be also part of who we are.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Who we are in the bodily resurrection is who we became through our life on earth. Or it is.

[Caller]

There's no more people coming after of.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Our life on earth. But it's not that the life of the world to come is like this life just doesn't stop.

Right. Like Tuesday I go to the store and I meet this new person who I never met before. And I learned an important lesson about xyz.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Like that doesn't make sense in terms.

[Caller]

Of saying there's no becoming in it.

There's no change at all.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

No, I just said you grow in your relationship with God, you grow in your knowledge of God, you grow in all those things. But that doesn't change who you are. You don't lose your human identity in that process.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, there's still continuous, the difference between.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Our view of theosis and like Buddhism.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right, yeah. Where you ultimately lose your identity. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I think the biggest, the biggest hang up is that time does not work in the age to come the way that it works here.

It just, it just doesn't.

[Caller]

Then.

Then the other part you were talking about was the, the negative parts in our life, the not God filled parts burning away.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right.

[Caller]

Or being forgotten. I guess.

For somebody who rejects God's salvation, how would God forgetting them or all of their life being forgotten then be different from them ceasing to exist?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Well, in a sense they would.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I'm trying to imagine like God like they're being like all of a person's life being nothing but sin. Like.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right, but that's the extreme case, right? Like, yeah, but the extreme case of.

[Caller]

That person.

Thoughts were evil all the time.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Sure, yeah. The extreme case of that person. Right. This is why we just again, we can't understand exactly what that means. But the church gives us, when, when the fathers say to us, you know, oh, their humanity is gone.

What does that mean? That doesn't mean they cease to exist.

Right, but what exactly does that mean? I don't know.

Right, that's, that's a metaphor. What does it mean to be in the outer darkness where there's weeping and gnashing? You're talking about madness.

Right? That's an image of people behaving like animals, right? Running about. You know, that's what we see with like demoniacs in the, in the Gospels, right. Living like animals naked in the tombs.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

You know, now do I think. But all of these things are ways of describing the situation. None of which I think are Literal. I mean, they contradict each other. Being thrown in a lake of fire and being in madness and darkness are two different, incompatible images. They're both really bad. Right. Like, you get the picture.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right. But.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. They can't both be literal. Right.

But they convey something.

Right. About that state. Enough that we want to avoid that. Right. Enough that we want to get away from that. But I don't think we can really understand what that would mean.

Right. On this side of it.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And there's more than we can really understand. Our resurrection bodies and exactly how the life of the world will come to. Come to be. Will be on this side of the resurrection. But we can have various ways of thinking about it.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And I think one of the problems, more than one.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

One of the problems comes when we take one of those ways, or maybe a couple of those ways, and try to push it all the way to the edge and absolutize it. Right. Like even. Like, even what you mentioned, you know, the thoughts of all mankind was only ever evil.

That's not a mathematical statement because obviously Noah was righteous, was a man.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

And is human. Yeah, exactly. So. So if you take it as a literal absolute, then the Bible is simply contradicting itself there, you know, so obviously that's not what that means, because Noah is a righteous man.

She's explicit about that. So.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But I want to be clear. I want to be clear, given all the discussion and your question, what I set out in the last episode was, number one, not meant to be literal.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Number two was a way of thinking about it that I wanted to add to the mix with other ways of thinking about it, because I think in various ways it's helpful.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. But if anyone is saying no, Father Stephen is right. This is what it's like. They don't understand what I was saying.

[Caller]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Because that's not what I was saying.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. He's not putting forth the answer.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

You know, to the exclusion of everything else. So. All right, thank you very much for calling, Nicholas. Thank you, Father.

[Caller]

Thank you, Father Andrews.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

All right, we're going to take Jennifer, who we lost for a little while on the call board, but she came back. So, Jennifer, welcome back to the Lord of Spirits podcast.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Jenny was a friend of mine.

[Caller]

Hi.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

That. We got her back.

[Caller]

Hi. Thank you.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

What's on your mind, Jennifer?

[Caller]

My question is about Madi. I think that's what it called the symbol that's supposed. Yeah. That's supposed to protect against the evil eye my daughter received as a kind of goodbye gift. From a friend from Bahrain.

A Mari. And she really likes the friend and doesn't want to give up the Mahdi necessarily, but is also concerned about any, like, spiritual, you know, I guess any negative spiritual aspect of keeping it as a trinket, even though she understands that it's not going to protect her. And of course, the cross is stronger. So is there any danger in her keeping it? Should we get rid of it? If we got rid of it, what would we do with it?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Well, obviously sell it at your local Greek festival.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Just kidding. Just kidding.

I mean, I, I mentioned that.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I know, I'm not trying to throw shade, but you do often see them at various ethnic festivals, including Greek festivals. I mean, it's just the way it is. Although I know, I know a priest that, like, they would go in there all, you know, turning the tables over in the temple kind of thing if they saw that at their, Their festival. So, yeah.

I.

I mean, to. It would be easy to just say, look, you know, you don't need that thing. Get rid of.

Really, how you would deal with that, I think would depend on the nature of the friendship. Right. Like, okay, you know, we've all gotten gifts that we didn't particularly want. Right. For whatever reason. Right, right. You know, and then we all have those relatives that come around and say, so where's that thing that I gave you that I expected you to hang prominently to dominate your living room, even though I didn't discuss it with you, whether that's your taste or, you know, whatever?

Yeah. I mean, I would say, ultimately, here's how to me, the idea would go is to have a conversation with a friend, say, hey, you know, I really appreciate what this gesture means and so forth, but I don't feel comfortable keeping this because this is what I believe. But, hey, let's hang out. Let's exchange, you know, can I give you, you know, like, whatever. Right. Like, rather than just making it about the object, make it about the relationship.

Right. Like, I, I super value our friendship and, and I don't feel comfortable with this. And. But I believe our friendship is at a place where, you know, this particular thing doesn't matter.

You know, hey, let's hang out. Let's, you know, whatever. So make it so that there's some kind of way of, of perpetuating the relationship, strengthening the relationship that doesn't turn on the object.

[Caller]

Right, Okay.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I mean, yeah. Yeah. Because, you know, a lot of people keep those things around without. I mean, a lot of people do have a real superstitious attachment and belief in these things, you're like, they treat it like a real talisman or whatever, but for a lot of people also, it's just like a cultural trinket.

You know?

[Caller]

Right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

And. And I'm not going to say that it doesn't matter to have one or not. Right. But I will also at the same time say that a blue bead or a little piece of glass that's a series of concentric circles that looks like an eye, that. That is not like a magical item in and of itself.

Right. Because the earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof, like, everything belongs to God.

Yeah. You know, you can't set aside this little piece of glass or whatever it is or bead and say this part belongs to somebody else, because it doesn't. It doesn't. Everything belongs to God. Right. But. But obviously, the point of those things is to suggest some other kind of power that's outside of the power of God, so it gets used for that. Right. So to me, the. The. The best thing is not to have such things because that's the way that we think about them and the way that some people use them. But again, the point is the relationship, not the item. And God willing, the friendship is at a place where if your daughter says, hey, look.

I don't feel comfortable keeping this, and here's why, and I love you, and let's hang out, you know, God willing, it'll be. That'll be okay.

[Caller]

Right?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, that's my thought about that. I don't know, Father, you got something much more provocative to say, or hit.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

It with some holy water and put it in a desk drawer.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

There you go.

[Caller]

That's close to what I did.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

There you go. Yeah. Dip it in holy water. See if it dissolves or lights on fire or something.

[Caller]

Does it sink, float?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Does it weigh the same as a duck?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah.

[Caller]

Yeah.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I don't know if that helps. Or muddles the. Muddies the water.

[Caller]

Well, my. My daughter will listen to this episode, and then she can decide where she wants to go from there. But.

She was embarrassed to ask her priest, so.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Oh, but it's not too embarrassing. Just, you know, Proxy asked a couple of yahoos on the Lord of Spirits podcast. That's. That's cool. I totally understand.

[Caller]

Way less embarrassment for it to be.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Broadcast to our dozens of listeners.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Dozens. Dozens, I tell you.

All right, well, thank you for calling, Jennifer. We're always happy to talk. Thank you so much, Father. Yeah. Yeah. All right, next up, up, we've got Scott. Scott, welcome to Lord of Spirits podcast.

[Caller]

How do y'? All.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Howdy.

[Caller]

Got a. Got a question that's kind of interesting. Intriguing to me. We read about the line, like men of Moab the lion like men. And whenever you like, whenever you go read that, the word lion like men in the original language. I can't remember where that was. The term Hebrew or Greek. I think it was Hebrew. It translates to like God, like men. And to me, that kind of relates Back to Genesis 6 to some degree, where perhaps these people were doing ceremonies, rituals, drunkenness, to create this possession of a demon within them, to give them the strength of a God. Is that kind of the take on it? Or what do we look at when we see the line like men of Moab and their incredible strength and demeanor and everything?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Wow. I have never looked this up before, but I'm sure you've got it all in hand, Father Stephen. I'm looking. This is what, 2nd Samuel 23. There's a reference to man. There's all kinds of fun stuff going on in these translations.

[Caller]

Yeah.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

What's up?

[Caller]

Two questions, but this is. This one's up Yalls alley. The other one's some type of pedantic intellectual exercise. But this one's interesting.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Oh, so more up my alley. Okay.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Well, it depends, Father. I could get very pedantic about certain things.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

This is true?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

This is true. Yes. Your pedantry knows no bounds in some cases.

Yeah. So the. Yeah, this is. This is part of.

What'S going on there in. In Second Samuel. It's toward the end of Second Samuel, if I remember right.

Is this is part of an ark.

So Edom and Moab and to a lesser extent, Ammon. Ammon kind of gets short shrift in the Hebrew Bible, but Edom and Moab in particular have this kind of arc because, of course, their descendants or connected to Abraham, right? Moab through Lot.

Edom through Esau, Right? And when the Israelites are first coming into the land.

In.

Deuteronomy. Deuteronomy chapter two, if I'm remembering right, is when they come to Edom.

And God says they're not to take a foot of land from the Edomites because they're like their cousins. And because God brought the. To that land and gave them that land and drove out the giant clans who were there in front of the Edomites, and then says the same thing about the Moabites, Right? And so at that point, right, God says, hey, Israel, I'm bringing you to this other piece of land. I'm going to Drive out the giant clans there before you. Right. And so part of understanding, right, which our dispensationalist friends certainly don't understand, what's going on in Joshua 23 with Joshua, when at the end of Joshua it says God kept all his promises to Abraham regarding the land. And they say, well, Israel didn't have all that land. Right. So what does Joshua mean? Well, the descendants of Abraham had all that land.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. There's other Abrahamites.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

There are other Abrahamites. Right. But so the warning that goes along with that in Deuteronomy is that the reason those people need to be driven out is that Israel, if they don't drive them all out and settle alongside them, they will become like them. They'll start taking on the same abominable practices, the same kind of pagan worship, the same kind of things they're doing, right. Will become like them. And then they'll have to be driven out by somebody else.

[Caller]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And so what you see unfold over what are called the historical books or.

The.

The former prophets, right. In the Hebrew Bible, is that you see this happen first to Moab, then to Edom, then to Israel.

That.

Moab and Edom. Moab is really the one that it happens to first. Moab, after having settled in the land, starts to become like the people who God drove out before them. They start worshiping Chemos, the moon God. They start. Right. All of these things start happening. We see them participating in human sacrifice in the Book of Judges.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And so the. You're correct in understanding these giant men or these linemen who show up as being essentially like a type of Nephilim. Right. Like saying this is how far gone Moab was. Right. And then when you turn to the latter prophets or just the prophets, depending on how you divide the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, you find all of these oracles against Moab because Moab has become like those giant clans. And so now Moab is going to be destroyed and driven out. And then you find the same thing with Edom.

[Caller]

And then these weren't explicitly Nephilim. Right. These were Nephilim adjacent or these were Nephilim, essentially.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

This is the same kind of phenomenon as Nephilim. Yes.

[Caller]

These are like, like possession of demonic forces that create humanity to some degree.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes.

[Caller]

Okay.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Because they were practicing the same things.

[Caller]

And that's just ritualistic, like human self sacrifice. Right, Like.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right.

[Caller]

Drunkenness and through. Through incantations and rituals and things of that nature.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right, right. That they took on these things from the pagans who had been there Before, Right.

[Caller]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah.

[Caller]

So it's essentially the same thing as the Nephilim. So my Genesis 6 theory was kind of correct or mostly correct.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah, it's related. Yeah.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. I mean, like, I think because. Because people rightly get excited about giants. I think the. The most important thing to realize about giants is it's not about, like, a formula or, you know, a particular phenomenon. Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

The.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

The point is that human beings can descend into great demonic evil. How exactly they get there is not really the point. Right. Yeah. You know, it's interesting in looking up, like, this verse in.

What is this? 2nd Samuel.

Like, the word that's there is that describes these. It gets translated 2nd Samuel 23:20. It gets translated in various ways, like. Like lion, like men, valiant men. But it's something like Ariel or something like Ariel or something like that, which some translations just leave it in there untranslated. And others say, we don't know what this word means, and then you get various translations. So obviously it's one of these weird cruxes that translate.

[Caller]

I don't recall where I got it from. It's probably strong because I don't know Greek outside of what I know, which makes no sense, but you know what I mean by that.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Well, the Greek, it's interesting. If you look at the. If you look at the Septuagint, the Septuagint actually just transliterates the word.

And it makes it like the sons of Ariel or something like that. So obviously, the Greek translators are trying to figure out what the heck is going on with that word.

[Caller]

Yeah. And I think it's strong. It has like, six or seven different words. And the one that stuck out with me was God, like men. And I think it has ELO in there, if I recall, or el or something like that.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah. The L in rel is God.

[Caller]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, There we go. It was at the end. It's at the beginning. Yeah, that's right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So it's actually something like lion of God.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Lion of God, Yeah. It's a weird.

[Caller]

Right?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

It's an interesting word. Interesting word. So. All right. All right. Thank you very much for calling. And we're going to take one more call and then go to our. Our next and final break. So, Timothy, welcome to Lord of Spirits podcast.

[Caller]

Fathers, how are you tonight?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Good. How are you doing?

[Caller]

Wonderful.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Timothy or Timothy.

[Caller]

Ah, you can say it either way. As long as I'm not late for dinner.

So my question, I guess I got a little bit of a way to describe it is it's the onion of pride. Right. So what do I mean by that? You know, when I converted and on my journey, I, you know, became aware of pride, Right. It's talked about everywhere. Pride is one of the. One of the great things we need to shed ourselves up. But what I've noticed is that after I, you know, recognize that top level, right? The complete convert, not knowing anything about anything, you know, when you start to see that, it's like, oh, you take notice of it. You kind of get rid of that, work on yourself, and the next thing you know, you're starting to question everything. Is this a prideful thought? Am I thinking about this in the wrong way? What's the consciousness? You know, for example, you know, I was brought up that, you know, to say, you know, have pride in a job well done. Right. But, you know, then at the same time you say, give glory to God. So, you know, what is a healthy way to look at this to the extent without driving yourself crazy about every, you know, you know, basically the motivation behind any action. Right. Is it. Is it a prideful motivation or is it a selfless motivation?

You know, I'm not probably doing a very good job explaining this because I'm still kind of just struggling with it myself internally. But, you know, it just seems like.

It can be, you know, every time you peel a layer back, you find another one or potentially you find another one. Yeah, I'll take my. Take your answer.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I remember one time I had a conversation. This was a number of years ago, I had a conversation with a friend of mine who's a monk. And.

I can't remember how we got into the conversation, but there was.

It wasn't confession. We were just talking and walking or something like that. And I said something about, you know, I'm full of pride or whatever.

And he looks at me and goes, pride? I said, yeah, pride. He said, pride is an old man's sin.

And I remember being kind of struck by that. And he said, next thing he said was, you probably have vanity. Now, he didn't mean any of that literally, like, oh, there's no way you have pride. You have to reach a certain age. You know, that's not what he. What he meant, right. But rather that, you know, from. From his point of view, pride is, like you said, there's sort of like layers of an onion. Pride, of course, is, as the church fathers tell us and as the scripture says, is the basis for all other sins. Right. So what exactly is pride? Pride is me first.

That's what it is at its Real base is it's about me.

You know, and the. And I think what, what the monk meant by that's an old man's sin is that.

Usually it's not until we're older that we really realize that that's what we're doing.

We're not ready to admit to ourselves or anyone else that way, deep down, we actually think me first.

Because it's because, you know, in our culture, we're at least. It still seems to be suggested that that's actually bad to just say me first, me first, you know, even though there's all kinds of things that are teaching us that that's the way we should go, but we don't come out and say it because we're not pagans, and pagans would have no problem with that ethic. We at least have a Christian veneer of culture, you know, that you shouldn't. You should at least pretend to be humble, right? And usually it's not until we're older that we actually realize, you know, way deep down, I actually prefer myself over everyone else.

And usually, you know, when we're younger, it's vanity, which is, you know, not so much me first as look at me, look at me, right? It has the same basis, it says the same basis in pride, but often we don't see that root.

We have to deal with the other things too. Like, I mean, think about the other kinds of sins. Vanity definitely comes from pride, gluttony. Like, why is it that we're gluttonous? It's because we're afraid that we won't get to be first way deep down. And so since I'm afraid of death, I'm afraid of, you know, lack of satisfaction. I'm going to eat.

Same thing with lust, but in a different way, right? Like envy, you know, all of these things right now, wanting to do something. Well, we in English do use the word pride to refer to that, but I don't think that that is the same thing, even though we're using the same word for it. Like, if I say to my. One of my children, hey, I'm really proud of you.

I'm not saying, hey, I'm really me first about you, right? That's not what that means at all. It's that I feel. I. I feel good things. I'm. I. I recognize your, your virtue. I, I appreciate it. I'm. I'm happy. You know, like, that's what that means, right? I desire what is good for you.

So I think even though we use that word, Pride in English to refer to that same thing. I don't think it's this to refer to that. I don't think it's the same thing as pride in the sinful sense. Now, someone could have pride in the sinful sense about a job well done or about one of their children or whatever. But you know, if one of your children excels and you have a good feeling and you tell them that you are proud of them, that's not the same thing. That's not the same thing.

[Caller]

Right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

So I think, you know, there's a lot of wisdom, especially for those who are beginners. And even, you know, I've been orthodox for a few decades now, I still would describe myself in terms of spiritual life as a beginner. There's a lot of wisdom in the beginning virtues, which is control your mouth, control your stomach.

Right. Like, let's start there.

Control your stomach, control your mouth. And then when you get those things under control, then, you know, you start to learn, okay, there's other things I need to work on as well. Right. Control your appetite, control your desires, you know, get yourself under control.

And gradually, as a onion, we peel down and.

Eventually, God willing, we can actually really repent in some deep, powerful way. But even if all we, you know, even if we're just still beginners, God will look upon that effort and he'll be merciful. Thank God, because I'm still, as I said, I'm still.

Working on those basic things, you know, I think most of us are, right, working on those basic things like control your stomach, control your mouth.

That's why I tell people, is that that's the place to start. Like just start by being quiet and by not eating as much. And that'll take you a long way. I don't know, Father, what else you got?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah, so.

There'S a real modernist way to take what Father Andrew just said, which you shouldn't take it that way.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, please don't.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

What I mean by that is, and we've all been kind of poisoned in our ethics by Thomas Hobbes.

Who, despite rumors, was not a contemporary of John Calvin.

Hobbes, what I'm specifically referring to said that there are two springs of human action. This is one of his basic ethical principles. There are self motivated actions and there are other motivated actions. Actions and self motivated actions are always bad and other motivated actions are always good.

And because we've got that.

Bred into us in sort of the modern liberal ethic. Right. Liberalism, broadly understood. Right. We tend to go this and hyper Analysis of everything we do and our motives. And was this too tainted by sin? And if you're trying to argue for total depravity, back to Calvin again, this works really well because you could always find some something or other.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right? Yeah, but, but.

If I may just add a parenthetical here, that means that if you eat because you feel hungry, that implicates you in sin. Right?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Because that's a self motivated action. Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

It doesn't make sense. Right. So there are a couple things that I think are way overrated here. One of them is motives.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yes.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. I don't think motives are all that important unless you're trying to investigate like a crime that it will help you discover the culprit. And sincerity is completely worthless.

Right. Lots of horribly evil people are really sincere.

So here's what I mean by that. If you do the right thing.

If you do the right thing, you do the good thing. You do the thing that God commanded you to do. Right.

I don't really care if your motives were at some level tainted by xyz.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And if you do something hurtful, harmful, sinful, wicked, I don't care if you had the purest motives in the world.

I don't think God does either.

Right. So that's what I mean when I say motives aren't important. And I also don't think sincerity is important. Meaning if you do what God commanded you to do, but you don't feel like it. Right. And it's not what you want to do and your heart isn't in it, but you do it anyway. I think that makes you a moral person, not a bad person.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Whereas being sincere and authentic and doing the wrong thing does make you a bad person.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. I mean there's going to be a lot of situations in which you don't particularly, your heart isn't in it, but you do it because you know it's the right thing to do, you believe it's the right thing to do even though your heart's not in it.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

That's morality.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And Christ talks about that. Right. Christ gives us that parable of the two sons, right? Who the father asks them to go work at the vineyard and the one says, yeah, dad, I'm on it. And then doesn't. The other one is like, ah, buzz off, dad. But then he actually feels differently later and he goes out and he works. Right. And it's which one was right? Which one did the right thing? The one who actually went out and worked. Right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. Or, or like, you know, Two in the morning, when an infant wakes up screaming and the mother gets up, having gotten up six times already that night to feed that child or, you know, says to her husband, it's your turn, buddy, or whatever, whoever does that, neither one of them is going to have a heart overflowing with altruism and love for that child at that time of night. But they're going to do it because it's the right thing to do.

Right? There's no, like when, you know, earlier in the day it could be like, oh, I love this baby, I'm going to feed this baby. I love this baby so much. But when it's that time in the morning.

No one has those overwhelming feelings of sincerity and love and authenticity. But you do it because you got to do it because it's right. Even though your heart is not in it, in the sense of like your emotions or whatever. You know, like to me there's. I don't know what you call it, but like, there's a sense of principle.

Which.

I don't know if it's right to say your heart is in it when you're doing out of a sense of principle. But I think principle is better than your heart being in it in most cases, honestly.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah. And so acquiring virtues is really like going to sleep.

When you want to go to sleep, you lay down and you close your eyes and you try to steal your thoughts and basically you pretend you're asleep and then eventually you're actually asleep. Like, you cross this line at some point that you can't quite identify and you're actually asleep. So in life, if you say, what would a humble person do in this situation?

What would a kind person do in this situation? What would a loving person do in this situation? What would a person who was self controlled do in this situation? And you do that and you keep doing that. Then eventually, at some point that's kind of indeterminate, you cross the line and you actually become a humble person and a kind person.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And a loving person. It just. And you can't nail down exactly when that was when, when it became quote, unquote, sincere or whatever. But it happens, right? Like, but we all start out with.

[Caller]

Yeah, you can say fake it till you make it almost.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah, pretty much.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yes, I'm a big fan.

[Caller]

Do the action.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Caller]

I really think this ties in well to what you guys were talking about a few weeks ago when you were talking about loving your neighbor. It's not a feeling, it's an action. Like it has nothing to do with how you feel. It's how you behave. And. Yeah, these. Yeah. I love you guys. You guys are wonderful. You break things down so well.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Thank God. Thank God. All right. We're going to go ahead and take our final break and we'll be right back with this all live Q and A episode of Laura Spirits Podcast.

[Narrator]

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

People often complain that the Divine Liturgy.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Is always the same week after week.

[Narrator]

But every ritual, praise and action in the service has meaning and purpose, drawing.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

In worshippers with its hymns and prayers.

[Narrator]

And allowing ordinary people to leave the world, enter heaven for a short time. In the new book Blessed Is the Kingdom, Father Stavros Akrotirioenakis, a longtime parish priest, offers reflections on the text of the Divine Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom to help readers learn to pray the liturgy and to understand and appreciate the.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Mystery that unfolds each time it is celebrated. Available [e-mail] chat.

[Narrator]

Again, that is store.ancient faith.com. we're back now with the Lord of Spirits with Father Andrew, Stephen Damick and Father Stephen DeYoung. If you have a question, call now at 855-237-2346. That's 855-AF-RADIO.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Hey, welcome back, everybody. It's the third and final, final half of this episode of Lord Spirits Podcast. And we're doing all Q and A this time and we're live. So.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So you know that last commercial, like they're talking about the Divine Liturgy being the same week after week. Like I make different mistakes every week.

That way it's always kind of fresh.

[Caller]

Wow.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

So you do that on purpose or you just.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Well, then it would be a mistake.

But.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Way to keep.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Really, you just. If you're bored at church, it's because you don't have a bumbling priest. Just find one.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

And if you don't have one, people, Father Stephen is available.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Well, I'm not available for every church. Right. Trust me, there are a bunch of other bumblers out there. You could find one.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

It's true. There's some others. So. All right. Well, we've got Douglas on the line. Douglas has a question about some of our bread and butter type stuff, Angels and stars. Douglas, welcome to Lord of Spirits podcast.

[Caller]

Good evening, Fathers. Can y' all hear me yeah, we hear you.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

I'm confused that Father Andrew seems to be arguing that you smear stars across angels.

Maybe I'm. The metaphors I'll get confused by my.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Reference to bread and. Yeah.

[Caller]

So, fathers, my question first. I'm trying to frame this so that it makes sense, because I know that we've talked about this a lot. This has been a topic on various different episodes of the podcast. So let me confess, I know I'm running the risk of modernism really undergirding my question, so just bear with me for a little bit. Okay.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Oh, no.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

How modernism are we talking about, like Descartes, Early Modern, or are you going full Hegel?

[Caller]

No, no, it's less philosophical. It's more of just.

All right, let me ask the question and see what you guys think.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Okay, enough with the meta.

[Caller]

Yep. So I know that y' all have spoken at length about ancient near east cosmology, Jewish astrology, and various episodes, most recently the Testament, the twelve Patriarchs, and Father Stevens whole Council of God podcast recently going through Genesis. One of the things I keep thinking about is how the association of the angels with the stars and the planets or celestial bodies, like how that keeps coming up throughout scripture and through many of the episodes. What I'm trying to. Or why I just kind of want y' all discuss out a little bit, is how to better conceptually hold ancient cosmology with modern astronomy. I know the ancient world didn't have specificity to the material makeup of the planets or stars or astrophysics or anything like that. And I know that we've talked about, like how, you know, for example, Mount Olympus. You know, they could climb up to the top of the peak and see that nothing was there, yet there was still a spiritual significance that the Greeks held for that being place or the abode of the gods. So quite simply, my question is, is how should we think about the association of the stars and the planets with angels in light of recent astronomy? Are angels and fallen angels still associated with them? Is it similar to how the ancient view of lower G gods being associated with territories or peoples?

I just want to know what y' all think about that.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, I. Well, one thing I think should be pointed out is that I think it was somewhere around 300 BC or so. I'm just shooting from the hip here. I don't have it in front of me that.

You know, Greek mathematicians figure out not just that the world is round.

Which honestly is relatively obvious, if you just walk in direction of the horizon and you notice things begin to appear on the horizon that were not there before.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

A bunch of our listeners right now.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I know, I know I'm alienating all the flat earthers tuning out.

But they also have even, even used, used math to figure out and they guessed pretty close to what its actual circumference was.

You know, so that was figured out 2,300 years ago at least, and even by like then the 8th century AD.

And I'm mentioning that because this is when St. John of Damascus is writing.

He's using this three level, quote unquote, flat earth cosmology in his exact exposition of the orthodox faith.

Right? And so you might ask yourself like, okay, I mean, you know.

If you buy into the ridiculous things that some anti Christian apologists say about quote unquote religion, then of course you'll explain that by saying, look how stupid these religious people still are. They're denying the science.

Number one. There is literally no one within that timeline who's doing any of this work who is not religious. Right? You know, ancient pagan mathematicians are pagans worshiping their gods. Right? Like so, so again, like this idea that it's like, you know, that's just, just total ignorance to say that. But what you will see is that while it's fully understood.

That the world is round by at least the intellectual world and Greco Roman world, at the same time you have this multi level cosmology being used.

Right. And so why would they do that? Well, it's because these are different ways of looking at the creation that are describing it in different ways for different purposes. Right.

And.

On one level they're incompatible. Right. You can't say that heaven is above that, that the earth is where we're standing and the underworld is underneath us and literalize that. And also, you know.

Describe the cosmology that you find in a science textbook of the 21st century. Right? Like those things are not compatible on the literal level. Just, it doesn't work. Right. But at the same time, I wouldn't say, well, these are describing two completely different sets of things that have nothing to do with each other, because if they were, then why use the same concepts and words.

Between these sets of ways of talking about things?

[Caller]

Yeah, true. Yeah.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Why would you do that? You know, it doesn't make sense to do that. But the way that they're related is not in terms of a kind of empirical 3D literalistic way. So if you're trying to kind of harmonize the way, you know, ways of talking about these things, which might be useful for discussing this with Somebody you could say, as you were kind of already hinting towards. So I think you, I think you have a beat on this. Okay.

That.

There are spiritual powers who have been given stewardship over creation.

Right. And when we talk about the sort of the multi level cosmos, it's for the purpose of talking about our relationship to those spiritual powers.

[Caller]

Yep.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

You know, because it's a phenomenological, relational, spiritual model. I'm not saying that's exclusive of an empirical model. It's not. Because what is empiricism? Empiricism is about human experience as well.

Right. But just from kind of a different angle, describing other things, you know.

[Caller]

Right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

So I think the value of.

[Caller]

I.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Don'T want to use the word rehabilitating, but that's maybe recovering the value of recovering the ancient multi level cosmology is not to say, you know, no one ever landed on the moon.

That'S not the point of it at all. But rather to say, look, there's a whole world of spiritual experience that our culture has been kind of pushing off to the side that we're all still having, but we're kind of pretending like we're not having it and that that's actually a problem and we're kind of wounding ourselves by doing that. Yes, that it's a kind of knowledge that we've been shoving off and trying to pretend doesn't exist.

You know, And I mean, the reality is that when you wake up in the morning, you watch the sun go over you and then down into the other side of the, the world, that's not a fake experience, that's a real experience.

You know, and when you put the bodies of your dead loved ones into the ground and you have a sense of the underworld being beneath your feet in some way, that's not fake either.

You know.

It'S not fake. It's. It is real. You know, when, when.

We talk about God being on high or in the heavens or in the heights, we don't mean that he's at a certain altitude.

Right. That's not what we mean. But, but it's a, it's a, it's a reality that, that, that kind of language serves well, you know, so that's, that's the way that I would, that I, that I would try to talk about that stuff. Especially if you're talking to people that they're like, what are you talking about? You some kind of crazy flat Earther? You know?

[Caller]

Right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. So I don't know, Father, what do you got?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

I think part of the issue here is that.

Science.

And religious discussions on this topic are not offering different answers to the same question. They're asking fundamentally different questions.

Right. So to give an example, in. In Golden Gate park in San Francisco, there's a bench in the International Flower Garden where I propose to my wife. Okay.

You could bring a scientist there. Right. A metallurgist, because it's a metal bench or whoever. Right. You bring a botanist to look at the flowers. They can tell you all kinds of things that I don't know about the flowers and about the makeup of that bench and its construction. An engineer could come in and talk to you about all the stress points and the tensile strength, the different parts of the benchmark. Right. On and on and on. But none of them could tell you why that bench is significant to me.

They have zero access to that. They would never arrive at that.

[Caller]

Right, right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And that would include if they tried to make the assertion that that bench has no significance.

[Caller]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Because they couldn't see one. They say, well, there is none. That's also. That would be a false claim on their part because they can't conclude that based on anything. Right?

[Caller]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So the question, like. Right. Like when pagans and Jewish people are arguing about the sun and moon and stars. Right. And pagans and Christians are arguing about the sun, moon and stars. They're arguing about the significance.

Of the sun, moon and stars for human life, human existence. Right. That's what they're arguing about and talking about. They're not talking about what a star is.

A scientist could tell you it's a miasma of incandescent plasma. Right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I like.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But that is. That doesn't tell you why it's important or if it's important or if it has any relevance to anyone on Earth. Right. A planet is just. I mean, it's floating out there, but they can't comment on me. Like, they have no access to that.

Right. And so it's a fundamentally different discussion that we're having.

And so the discussion, for example, Philo. Right. The Philo quote that we've read several times on the show. Right. He's disagreeing with the pagans, saying, no, the sun, moon and stars are not gods that govern our destiny on the Earth. Right. But the God who created us, who does govern our destiny on this earth, created them also.

And can communicate things to us through them.

Right. And could and could do these things through them. Right. All of that has. That's not a different answer to some answer that science would give. Science can't Ask that question. It can't weigh in on that one.

[Caller]

Way or the other right now.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

They'll attempt to. They'll try to say, no, you guys are all wrong. There's no significance whatsoever. But that's making an assertion based on nothing.

That's saying there's no meaning. Because my method is not able to determine meaning.

Which is a logical fallacy.

Right. So I think that's the way to see it. I think. I think the way to see is that we're asking fundamental, fundamentally different questions.

[Caller]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

In the same way that when. When I'm talking to someone in confession and a physician is examining the same person.

Right. We're asking different questions.

I'm not sitting there telling them, no, all your problems are demons and sin. And the doctor's saying, no, all of your problems are purely based on biochemistry.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

At least not if you have a good doctor, because a good doctor will know that there are all kinds of things that affect your physical health that aren't physical.

[Caller]

Right, Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

You know, we're asking and answering fundamentally a different set of questions, and that means we can work together in the best of all possible worlds. We're working together to give a full picture. Right. And answer all the different kinds of questions.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Does that help?

[Caller]

Yeah, that's very interesting.

And like. Like I said, it kind of touched on a lot of things that have been spoken about, but that does make a. That does make sense as far as a good way to kind of distinguish, you know, how to even enter into the subject. So I appreciate that very much.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

All right, thank you very much for calling, Douglas. We're going to take three more calls tonight, and next up is James. So, James, welcome to Lord of Spirits podcast.

[Caller]

Hello, Father. Thank you for having me.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. What's on your mind?

[Caller]

So I had a question for both of you, and I didn't know if you guys could recommend some books on ancient history, just general books on ancient history, and then some really good church history books as well.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Just in general? Yeah. Like, that is a huge library of stuff that you're talking about. Is there any particular area or period that you're interested in or subject or.

[Caller]

Well.

Specifically, like, ancient history. So back to, like, the Bronze Age or not too long after the Bronze Age, during approximately around the time of the Exodus, and then early church history.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Okay.

All right. Well, I don't know. Father Steven's probably more the Bronze Age guy in this regard, but certainly early church history.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

I am not, however, a pervert. Anyway, go ahead.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Thank you.

For early church history, my Recommendation, I mean, so Metropolitan Callistus Ware, writing under his original name of Timothy Ware, his book the Orthodox Church has a good sort of outline, general outline of Orthodox churches history.

That's a good starting place if you have no knowledge of that at all.

My suggestion is to especially look at primary sources as much as you can or read stuff that's directly engaging with primary sources. Right. So like Eusebius's church history is good for looking at the early years of the Church. I definitely recommend reading the apostolic collection that's called the Apostolic Fathers, which has like, like the writings of Saint Ignatius of Antioch and some of those from that are basically all like late first, early mid second century.

Texts.

Saint Justin Martyr is great, Saint Irenaeus of Lyon.

A lot of those early church fathers can give you a sense of what's going on. If you're looking for secondary sources, I mean a lot of the standard names like, like Chadwick, he's a good solid historian. JND Kelly.

You know, Yaroslav Pelikan for sure, definitely Yaroslav Pelikan.

And you know, a lot of these guys have written piles and piles of stuff. They're all good solid historians writing about church history. So those are my suggestions there. Like one of the great benefits of like Pelican for instance is he's, you know, the citations of the sources he's looking at, looking at are incredibly extensive. So you can sit there and read what he's reading, which is really the place to go ultimately, you know, look at the actual sources themselves if you're able to. I mean a lot of people are not able to or they don't want to and that's cool if you just want to read some secondary source but just be aware that whatever secondary source person writing is, that's their take on the material, you know.

But a lot of these, these well regarded standard scholars are going to give you a good fair treatment. Just kind of look up what their deal is, where they're coming from so you can at least see the angle. I know Father, you know way more about ancient, ancient history than I do and what to read there.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah, the only thing I'd add to that, if by early church you mean first century, then I'd recommend NT Wright's main historical series.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

He's also got piles and piles of footnotes.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

So yes.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

In terms of the Bronze Age.

You know, really the good books are going to be about some particular civilization really. But.

If you want to get kind of an orientation, a book, I've recommended To a lot of people is Eric Klein's 1177, the Year Civilization.

Was it the year civilization collapsed, I think, or ended collapsed, something like that. But it's called 1177 Eric Klein. It's about the Bronze Age collapse. And so he does a pretty good job of summarizing sort of the Bronze Age and the level of civilization in the Bronze Age and then the different factors that led to collapsing. And he recently published a sequel.

Called after 1177.

Where he talks about the survival of the cultures like Egypt that managed to survive the Bronze Age collapse and then the new cultures that developed in the early Iron Age. Right. Like, coming out of that.

Beyond that, like I said, it's really. You're gonna be looking at good books about individual.

Individual cultures. Right. So, like, there are books on Egypt. There are books on, you know, the Babylonian empire. There are books on.

That go more in depth in those. But Eric Klein has a pretty good. If you start there, Eric Klein in the first book has a pretty good bibliography and stuff. So you can get a lot of those books on those particular civilizations from there.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. And again, depending on what you mean by early church history, I'm a big fan of Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People. That's obviously very specific, but that's very late. Yes, that text is late, but he's. He's writing about the history of Christianity.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Well, after I lose interest in the world in Britain.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I know, so sad. So.

But yeah, I mean, those are some good starting points. And I think, you know, once you start to sort of swim around in that world, you start to see what everyone's reading and what the actual texts that are being discussed are.

And you can see hopefully fairly clearly who's legit and who's not. Where you go wrong is if, like, you read one book and decide that's the end all be all for some particular subject or period, almost never the case, you know, So I don't know. Does that help?

[Caller]

Yeah, it does. I. So I have most of those resources.

I'm just looking to expand my collection and didn't know what you guys would recommend.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Oh, well, ask a general question, you're going to get general answers. What can I say?

[Caller]

Well, that's. That's fair and. And that's. I just kind of an overview of. Of those.

Specific timelines and not really looking for anything too in depth because I want to take a general view and then dig a little bit deeper into those specific times.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. Good. Well, happy reading.

[Caller]

All right, well, thank you so Much, Father. You have a great evening.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

You too. All right, we've got Justin.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

I knew I should have learned to read.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

You should have learned to read, Father. I mean, you smartest. You are.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

When am I going to use this? I thought, you know.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

So. Oh, do we.

Oh, we've. We had a caller drop off, but it looks like we got one coming in.

Yeah, we've got our old friend, I think.

Yeah, we've got our old friend Samuel from Virginia, who's called us many, many times. So I'm surprised Samuel has anything left to ask us. So, Samuel, Lord of Spirits podcast.

[Caller]

Well, hi.

Since last time I randomly appeared, I've been crucified. Finally.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Hey, congratulations.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

My under.

[Caller]

I have a question about giants and apocryphal tests.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Oh, okay. You get charismated in what you want to know about giants and apocryphal texts.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Suddenly, I mean, it's on topic. We can't say it's not on topic. It's true.

[Caller]

Well, I was in church this weekend. I was hearing about how St. Titus and how there's an apocryphal text that says that he's a descendant of King Minos. And would. Could that. That apocryphal text be saying that this was a redemption of the families of the giants or something like that?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I don't know, Father. What do you know?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Well, so.

The short answer is, yes, that is how I would read that. Because, of course, King Minos was the founder of Minoan civilization, which was on Crete, which was the Proto Crete civilization. St. Titus is sent to be the bishop of Crete. Right. And is. Is sort of then instrumental as, you know, the bishop of Crete. And so I think that tradition was probably.

Aimed at. Right. So the. The establishers of the pagan civilization of Crete kind of have their people redeemed by.

Their descendant.

Right.

I think that's probably the connection there.

So, again, yes.

There'S not. I mean.

I don't know that Titus even was a Cretan. Right. I mean, he might have taken it personally when St. Paul said all cretins are liars. And you should remember that.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

He was just quoting a saying.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah, he says it's true.

But that, I mean, compared to the things that, like Plato said about Cree, that's nice saying they're all liars. He says something I don't think even I could get away with saying on AFR's airwaves, even in Greek, probably.

But yeah. So, I mean, I think it's a stretch that that's accurate. Right. But that makes it even more so that the reason for putting that forward in an apocryphal text would be to try to make this connection about the redemption again of sort of Crete as nation in the biblical sense.

Right. That this nation gets sort of discipled. Right. In terms of the great commission by St. Titus. Right. And is sort of redeemed in that way.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

What do you think, Samuel?

[Caller]

Oh, that makes sense.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

All righty. All right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Do you have any wrestling questions?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, this is an all wrestling.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

No, we'll just bookend the show with wrestling questions.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Well.

You don't have to come up with something if you don't already have something on the tip of your tongue. It's okay.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

We could segue to Andre the Giant.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

That would be an easy segue.

[Caller]

I know about jiu jitsu and sumo wrestling, but not any kind of wrestling to ask questions about.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Oh, that's okay. All right, well, thanks for trying anyway. Maybe next time do some research. Next time, Samuel. I mean, come on, we know you're going to call back again so I.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Can make this work. He brought up sumo wrestling. Little known wrestling fact. Yokozuna not only was not really a sumo wrestler, was Samoan, was not even Japanese.

There you go.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

My stars. All right, thank you. Thank you very much for calling. Sammy. We have one more caller and then we're going to call it a night, and that is Kaden. Kaden, you are the final caller on this all live Q and A episode of the Lord of Spirits podcast. Welcome.

[Caller]

Thank you. Thank you. Fathers. How are you?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Good. How are you?

[Caller]

I'm doing good. My question was kind of relating back to something touched on in previous episodes and actually a previous caller.

Earlier in this. In this episode, which is. So me and my wife are both becoming catechumens at our local parish.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Awesome.

[Caller]

And with the blessing of our priest, I have an icon corner set up. And I'm trying to, like, really get into prayer more in an orthodox mindset, but it's not at all, you know, what I was used to as a Protestant.

Praying for. I don't know, it's just. It's completely different the way that the east praise. And so my priest said something to me, which was he suggested we get an icon corner because we pray, like Orthodox. And I am kind of like, I pray from a prayer book. Like, I'm. I feel like I don't. I don't know how to authentically pray. And so. So my question is, is it just like, you know, when it comes to loving your neighbor or fake it till you make it thing, or am I looking at prayer in the wrong way? Is it. Is it wrong to. When I have a list of things that I pray, I go through my prayer book and find a specific prayer that helps with those things.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

This is a good question.

The thought that immediately came to me first was a. I don't know if it was an article or it was like a transcription of a talk or something like that. From. There's a modern holy elder named Elder Emilianos, who was the abbot of Simonopetra Monastery in Mount Athos. He died just two or three years ago, as I recall.

And my own father confessor, actually.

Father Emilianos, was his spiritual father for a while.

Anyway. In this article, he talks about. He uses two different Greek words to talk about prayer. And this is, again, as with so many things, this is just one way of talking about it, right? This is not the way. And so he talks about the word. The Greek words he uses, he uses pros, fk and fk, which, as you can hear, are related to each other.

So prosef key. I'm not going to pull the etymological fallacy, but basically, that's the kind of prayer where you ask for something, okay? Whether it's, you know, mercy or health or healing or, you know, whatever it might be. And then FKI is this sort of idea of abiding in God.

Okay?

And both are prayer. But he clearly says that the latter is.

Deeper or higher, depending on how you want to think about it, but greater. Right.

And is usually not attainable at first, okay?

So the beginning of the life of prayer is to ask God for things, and we ask him for good things.

I mean, this is in keeping with the scriptures you don't have because you don't ask, ask in my name, right? This sense of asking, and.

At least in terms of the actual text of our liturgical prayers, the prayers that are in the prayer book, this is almost all aimed at that, right? Asking God for things. Almost all of it is aimed at that. So clearly.

This is normal stuff. This is baseline. Like, this is what we should be doing. And especially since you're new and I don't know what your religious background before was, but evangelical, evangelical. So you're probably not used to using a prayer book. You're not used to standing in front of icons. You're not used to looking up a prayer for this thing or that thing, right? That's all relatively new to you.

And actually, if you're interested in this kind of from an intellectual and historical point of view, there's a good book called Rituals of Spontaneity by Lori Branch, who is a friend of mine. This was her doctoral dissertation and she tracked how historically it came to be within the English language world that being spontaneous became regarded as authentic religion.

Which was an innovation at the time.

[Caller]

I think that's what I struggle with the most, is I feel like I'm not being authentic when I pray now.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Because it's not spontaneous. Yes. Yeah. So that is a historical development. Like it's only just a few hundred years ago that there came to be this widespread idea that spontaneous equals authentic.

Right.

And I get it. I mean, I'm from an evangelical background myself. Right? So I get it. But here's the thing. I think that'll help you bridge that gap. Okay.

Love songs are way better if someone wrote them beforehand.

Refined them, practiced them and then delivered them, versus some simply trying to spontaneously come up with something. Right. Like you might be able to spontaneously something approaching poetry, but forget spontaneously coming up with something approaching a good love song. Like almost no one can do that. I'm sure there's people out there that can do that, but it's pretty rare. It takes work. Right. And so.

Why would we think that prayer shouldn't take work of that kind? Right. I think we need to question the idea that spontaneity equals authenticity.

Because it's not obvious from.

The historical point of view. Again, it's a development. And like I said, I recommend Dr. Branch's book Rituals of Spontaneity if you're interested in tracking that and taking it apart. I mean, it's an academic treatment, so that's the kind of book that it is. But it's good. It really shows how this is the case.

But most of humanity, for most of history of any religion, has regarded pre written prayers as what constitutes the norms and authenticity of religion.

And would it be inauthentic to read one of the Psalms as a prayer to God? It's in the scriptures. It's not inauthentic. That is the prayer book of ancient Israel, the Psalter. And it is continued to be the prayer book of the church.

Right. And it's clear from looking at the Psalms, even if you're just reading in translation, that this has been worked over, meaning that David or whoever wrote the psalm, worked on it and practiced it and edited.

Was not mere spontaneity.

It might have, it's possible, but not likely that it would have been spontaneous one time, but someone then wrote it down and then it was repeated and that wasn't spontaneous. When it got repeated that first time, that's not spontaneous. Writing it down, that's not spontaneous. You know.

When Christ said pray like this and then gave our Father who art. I mean, that's a formula. In fact, actually, that prayer, in many ways, the shape of that prayer forms the form, the formulaic basis of a lot of the prayers of the church.

So all of that is there. And I can tell you that, number one, the quest for authenticity, I think, is.

What do you get out of that exactly? What are you going for there? When do you know that you've arrived? Aha, now I am authentic. I think it's a problematic quest to begin with. But if the question is, what is real? Are you actually doing it?

[Caller]

It.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

When you ask God for something, you're asking God for something. You know.

The fact that you're reading the words of a saint in doing so doesn't mean you're not doing it. You are doing it.

Right. Again, remember the love songs? The best love songs are definitely not spontaneous.

Spontaneous love songs might well be hilarious, but probably not, not really good in terms of being truly a love song.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I mean, Song of Songs is incredibly deep, powerful.

Poetry in the Old Testament is clearly not spontaneous. You know, it has all kinds of poetic form. Like this is being made to conform to certain kinds of poetic norms. This is just flow out of nowhere. Right. So.

Yeah, I think, you know, part of the point of using the forms that the church has established in our prayer. And I should say, by the way, just as a parenthetical aside, there's nothing wrong with standing in front of your icons and actually saying, God, give me, please give me patience for today and not having read that prayer from a book, looking for a prayer that says prayer for patience. You know, like, it's okay. It's okay to just say to God whatever your is on your mind. Right. But if that is the only kind of prayer that you do, then then the limits of your imagination and your desires are what are going to shape your heart in terms of ability to pray. So that's, that's. That then leads me to my larger point, which is we pray the prayers of the saints so that we can actually learn how to pray.

Because frankly, they're way more experienced at it than we are.

You know, so it might not.

[Caller]

That does make sense.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. It might not like, feel right or feel authentic, whatever. Right. But it's like when you're learning how to do how to drive a car or play a musical instrument or whatever, like it's Initially, it's going to feel kind of awkward and weird, but you have to learn those norms and those rules and then you can really go.

You know, then you can really go.

And so it's like learning how to speak or how to speak a new language. You have to learn the building blocks, the tools, the grammar, the structures, the rules, and then you can do something with that.

Right?

And in many cases.

As a gift from God, people can ascend to the level where they're simply abiding in him and actually.

Have what is sometimes called wordless prayer. But that is a gift from God. You don't, like, try to make it happen. Okay. Most people who are at that place have done a whole lot of the asking God for stuff and practicing patience and practicing fasting and practicing alms, giving.

Before they ever get to that, that point, right? And I should say, right, like that kind of abiding prayer in God does not equal salvation. It's related, right? It's not like, oh, I've never achieved this wordless prayer in this life, Therefore, oh, no, I'm not going to make. That's not the point. It's not the point. Whatever God gives, that is for your salvation.

Whatever God gives, whatever gift he gives you in terms of your ability to pray, that is for your salvation. And at this point it sounds like the gift is your prayer book, but it's perfectly okay again to just say, oh, God, give me strength. You know, there's nothing wrong with that. Nothing wrong with that. I often, I found like.

The quote unquote, spontaneous prayers that I use the most often are actually used often. A line from the Psalms. From the Psalms. You know, there's all kinds of stuff in there. But you know, it's okay to just simply talk to God and say whatever is on your heart. But you'd also need to be shaped by the norms of prayer in the church, right? And the more that you do it, the more that you'll find your heart opened up. And eventually, like you memorize some psalms, eventually when you want to turn to God and really turn to him, you'll find that those are the words that come to mind, you know, that they actually plumb depths that you didn't even think about.

Because.

You didn't know it, you didn't experience it.

You hadn't been there, you know, so we have a lot of learning to do in terms of, of how to pray. And in many ways that's what the Christian life is about. It's about learning how to pray, how to be With God, because that's what prayer is about, is being with God. Like we start out asking him for things. And I shouldn't say, I say we start out, we never stop doing that. But that's the first level. We go because we need something and then eventually we go because we feel grateful. Right. And then eventually we go because we simply want to be with him. But that doesn't mean that the earlier levels, we stop doing that. But there is a kind of progression over time, I've noticed. So I hope that makes some sense. I know that kind of is kind of a long.

Monologue, but that's.

[Caller]

No. Yeah. I really appreciate you guys taking my call.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. Yeah. Father Stephen, any final words for our.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Oh.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Oh, yeah. Wake up, Father Stephen. Come on. Come on. You're in central time zone. You should be.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

It's dul tones, your dulcet tones.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I know.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

I have load lilted me off to dreamland.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Caller]

It's almost 9:30 here in Maryland.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

No, the, the only thing I'd add is that again, sincerity is worthless and.

Pol Pot super sincere about all his beliefs.

But.

Also again, on a meta level. Right. Like there's an element in the evangelical world where worship and prayer as part of worship is about self expression.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And God doesn't need our self expression. He. He knows.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Like he knows what you think and how you feel and who you are. Better. Better than you do. He knows me better than I do.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So me expressing myself to him.

Doesn'T accomplish a lot.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And so part of having prayer in a structured form and worship that's very much a structured form, is that that structure then allows it to mold and shape and change, meaning me.

Right. And that, you know, so that, that not just the way I pray conforms to the ways one should pray, but that the way I think about things.

The way I think about the things that I face during the day that are framed by my morning and evening prayers. Right. Is shaped by those prayers.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

The way I process things that happen to me are shaped by those prayers. Right. Because the prayers are sort of shaping me.

[Caller]

Yeah. I think from my background, it's hard. It has been a hard transition because. Well, I've really enjoyed the. I've listened to a couple of your podcasts today while cutting my grass where. But you speak on like love, not meaning what it does in the west to the people it did in the East. Like growing up, I was always taught, you know, you have to love Jesus like, like you are falling in love with him. And I don't. I never really understood how to do that. But, like, I guess it makes more sense if sincerity is almost irrelevant. And, you know, I am loving God by trusting and obeying what he says to do.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

I mean, are you married?

[Caller]

I am. Yes.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Well, I won't make. I won't make you admit this. Right. But I'm willing to bet that not every moment of your marriage has been filled with the same feelings of love and adoration toward your beautiful wife that you had, say, on your wedding day.

[Caller]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

I won't make you admit it, but.

[Caller]

I think we can both agree to it.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Some marriages, that is not true. Right. But what makes you a married man and what makes it a good marriage and what makes you a faithful husband is the fact that in the moments when you are feeling that, in the moments when you're feeling less of that, in a dark moment where you're not really feeling that at all, you're still a faithful husband.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And you're still loving her by doing the things that a faithful husband does.

[Caller]

Okay.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. Even if they're not quote, unquote, authentic in that moment.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. I mean, in the scripture, the Lord does not say, in everything, feel thankful. He says, in everything, give thanks.

Right. And also, he doesn't say, if you love me, you're going to feel it deep down. He says, if you love me, you will keep my commandments.

Right. That it's. It's about what you do. It's about what you do.

That's. That's really what it comes down to. Yeah.

[Caller]

All right, well, thank you very much, fathers. I appreciate it again that you took my call. Felt very nervous and excited to finally get to call in.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Well, we're happy that you called. I hope you feel better now that it's all over.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Any. Any wrestling questions?

[Caller]

Oh, man, I have so many that I could go completely off topic and.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Keep putting them on the spot. Father Stephen.

[Caller]

Geez.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Is there a difference between wrestling and wrestling?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Rule of three, we got to bring up. We got to do it a third time, right? Like.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Okay, okay. Yeah.

[Caller]

Yeah. Okay. One. One random question. Does it matter which. What. What scent of incense I burn at at specific times?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

That's not a wrestling question.

[Caller]

Sure it is.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

I would burn pure frankincense while you're watching Monday Night Raw on USA Now.

[Caller]

Okay, got it. Okay.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Okay.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

I made it a wrestling question.

[Caller]

More of a mer moment or.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Well, you know, it depends on how the pay per view's going. You know, there's. There's other there's other things, other times.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

But.

[Caller]

Thank you very much.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

A boolean, a certain je ne sais quoi about Raw on Monday nights.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

And so wow, went full Norman.

All right, thank you, Kaden, for calling.

[Caller]

Not a problem. Well, thank you very much.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

You're welcome. All right, everybody, that's our show for tonight. Thank you very much for listening. If you didn't happen to get to through to us live this time around, we'd still like to hear from you. You can email us@lordofspiritsand ancientfaith.com you can message us on our Facebook page, send smoke signals, or leave us a [e-mail] LordOfSpirits and if you have basic questions about Orthodox Christianity or you need need help finding a parish, head over to orthodoxintro.org and join us for a live.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Broadcast on the second and fourth Thursdays of the month at 7pm Eastern, 4pm Pacific. I never made it as a wise man. I couldn't cut it as a poor man stealing.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

This is how you remind me. If you're on Facebook, follow our page, join our discussion group, leave reviews and ratings everywhere, but most importantly, please share this show with your friends and you know, your enemies too.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And finally, be sure to go to ancientfaith.com support and help make sure we and lots of other AFR podcasters stay on the air. I'm tired of living like a blind man. I'm sick of sight without a sense of feeling.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Thank you, good night and may God bless you and your 90s rock and roll.

[Narrator]

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.