Pantheon and Pandemonium XVIII Live Q&A August 2025

Summary

The Lord of Spirits Podcast

Episode: Pantheon and Pandemonium XVIII Live Q&A (Ep. 122)

Hosts: Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick & Fr. Stephen De Young
Date: August 29, 2025
Main Theme:
A wide-ranging live Q&A focused on the union of the seen and unseen—spirits, angels, demons, traditions, and daily life—within Orthodox Christian understanding.

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Overview

This live Q&A episode of The Lord of Spirits offers an engaging, sometimes humorous, and highly insightful exploration of questions from listeners about the spiritual world as seen in the Orthodox tradition. The topics range from the fate of animal souls and Old Testament covenants, to nuances of Orthodox liturgical calendars, contemporary pop culture's spiritual underpinnings, intricate biblical passages, and deep doctrinal divides such as Chalcedon. In classic style, Fr. Andrew and Fr. Stephen answer questions with a blend of scholarship, pastoral guidance, and banter.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Opening & Banter (00:00–09:00)

• Fr. Andrew opens with a reading from First Enoch, highlighting the longing for a spiritual reality beyond "secular materialism."
• Light-hearted banter around Fr. Andrew's birthday, joining the "AARP generation," and the perks (like yelling at clouds).
• Jovial introductions—establishing the relationship and playful rapport between the hosts.

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2. Pop Culture and Demonology: K-Pop Demon Hunters (05:26–08:17, 84:17–87:23)

• Discussion about K Pop Demon Hunters—a hit Netflix film featuring a K-pop band fighting demons and soul-sucking hellmouths.
• Fr. Andrew is (begrudgingly) persuaded by his wife and friends to watch, only to discover "the soundtrack’s kind of a banger."
• This leads to a broader comment on finding spiritual themes in contemporary media:

  “If you do ever find it in your heart to watch this film...it’s almost like a Lord of Spirits fan decided to write a movie about K Pop...that hunts demons and is trying to avoid people getting their souls sucked into a hell mouth...that is literally what the plot is about.” —Fr. Andrew (05:51)

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3. Q&A: Biblical Covenants and their Fulfillment

The Covenant with Phinehas

(09:36–14:53)

• Listener Dan asks about "the eternal covenant" with Phinehas (Numbers 25) and its fate.
• Fr. Stephen:
  • The high priesthood gets reckoned through Phinehas, then through Zadok, with the expectation it’ll serve in Ezekiel’s temple (understood as Christ himself per St. John).
  • The figure who fulfills this is St. John the Forerunner (John the Baptist) (13:17).

  "The temple in Ezekiel is actually Christ himself...who is the descendant of Levi, Phinehas, Zadok, who serves Christ? As St. Luke sets up...it’s St. John the Forerunner." —Fr. Stephen (13:08)

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4. Q&A: Animal Souls and the Afterlife

(15:40–22:19)

• Listener Mark asks if animal souls persist after death.
• Fr. Andrew: Orthodox tradition posits animals have souls (St. Gregory Palamas), but fundamentally different souls from humans.
• Salvation is resurrection into new creation, not mere existence after death. There’s a Scriptural expectation of animals in the New Creation, but not necessarily your pet.
• Fr. Stephen introduces a speculative point:
  • Domesticated animals, being “humanized” through human love, might, hypothetically, return in the resurrection.
  • “If you wanted to argue that...at least some animals...through the love of humans...are resurrected, I wouldn’t be grumpy about it.” (21:12)

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5. Q&A: Demon Reactions vs. Devil's Reaction to Christ

(23:11–29:40)

• Rory asks why demons immediately recognize and fear Christ, but the devil doesn’t (e.g., he tempts Christ; Gospel of Nicodemus).
• Fr. Andrew:
  • Demons know who Jesus is but not what he’s here to accomplish. Patristic tradition often portrays Christ as “bait” for the devil (Chrysostom: “Hell took a body and met God”).
• Fr. Stephen:
  • Notes a distinction between types—demons in the Synoptic Gospels are often the spirits of dead Nephilim; the devil is a fallen seraph—so different behaviors/reactions make sense.

  “Whereas the devil is a fundamentally different type of creature—he’s a seraph...there’s a kind of different relationship.” —Fr. Stephen (28:47)

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6. Q&A: Elemental Spirits & Galatians 4

(32:08–37:39)

• Jonathan in Virginia asks if Paul’s “elemental spirits” (stoicheia) in Galatians 4 refers to titanic gods or spiritual teachers.
• Fr. Stephen:
  • Paul speaks to Gentiles from their own narrative (Acts 17, with reference to Plato et al.): at Babel, humanity was set under the “lesser gods” as shepherds, but through Christ, the Most High is calling all nations back.
  • There’s a “spermatikos logos”—seeds of truth among Gentile religions—Paul uses to draw Gentiles to Christ.

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7. Q&A: Prayer, Exorcism & God's Will vs. Charismatic Practice

(38:27–45:49)

• Lisa asks about the "authority" to renounce the devil in prayer (esp. for healing), referencing charismatic practices.
• Fr. Andrew:
  • Orthodox practice is to pray for protection, not to wield words as “magic spells.” Demonic influence most often comes from persistent sin:

  “You can renounce Satan at baptism, but if you go back to your sin, you can bring that demonic activity right back.”

• Fr. Stephen:
  • Cautions against reading all tragedy as a victory for the devil. Even apparent evil fits within God’s economy, as in the story of Job; all is permitted for a salvific purpose, not as punishment:

  “Even when the worst from our perspective happens, God has some good purpose in it...He can bring good even out of that.” (44:18)

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8. Q&A: Soul, Spirit, and Consciousness

(49:11–59:41)

• Paul from Texas wrestles with the soul/spirit distinction: “Why isn’t consciousness located in the soul?”
• Fr. Andrew:
  • The soul is the life of the body; the spirit is the animating force (can include soul, but also other influences: angels, demons, etc.).
• Fr. Stephen:
  • Spirit is always collective consciousness—your “I” is built atop a hodgepodge of subordinate mechanisms (heart, bacteria, brain stems, etc.).
  • “Anything that has a soul has some level of consciousness...spirit brings with it volition and communication.”

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9. Q&A: Orthodox Calendar Debate

(60:40–73:33)

• Marcion from Nevada asks: “Should I use the Old Calendar or the New Calendar? Are visions about one or the other real or authoritative?”
• Fr. Andrew:
  • Historically, variety in calendars was normal in the Christian East (different month names, dating systems, etc. for Copts, Armenians, etc.)
  • Real issue is “Do what your bishop sets as the calendar”—that’s what guarantees ecclesial unity.

  “The overarching question isn’t which calendar you’re on, but that you are on the calendar your bishop is administering for you.”

• Fr. Stephen:
  • Yes, the calendar is weighty, but God holds the bishops to account for these decisions. We should trust and follow, not make salvation hinge on this.

  "You just have to follow the calendar your local Orthodox church is following. If there's a problem, God will deal with the bishop about that." (73:13)

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10. Q&A: Origins of Sacrifice

(75:00–83:38)

• Joey asks: Did God instruct Cain and Abel on how to sacrifice? Are pagan sacrifices distortions of heavenly worship?
• Consensus: The text doesn’t record God instructing Cain and Abel; sacrifice is “in the structure of creation.” God’s Torah commandments (first fruits, Sabbath, etc.) are "built into the world," merely made explicit in the Torah.
• Pagan sacrifices reflect true insights but are distortions, hence some overlap but also corruption.

  "A good lie contains some level of truth." —Fr. Stephen (82:49)

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11. Q&A: Mercy, Judgment, and ‘Getting Away With It’

(88:59–97:07)

• Nathan from Kentucky observes: Many people feel “bad guys” get away with things—not out of atheism but thinking “God is a big softy.”
• Fr. Stephen:
  • True repentance isn’t “saying sorry and getting off the hook.” David is the icon—he repents, suffers consequences, but also achieves reconciliation with God because he takes total responsibility ("mans up"). We should desire and pray for the repentance of others, not their destruction.

  “By the time David gets to the Day of Judgment, it's not that he didn't have any sin...but it was all dealt with. That's why he's the image of repentance.”

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12. Q&A: Council of Jerusalem—Why 'Blood' and 'Strangled'?

(98:36–106:02)

• Ian from Mississippi: Why does Acts 15 (Council of Jerusalem) add “abstain from blood and food strangled” to Christian Gentiles?
• Fr. Stephen:
  • Forbidding blood consumption traces back to Noah (Genesis 9), as a limit on human predation/cannibalism.
  • Sacrifice and eating are tied: animal life/blood isn’t for human consumption but for atonement. The Eucharist is the unique exception, because Christ voluntarily offers himself.

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13. Q&A: Paying Taxes & Secular Authority

(111:06–117:06)

• Christian from Australia: “Is it moral to pay taxes if government uses the money for evil?”
• Fr. Stephen:
  • Jesus relativized the value of money: "Give to Caesar what's Caesar's, to God what's God's—everything is God's."
  • Christians must pay taxes honestly, though not more than needed, even if the state does evil; use democratic means to influence justly.

  "You got to pay your taxes." (117:06)

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14. Q&A: Joshua’s Long Day—"Sun Stands Still"

(120:58–125:15)

• Jennifer from North Carolina: What does “the sun stood still” (Joshua 10) mean in an Orthodox reading?
• Fr. Stephen:
  • Ancient view: Created elements (sun, moon, stars) are spiritual beings who can, under God’s direction, participate in His warfare.
  • Phenomenon is a sign—the sun cooperates with Israel, part of the broader theme of creation joining God against evil.

  "It's God making war against them. Israel is part of God's army, but so is the sun, so is the wind..." (124:28)

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15. Q&A: Liturgical Time and Ancient Clocks

(125:30–131:04)

• Jennifer (continued): How did ancient people handle time, especially with seasonal changes?
• Fr. Andrew:
  • Time reckoning was relative (hours from sunrise to sunset), not clock-based.
  • Old liturgical books (Horologion) reflect changing “hours” per season/month.
  • Ancient society marked events by the sun’s position, not standardized hours.

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16. Q&A: America, Saints and “Sanctifying the Land”

(132:22–141:09)

• Joe from Oklahoma: To cure “Americanism,” do we need more saints buried here, as the ancient Church did with pagan sites?
• Fr. Andrew:
  • Yes, sanctified ground matters—but living like saints is the first step.

  “How do you change your country? You change it by making it holy... If just 10 of us lived the Christian life for real in this city, we would light the place on fire.” (135:24)

• Fr. Stephen:
  • Burying saints comes after making saints; culture war is less effective than actual conversion and sanctification.

  "Your will has been frustrated...you're looking for a way to grab the mechanisms of power and do that. But it is of no spiritual benefit to anyone..." (139:45)

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17. Q&A: Benjamite Wives in Judges 21

(141:45–145:40)

• Anosh from Wisconsin: What’s the point of the dark story about the Benjamite wives?
• Both: Judges arcs downward into chaos and intra-Israelite violence; stories late in the book (like Judges 21) illustrate the depth of civilizational and covenantal breakdown.

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18. Q&A: Neanderthals and the Image of God

(147:52–153:19)

• Scott from Grand Rapids: If some of us have Neanderthal DNA, did Neanderthals bear the image of God?
• Fr. Stephen:
  • “Everything in genus homo is a human.” Neanderthals were human, they buried dead, made art, had souls.

  “Our ancestors in Doggerland were humans, meaning they’re made in the image of God.” (152:06)

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19. Q&A: Leviticus 12—Purification After Childbirth

(172:58–183:52)

• Tim from Minnesota: Why is purification longer after daughters than after sons?
• Fr. Stephen:
  • Not punitive. Ancient societies had gendered spheres; the practice corresponds to forming stronger bonds between mother/daughter vs. mother/son, marking different socialization trajectories.

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20. Q&A: Chalcedonian/Non-Chalcedonian Divide

(184:44–194:20)

• Samuel (Washington): Is the break between Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox a theological difference or just expression?
• Both:
  • Goal: Communion on the basis of shared faith.
  • Real obstacles: significant Christological variation among Oriental Orthodox churches and saints anathematized on both sides; also deep historical memory of persecution complicates dialogue.

  “Step one is going to be...those [internal Coptic] divisions have to be resolved...and hopefully in a positive way...” —Fr. Stephen (193:45)

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Notable Quotes & Noteworthy Comments

• “Hell took a body and met God.” —St. John Chrysostom, quoted by Fr. Andrew (25:44)
• “You just have to follow the calendar your local Orthodox Church is following. If there's a problem with that calendar...God will deal with the bishop about that. You don't have to worry about it.” —Fr. Stephen (73:13)
• “If just 10 of us lived the Christian life for real in this city, we would light the place on fire.” —Fr. Andrew, paraphrasing St. John Chrysostom (135:24)
• “By the time David gets to the Day of Judgment, it's not that he didn't have any sin...but it was all dealt with. That's why he's the image of repentance.” —Fr. Stephen (95:04)

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Memorable Moments & Humor

• “Monster mashers. I’m not sure if we’ve used that one before.” —Fr. Andrew (02:27)
• Banter about the K-Pop Demon Hunters movie including crowd-sourced recommendations, skepticism, then surprising delight.
• Canadian wrestling and Bret Hart/Stu Hart references (30:00–31:51).
• Ongoing teasing about being Dutch, joining the AARP, and “Pentagenarian Class.”
• “Pith is your byword.” —on keeping jingles short for Samuel from Virginia (155:34)
• Fr. Stephen: “It was ineffable. It could not be effed.” — On meeting William Shatner (161:33)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

| Time | Content | |------|---------| | 00:00–09:00 | Introduction, hosts' banter, birthday jokes, movie talk (K-Pop Demon Hunters) | | 09:36–14:53 | Covenant with Phinehas, St. John as fulfillment | | 15:40–22:19 | Animal souls, afterlife, pets in resurrection | | 23:11–29:40 | Demons’ vs Satan’s reaction to Christ | | 32:08–37:39 | Elemental spirits in Galatians 4 | | 38:27–45:49 | Spiritual warfare, praying against the devil, charismatic trends | | 49:11–59:41 | Soul vs. spirit vs. consciousness | | 60:40–73:33 | Orthodox calendar (Old/New); variety and practical guidance | | 75:00–83:38 | Sacrifice origins, pagan parallels | | 88:59–97:07 | Mercy & accountability, "getting away with it" | | 98:36–106:02 | Council of Jerusalem’s bans (blood, strangled, etc.) | | 111:06–117:06 | Taxes, Caesar, public authority | | 120:58–125:15 | Joshua’s long day, sun stands still | | 125:30–131:04 | Daylight savings, ancient reckoning of hours | | 132:22–141:09 | Saints’ relics sanctifying America | | 141:45–145:40 | Benjamite wives story—Judges as decline narrative | | 147:52–153:19 | Neanderthals, image of God in archaic humans | | 172:58–183:52 | Leviticus 12, purity after childbirth| | 184:44–194:20 | Chalcedon, “quick” question on reunion |

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Conclusion

A spirited, funny, and theologically rich Q&A that demonstrates the breadth of Orthodox thought as it meets classic biblical exegesis, contemporary challenges, and personal, practical concerns. Whether tackling ancient controversies or helping callers process grief and suffering, Fr. Andrew and Fr. Stephen model wisdom, humility, and the pastoral heart of Orthodox Christianity.

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For full details, visit Ancient Faith Radio or the Lord of Spirits podcast archive.

Transcript

[A]

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

[B]

Hey, good evening.

[C]

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

[B]

Oh, okay. Sorry, you gotta go do something or.

[C]

No, no. It is past 7pm where you are.

[B]

That is true. 701.

[C]

So, as the sun sinks slowly in the west, that means, liturgically speaking, it is now your birthday.

[B]

Oh, no.

[C]

And this is not just any anniversary of your natal day. This is the one that makes you eligible to join aarp.

[B]

Are you my sponsor? Is that what's going on here?

[C]

No, not aa, the aarp.

You may need to get one of those horns for your ear. I don't think you heard me correctly.

But you have many good things to look forward to in the handful of years left to you, like yelling at clouds and telling kids to get off your lawn. So, congratulations.

[B]

Thank you so very much.

[C]

My underpants to you, sir.

[B]

Happy to join you in the Pentagenarian.

Class.

[C]

Now you can go ahead with your intro.

[B]

Yeah, I'm fully discombobulated now because I was all pent up to wait until tomorrow to have to deal with any of that. But here we are, I guess, at Greenwich.

[C]

Meantime, there was evening and there was morning. The first day.

[B]

Yeah, it's true.

Yes. Well, good evening. Giant killers, dragon slayers, monster mashers. I'm not sure if you've ever done that one before. You are listening to the Lord of Spirits podcast. It's episode 122. And my co host, Father Stephen DeYoung, he who has seen the face of Shatner, is with me, straight from the swamp in Lafayette, Louisiana. And I'm Father Andrew Stephen Damick in Emmaus, Pennsylvania, perched precariously atop the arcane tower of podcasting, hovering dozens of stories as it were, above a disused gateway to the underworld. And this is an all live, all Q and A episode. And if you, dear listener, are listening to us live, you can call us at 855-237-2346 and talk to us. And Mike, Honey Glazed Ham Degan is going to be taking those calls. He'll finally have to work for a living. Normally we just let him sit for three and a half hours.

[C]

And is there a little bit of brown sugar in that glaze?

[B]

Take a snooze.

First, a word from our sponsor. So Lord of Spirits podcast is brought to you by the Antiochian Men. This November 5th through 8th, 2025, you can join them in Temple Georgia for their second annual Antiochian Men conference and retreat, which is titled no Man Left Behind Brotherhood as a Path to Salvation. This event is a unique blend of spiritual formation, hands on challenges and real brotherhood. With talks from Father Barnabas Powell, Father Hans Jacobs E. Father Michael Butler, and our very own Father Stephen DeYoung.

[C]

Indeed.

[B]

Registration.

Registration has been expanded. This is new from last time. Expanded to include teen boys ages 13 and older, provided that they are accompanied by and lodge with their parent or legal guardian. So early bird Registration is just $275, which includes three nights and nine meals and should appeal to all of the cheapskate Dutch people in our audience. Does it appeal to you, Father Stephen?

[C]

It is appealing, of course, I, I'm speaking. So I get to go for free.

[B]

That's as cheap as it gets.

[C]

Which is even better. Cheap as free is the way to go. But yes, now unlike the Chappelle show, you can bring your kids, at least some of them the teenage male ones.

[B]

Yeah.

So yeah, we are doing an all call in show. But as Mike frantically is manning the call board.

I actually have a question for you myself, Father Stephen, because I want to test. I mean normally it is the case and all of our listeners know there were any trend, any, any newfangled thing, any hot item is concerned that you are always way, way ahead of me, usually years ahead of me. And so I just want to.

[C]

What I think it is, this is the exception. But go ahead.

[B]

It might. I don't know. I'm gonna just, I'm gonna ask this question. I just want to know because. Because I don't know. I just have to know. It's one of those things you just have to know.

[C]

So.

[B]

So have you seen.

What as of Tuesday is the most watched movie ever on Netflix? K Pop Demon Hunters. No, you haven't seen it.

[C]

Animated Asian things. I'm telling you, they're. They're.

[B]

It's not your deal.

[C]

They're the. Yeah, they're the. The missing piece. And this is much to my niece's consternation, by the way.

[B]

I'll bet. I've been telling people. I've been telling people, if you do ever find it in your heart to watch this film, I've been telling people that in some ways, it's almost like a Lord of Spirits F fan decided to write a movie about K Pop, a K pop band that. That hunts demons and is trying to avoid people getting their souls sucked into a hell mouth. Like, that is literally what the plot is about.

So. And demonization. I mean, I'm also not a big K Pop fan. You know, I also am not a big K. I'm not even a small K pop fan. But this is.

[C]

How did you come upon this? Was it through the influence of one of your children?

[B]

So actually, it was. I. I need to say this publicly again and again. It was through the influence of my wife.

She.

[C]

She heard about Korean television. I am given to understand she is.

[B]

Into K dramas and such, but she hadn't watched the film, and a friend of hers told her about it. She hadn't heard of it even. And so she watched it. And then she started telling me. She's like, you have to watch this because this is about all that stuff you talk about on podcasts. I was like, but it's K Pop. And she's like, no, you have to watch it. And I'm like, I hate K Pop. No, I believe you. But no.

And finally she wore me down. And there was actually. I don't know if it was a coordinated group effort, but there was a group effort that was going on. I had other people, even our very own Michael Landsman said, have you watched this movie? And I really couldn't believe it coming out of him.

[C]

Landsman is a man of fickle tastes and moods.

[B]

But this is not all just a cheap attempt to get people to listen to the most recent episode of the Areopagus podcast. It's not just that.

[C]

It is that. But. It's not just that.

[B]

But. But, yeah, I don't know. Lord of Spirits people. You. You may be surprised. As I was, I went into this thing very, very prejudiced, very prejudiced against watching it, and then found that I regarded the soundtrack as kind of a banger, as it were. So. So in this case, this may be the one thing ever That I am trendier than you, Father Stephen.

[C]

I guess. Yeah.

I will savor if you delve into that whole area. You will?

[B]

Quickly.

I will savor it. You're on the eve of my pentageneity.

[C]

I have not even dabbled in that arena since, like, the 90s, so.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. Neon Genesis or something. I don't even know when that stuff came out.

I don't know.

[C]

Well, there's when it. There's when it came out in Japan, and then there's when it came to the United States.

[B]

Yes, that's right.

[C]

Like, those are two different things.

[B]

Yeah, yeah.

[C]

Now it's. It's the animated stuff. Like, if you want to talk about, like, live action Hong Kong action movies and stuff, like, I. I can go there with you. But, yeah, animated stuff is just.

[B]

Gotcha. Well, we do have a very full call board. It looks like people are hot to have conversations with us, so it would.

[C]

Help if you got him a new one so he wasn't having to put those, like, big plugs into the holes.

[B]

I know, but it's. It makes for great drama down there at Ancient Faith Radio Central. You know.

Who was it? Was it Lily Tomlin who did that bit on the ancient Saturday Night Live of the telephone operator? Yeah, yeah. See, that dates both of us.

Okay, well, let's go ahead and take our first call. So I think our very first caller is. He's listed as Game Plan Dan the Question Man. I'm sure that's what his mom called him.

[C]

Yes.

[B]

So greetings.

[C]

That's too long to be a screen name, even.

[B]

Welcome to the Lord of Spirits podcast.

What's on your mind?

[D]

Hello, this is Florida man and friend of the show the Danimal, here for more questions and good times.

[C]

Was that a reference to the TV show Manimal or just in general?

[B]

Oh, Manimal, man, I haven't thought about that in years.

[D]

No, no, just a nickname I acquired long ago, and it's just stuck with me like a wart or something. Many ways. My question is about. I got two. The more meteor question, if you will, has to do with the covenant that God gave to Phineas. So there's several covenants in the Old Testament. Like God says to Abraham, you're. You're. You will be the father of many nations. Your seed will shine like the stars of heaven, David. And, you know, his seed will have an eternal.

Kingship, king, kingdom from his line, but with, you know, Christ. Christ priesthood is according to the order of Melchizedek. But at least when I'm going Through and reading numbers, it appears that God is making, like, an eternal covenant with Phineas and his descendants. So, like, what happened to that? Like, was it just like, I don't need this anymore? Or, like, man, your descendants, they're kind of lame. Look at the, you know, Hasmonians and all these other people taking this away. Like, what. What happened with that? What's the deal with that?

[B]

What is up with that? Father Stephen DeYoung, you don't want to.

[C]

Take a shot at it for.

[B]

No, I can't. I have nothing to say.

[C]

Okay.

[B]

Nothing. I got nothing.

[C]

So. Yeah, and. And so that. That covenant, actually, you know, that starts in. In numbers.

There's this weird overlap right now between the Antiochian men Bible study I'm doing and real time of the whole Council of God Bible study where both of them are in numbers. So, like, I've been talking about this passage all the time for the last month or so.

So that that covenant with Phinehas, who is Aaron's grandson, right. Is essentially that the high priesthood is going to be reckoned through him henceforward. Right. And eternally. And then that gets further refined around the time of the exile later in the prophetic corpus to being through one of his descendants.

Zadok.

And that's why the idea that the restored priesthood would be Zadokite is where the Sadducees got their. Their name, the Zedekim.

The Zadokites, essentially, even though they were not in any way descended from Zadok.

It was pure propaganda to try to legitimize their hold on the high priesthood. But if you're listening, a few episodes ago, when we talked about the Hasmonean period, we talked about that a little bit.

But. So.

All this is going around to the Zadokite high priesthood was.

Not going to serve in a physical rebuilt temple, but they were going to serve in the temple described in Ezekiel. And if we understand, as St. John does in his gospel and makes pretty explicit that the temple in Ezekiel is actually Christ himself, then we ask.

Ourselves, who is the Levite? Who is the descendant of Levi, the descendant of Phinehas, the descendant of Zadok, who serves Christ at the temple. And long story short, as St. Luke sets up in the first chapter of his gospel, it's St. John the Forerunner.

[B]

Well, there you go, Dan. Was that. Was that a surprise answer or what?

[D]

Yeah, because I was.

Not really sure how to follow that. I clearly need to read more Ezekiel and commentary on Luke's opening. I did not connect that.

[C]

Yeah. So at the beginning of, of St. Luke's gospel.

He sets up.

In chapter one, before the birth of Christ, he's setting up. There's these three main figures, right? Of course, Christ being central, but then his mother, Miriam, and.

St. John, who's set up as this should be the rightful priest. Right. If his father hadn't been.

Exiled and killed. Right. And so that's. St. Luke is making a parallel to Moses, Miriam and Aaron.

In terms of how he sets up his gospel. So, yeah, so that's a important connection. That's why he emphasizes so much. St. John being from the priestly line.

[B]

All right, well, thank you very much, Dan, for calling in and immediately posing something that I had nothing to say about. So thank you very much for that. Very nice of you.

[C]

Someone will call about K Pop demon hunters or something. You could take it from there.

[B]

I hope so. I hope so.

There are things to say. All right, thanks for calling, Dan. We're going to take our next call coming from good old Dayton, Ohio. So, Mark from Dayton, Ohio, welcome to Lord of Spirits podcast.

[D]

Hi, Fathers. Thank you for having me on.

[C]

Ohio, I guess, is the rich man's Ohio.

[D]

My question for you is. I don't know. There really is an answer, but just your opinion. What happens to the soul of an animal when it, when it dies?

[B]

I mean, animals have, should we go. I mean, in the Aristotelian model, right, Animals have vegetative souls. And.

I'm trying to remember the, the one that makes them move around, design souls, desiring souls.

[C]

Yeah. Epidemia.

[B]

Yeah. Yeah. But they're not.

They'Re not in Christ. They're not, they don't. There is, I don't know, do they just dissipate?

Does he have anything to say about that? I don't know.

[C]

Okay.

[B]

So, yeah, I, I, you're having a.

[C]

Rough time tonight, Father.

[B]

I just say was, I say, my, my short answer always is like, animal souls do not, do not continue to exist after they're dead because there is no, you know, eternal life for them. Right. That's just not a thing. But maybe there's something else. So.

[C]

Well, yeah, so.

If you read St. Gregory Palamas's on the souls of animals.

[B]

I did not even know that that was a text that existed.

[C]

So that's a thing. Yes. He talks about how any. He confirms that animals have souls, but they are fundamentally different than human souls. And of course, Christ was incarnate as a human. Right. And so humanity therefore is joined to God in Christ.

And so there's a fundamental difference there. And so animals do not experience salvation in the way in which humans experience salvation.

[B]

But.

[C]

But there are still a few more questions, and these remain questions. There is no. Nobody rules on this. Right. There are no fathers, there are no canons. There's no.

[B]

There's.

[C]

There's nothing. There's no ruling on this.

But salvation, of course, is not going to heaven or hell, right?

[B]

Right.

[C]

It's not eternal existence as a disembodied soul. It's being resurrected and living in the new heavens and the new earth. There's nothing in the Scriptures that would cause us not to believe, and everything in the Scriptures that would lead us to believe, at least at an intuitive level, that there are going to be plants and animals in the new heavens and the new earth.

[B]

Yeah, that seems pretty clear whether it's your dogs, your heathen dogs. Right?

[C]

Well. And that's the question, right?

[B]

Yeah. Usually people want to know about their own pets, Right.

[C]

And so here's the thing with pets, right. With domesticated animals in general.

So, first of all, domesticated animals occupy a somewhat different place, and this is borne out liturgically. Right. We have lots of prayers for the blessing of domesticated animals and that kind of thing. We don't have prayers for blessing like wild dogs. Right, right.

[B]

Beetles.

[C]

Yeah. But we have prayers for blessing livestock. Right. And praying for their fruitfulness.

[B]

And do people really want ticks to go to heaven? You know what I'm saying?

[C]

Yeah. Mosquitoes. No, they're done.

But maybe not. Who knows?

But so.

And that's based on something that's real spiritually in that.

In Christ we're united to God. Right. But it is through humanity that the rest of creation, animate and inanimate, is brought to God and presented to God. And so domesticated animals are an example of a category in which something in the created order has fallen under the dominion, has been given order by humanity in a sort of transformative way. And so there is a kind of limited partaking of the blessings of God that are proper to humanity that come through Christ, but that sort of bleeds over through humanity, right. To these other elements of creation. And so if someone wanted to. I'm not saying this is true. I'm definitely not saying this is orthodox doctrine, because, like I said, there's no ruling on this everywhere. Anywhere.

But you could. You could make a case.

That it is reasonable that animals that have spent a great deal of time with humans and have therefore been in a certain way humanized.

Right. This is true of all domesticated animals, but especially of, like, pets Animals that spend a lot of times with humans start taking on human characteristics that wild animals don't have, even if they're the same species.

[B]

Humanosis.

[C]

And sort of. Yeah. And sort of flourish in a certain way.

And so if one wanted to argue.

That it is possible that at least some of the animals in the new heavens and the new Earth will be animals who, through the love of humans. Right. Are resurrected, I wouldn't, you know, be grumpy about it or argue with you.

I am not convinced. I'm not saying. This is my view, and I just can't back it. I'm not convinced that that's true. I'm just saying, hypothetically, if you asked me to make the case.

[D]

Right.

[C]

That is how I would try to make it. Yeah.

[B]

I don't know. Does that. What do you think, Mark? I mean, are you thinking about, like, your own dog, or is this just, like, a completely theoretical question?

[D]

No, no, I. I lost two of my dogs back in May.

[B]

Yeah.

[D]

Unexpectedly, it was, you know, and it just got me wondering, like, what. Where are they now? Where. At this, you know, currently. Where. Where are they now? I mean, that's.

[B]

Yeah.

[D]

For my question.

[B]

Yeah. Yep, I hear you. I hear you. Well, thanks for calling in and God bless you. All right, our next caller is coming all the way from La Verne, California. So, Rory, welcome to the Lord of Spirits podcast.

[D]

Hello, gentlemen, second time caller, longtime listener and downtown liver. My name's Day. Well, the. Well, they shut down the heroes clone there, and now it's called Lordsburg, which was the original name of Laverne.

[B]

Huh.

[D]

And you should just make him continue.

[B]

Making Lord of Spiritsburg. Right.

[D]

I'm just saying I have a petition with one signature.

[B]

All right, it's a start. Just need a little more charisma there, Rory.

[D]

I'll do my best.

[B]

What's on your mind?

[D]

So I have. I have a main question. Then I have a second question that's kind of wrestling related, I. E. Very wrestling related, but my first.

[C]

And Father Andrew's having it rough on his birthday, no less. I know. Birthday.

[B]

Yeah. That's the eve of my birthday. It is. My birthday is the beheading of John the Forerunner. So I've always appreciated a certain kind of irony in the whole thing. And it's a strict fasting day, so.

[C]

Every year, liturgically, though, it's enjoying my question.

[B]

So. Sorry, Rory, go ahead, go ahead.

[D]

Okay, so my primary question is regarding the.

[E]

So in.

[D]

In the Gospels, whenever a possessed person, you know, encounters Christ, the demons immediately know who he is and are immediately terrified and immediately, you know, start lamenting about their ultimate Satan. That is too early and kind of, I kind of wanted to know if there's any commentary or what your guys thoughts are on the way. Kind of like the difference between that and the way that the devil reacts to Christ in both in the gospels where he, you know, he, he tries to tempt him. He, you know, everything, you know, he's not, he's not, he's not definitely terrified as far as we know. And also in, I know it's apocryphal, but in the Gospel of Nicodemus, you know, the devil is, you know, kind of, you know, talking the embodiment of Hades and kind of bragging like, hey, we got him. You know, hey, there he is. Look at that guy right there. And then. So my question is kind of like, is there any commentary about kind of like why the devil is so unafraid? Is it just because he's so pride that he's gone into? You know, does he really not know? Or is he just so prideful he's hiding in from himself or has there been any commentary on this or what are your guys's thoughts that I'm interested in? Any of that?

[B]

Yeah, well, I mean.

Ascribing emotions to demons.

Is an iffy game at best, right? Because they're not humans, so they don't experience the world or even themselves the way that we do. I think what they do all have in common is that.

At least it seems to me in the Gospels, you know, that the demons, including the devil, they know who Jesus is. Like we sometimes get this question, like, why don't they know who he is? I mean, they call him the Son of the Most High, right? So it's pretty clear that they know who he is, but they don't know what his deal is. Like what is it that he's there to accomplish that that seems to be hidden from them. And which is then why you get all of this patristic language.

About.

The, the devil sort of being baited by God, you know, like, like St. John Chrysostom says, you know, hell took a body and met God. Like surprise. You know, there's even language of, of, you know, a divine hook being used in some of the liturgical texts, which all implies this kind of deception against the demonic powers, Right? So to me, the, the reason why some are presented in one way and some in another in the way that, that we read them and the stories that we get about them is to show us different aspects of the demonic world, right. That like, for instance, the one of the apostles says that the devil is, you know, he's crafty, right, right. He's going around like a lion trying to devour us, you know, so, so that we should be afraid of him. But on the other hand, you get like that they're kind of pathetic and they run away at the name of Jesus. And you know.

And the point there is not, wait, should I be afraid of them or not? The point is I need to remain in faithfulness because my salvation is at stake. But also I should be confident in the power of Christ, you know, not my own power, but in the power of Christ. And so.

I think one of the big questions always ask for the Scripture is like, what does this mean for my life? Like, how do I repent in response to this? And that would be the reading that I would give.

Based on those distinctions that are being drawn there in the Scriptures. Father, what else might you add or subtract or multiply or divide or square root, as it were?

[C]

Logarithm.

Yeah. So yeah, the fathers, when they talk about that deception thing, they're really getting that from St. Paul in First Corinthians where he says, if the rulers of this world had known, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory, that's not talking about the Romans, because why would the Romans not have done it? That like got the Romans saved.

[D]

Right?

[C]

That's.

But.

Slight actually.

In that.

The demons who are getting exorcised in the Synoptic Gospels, from the perspective of the authors of the Synoptic gospels.

[B]

Oh yes, right.

[C]

Were actually dead humans sort of demonized humans. They're demon dead, demonized Nephilim.

And so they had been thoroughly demonized, Right. So they were lost their humanity. But the point still stands. Whereas the devil is a fundamentally different type of creature, the devil's a seraph, right? So.

One would expect a kind of different.

Relationship between.

This high ranking angelic being who has been in rebellion against God since not long after his creation, and you know, the ghosts of dead Nephilim who are sort of on work release. Right. Like that's sort of the paradigm, right, as Jubilees gives it. Like most of their company are confined in the abyss and they're sort of out. And so now they run into Jesus and they're terrified that he's going to send them to the abyss too.

You know, and they're like, hey, we thought we still had some time left to get up to our chicanery, right?

So yeah, there's a bunch of things there, but part of it is that the devil is a fundamentally different type of being.

[B]

Yeah. Yeah. So what's your wrestling question there, Rory?

[D]

So my wrestling. It's not exactly a wrestling question. And Father Stevens, for you, it's. It's a wrestling Jordan Peterson question, because I know he's your close personal friend.

[C]

Oh, yeah, we pal around all the time.

[D]

Well, I was wondering if you were aware, and this is a clip on YouTube, that Jordan Peterson. There's a clip on YouTube of Jordan Peterson where somebody asked. Somebody asked him, how does morality go from who's stronger and who's weaker to what is good or what is, what isn't? And he somehow.

And I'm very proud of this, he turns it into. A good example of that is Bret Hart, and he's not even a huge wrestling fan because he turns it into. Brett.

[C]

Nobody's a true Canadian. Right.

[D]

Like in. Well, it gets even better. Bret Hart, as he was in Wrestling With Shadows. And the point he was trying to make is about. It's a drama about good and evil and, you know. You know, the kind of pressure he puts on himself as being the main good guy. But then he goes on this sidetrack where Jordan Peterson just starts gushing about Stu Hart and the scene where Stu Hart is stretching those younger guys, and he gets so into it that he kind of basically forgets the question, has to go back and kind of get back to it and kind of get back on track. And then, of course, he somehow brings up Marduk as well in it. And I know. So if you haven't seen that, I think you and everyone else should look it up on YouTube.

[C]

Yeah, I need to know how Bardock Free on YouTube ended up in Calgary Stampede. I don't. Yeah.

That is one of the most Canadian things I've ever heard of Jordan Peterson saying, like, being obsessed with the Hart family, like.

[B]

Well, on that note, thank you, Rory, for that scintillating bit of Canadiana.

[C]

Yeah, there was a great period of time where Bret Hart was like. He would come out with, like, a Canadian flag and insult America all the time. So whenever they were wrestling in Canada, he was, like, a big hero, and everybody cheered for him. And whenever he was wrestling in the United States, they all booed him.

It was this weird inverted thing.

[B]

Captain Canuck. All right, thank you for calling, Rory. Now we have Jonathan calling from Virginia, who apparently has a question about Galatians Chapter four. Jonathan, welcome. Lord of Spirits podcast.

[D]

Yes, glad to be here. So this is A replay to the question I try to ask on a certain magisterial livestream promoter.

[B]

Oh, okay.

[D]

Yes. And this is about the elemental spirit. So yes, demons. No to K Pop, I'm afraid.

[B]

Oh.

Wow. I mean, that's the opposite. That's the opposite of the lesson in that movie.

Where it's about no demons. In fact, K Pop keeps the demons out of the world in that movie. It's true. When they seal the Golden Honmoon.

[C]

The power of K Pop.

[B]

It's the power of K Pop. That's right. Anyway, go ahead, go ahead.

[D]

Right, so in Galatians 4, St. Paul seems to be placing the elemental spirits in the category of teachers. I'm used to the law being teach, but not the elemental spirit. If I can read the three verse in question here, I mean that the heir, as long as he's a child, is no different than the slave. So he's the owner of everything, but he is under guardians and managers until the date set by his father. In the same way, we also, when we were children, were enslaved to the elementary principles of the world. If I'm understanding correctly, the elementary principles are things like the Titans. So what are those doing in the category of teachers? The best idea I've got is this is a reference to Plato's Shepherd God and the gods of nations from Deuteronomy 32, weak and provisional. In St. Paul, St. Torah is in the same category with them. Am I right or am I way off here?

[C]

Go ahead. Oh yeah.

You'Re basically right. You're basically right.

This is.

If you look at St. Paul is actually pretty consistent in how he talks to Gentiles, right? Starting in Acts 17.

That he has in mind.

[B]

Right?

[C]

And this.

There'S actually a lot of a good place to see this sort of fully fleshed out, even though he's not totally orthodox, is actually CBS of Caesarea's demonstration of the Gospel. But he's really pulling out these elements of what. What St. Paul says to, to Gentiles is he's accepting that narrative, right, that.

At the Tower of Babel event, in order that, right, things wouldn't go down as they went down in the Flood. God steps back away from humanity, divides the nations, gives them their places to live, as St. Paul refers to, assigns their borders and then assigns the these lesser ranked spiritual beings to sort of shepherd them and intend them. And Plato, as you've heard on the show before, kind of refers to that same kind of idea. So St. Paul describing it that way to Gentiles, even though he's speaking from a Jewish perspective. Like, they would resonate with that. They had the idea still way back that something like that happened. And then St. Paul is arguing that through Jesus the Messiah.

Aside from everything about Jesus as the Jewish Messiah and all of that, that in terms of the Gentiles, through Jesus as the Messiah, he is now calling all. All of the nations of the world back to himself to abandon those things and now come back to him. Right. And so.

The. In terms of the. The teachers being taught, talked about in a somewhat positive way. This isn't. This is less.

There were some good things about Zeus worship. Right. Which St. Paul wouldn't say, because idolatry, of course, is bad. It's closer to, like, St. Justin's Spermaticos logos. Right. The idea that even, for example, that idea that at some point a most high God sort of retreated and we got the Gods we've got now who originally were like gentle shepherds, like Plato says, and then something changed. Right. The fact that they still had that idea is one of those seeds that St. Paul can now pick up on and say, hey, yes, that God, he's calling you back now.

In repentance to follow him through, through his Messiah, Jesus.

[B]

Yeah. I think the key, you know, the key thing is, like, comparing them to teachers is because it didn't start out bad. Right. Eventually they're, you know, characterized as these sort of titanic figures.

[C]

But yes, it's.

[B]

They don't start out.

[C]

Not just appealing to a state of affairs. He's appealing to that narrative. Yeah, that story. Yeah. And arguing now that that story, the conclusion of that story is them coming. Them becoming Christians, essentially. Them coming back to God in Christ.

[B]

Yeah. All right. Does that work for you, Jonathan? Does that answer your question?

[D]

Yes, it does. Thank you very much.

[B]

All right, thanks for calling. All right, swinging over to the other end of the United States of America, in Portland, Oregon, we have Lisa. Lisa, welcome to Laura Spirits podcast.

[E]

No, thank you. I'm actually from Oregon City, but Portland, you might know.

[B]

Oh, well, you told Mike you were from Portland, so.

[E]

I know, I know. That's the first thing that popped into my mind because I was a little nervous.

[C]

Do you know. Do you know if the dream of the 90s is still alive in Portland?

[E]

Oh, gosh, I don't know. Portland always wants to be weird, and I don't go down there, so I don't know.

But I love the country, and to go to the city is kind of, you know, a big deal.

[B]

Gotcha. All right, so what's up, Lisa?

[E]

Well, my question is, we were praying for a baby a while ago that we didn't know if he was going to live or not. And I was praying God's will. And a friend of mine was. She prayed, she wanted to renounce the devil in any of his actions speaking to the mountains and that. That God's will is for this child to live and be healthy. And I know it's God's will, but can we. Can we have the authority to renounce the devil in his actions against different things that he's doing in people's lives and stuff like that? You know, kind of like the. You hear it a lot in the charismatic movement of renouncing the devil and all that kind of stuff.

[B]

Yeah, I mean, I think. I mean, I don't know what your friend's understanding of all that would be. It does sound kind of charismatic. There are certainly some kinds of the Charis, some areas in the charismatic world where.

The specific words that you speak are considered to be sort of powerful in and of themselves. Like, some will say that words are sort of containers of power and this kind of thing. Particularly you hear that in the word faith, Pentecostal, part of the charismatic world.

You know, but.

Certainly we can pray that the devil or other demonic forces would. Would be driven out, that they would. They would fail in what it is that they're attempting to accomplish. But we need to understand that these are not magic spells, right, that are spoken over people and that, like, make things instantaneously happen. We pray that God would grant our requests. But also.

Demonic power being functional in someone's life, as it is in all of our lives, because we're all sinners, is really a function of how much, in what way, to what degree, etcetera, that person and those around them are cooperating with. With sin. You know, so, like, I know.

A priest that I know used to have a parish. I think he was in Chicago maybe, and there was a family that kept inviting him, you know, kept asking him to come over to bless their house because there was very apparent demonic activity in the house. And it was. You know, it happened so often that eventually the priest said, look, we need to have a conversation. And.

And he, through talking to them, uncovered that there was incest going on in the house. And he said, look, if you don't want the demons to come back like they have been, you gotta stop. You know, so even though this is an orthodox priest and praying traditional orthodox prayers and, you know, throwing holy water everywhere and doing all this exorcistic stuff, the fact that they kept going back to their sin, kept inviting demonic activity back into their lives. And so, yes, we can, you know, like at the beginning of an orthodox baptism, we renounce Satan. Right. You renounce him. But if you, you can go back, you can say, hey, you know, remember me? And, and bring that back. So it's not an automatic. Automatic kind of thing, but yeah, of course. I mean, we should pray for ourselves and for other people that we be protected from demonic attacks.

Father, you got anything you want to include?

[C]

Well, yeah, I also think we have to be careful when talking about spiritual warfare topics.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

That we don't fall into this trap of assuming that when we're talking about things that happen. Right. Then anything that happens that we consider or even that is objectively good.

[B]

Right.

[C]

Yeah. We could say everything good comes from God. Right. But things that we don't like.

[B]

Or.

[C]

That we find bad, we don't ascribe those to the devil.

Right.

Because if you set up a narrative, for example, in terms of this child, right. Where.

You'Ve decided in your head that God wants them to live on this earth and the devil wants to kill them, what happens if, God forbid, the child dies?

Are you going to think based on that narrative that the devil won somehow?

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

Right. And. And that's not. That's not the picture of these things that were given in the scriptures. Right. I mean, think about Job. Even when the devil is doing something, it's only because God's letting him.

[B]

Right.

[C]

And so.

God has a purpose in all of these things. And so part of accepting God's will.

Is not just. And having grown up in Calvinist circles. Right. It's not this fatalistic thing of like, well, you know.

If the worst happens, you know, that's God punishing me for my sin. Right. And I deserve it. Right.

No, even when the worst from our perspective happens, God has some good purpose in it.

It's never to punish in that retributive kind of way, like, you were bad. And so now I'm going to do this thing to you to hurt you. God doesn't do that ever. Hell, isn't that.

[B]

So?

[C]

And we don't know in our earthly lives why.

Right. But I firmly believe, as a Christian, that when a child dies, which is one of the most horrible things that can happen.

Right. That God has allowed that to happen for a reason and that he can bring good even out of that.

Yeah, we. And this is hard. This is a hard thing, right. To. To hear and to say even. Right. Because, I mean, we think a child dies and we're thinking, oh, they're never going to get to date and go to prom and get married and have their own kids and. Right. We're thinking about all those things on this earth.

That they're not going to do, all of those temporal joys and things they're not going to share in.

We're not in that moment thinking about all of the potential horrors of this world that they've been spared.

But.

God knows the whole picture.

And I also firmly believe as a Christian that those children who die.

Are going to be part of the resurrection and so I don't fear for their ultimate fate.

So, yeah, we just have to be a little careful about how much agency we ascribe to the devil.

And that we don't sort of limit the power or knowledge or wisdom of God.

[B]

Indeed.

All right, Lisa, I hope that helps. Thank you very much for calling.

We are going to go ahead and go to our first break and we'll be back in just a minute on this all live Q and A edition of the Lord of Spirits podcast.

[A]

Father Andrew Stephen Damick and father Stephen DeYoung will be back in a moment to take your calls on the next part of the Lord of Spirits. Give them a call at 855-237-72346. That's 855-AF-RADIO.

[C]

For centuries, Byzantine music has sustained orthodox worship around the world. Now the St. John John cucuzelis Institute of Liturgical Arts offers online classes in notation, theory and practice and free classes in liturgics with a faculty led by John Michael Boyer, author of the acclaimed book Byzantine the Received Tradition. Registration is open now for classes in [e-mail] that's K O U K O U Z e L I S.net.

[D]

We'Re.

[A]

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

[B]

We're going up, up, up. It's our moment, you know, together we're glowing, gonna be gonna be golden.

Yes. It's an all live Q and A episode of Laura Spirit's podcast. Isn't John Michael Boyer, whose voice we just heard, isn't he sort of your neighbor there in Louisiana or some other part of Louisiana?

[C]

I think he's over in New Orleans.

[B]

New Orleans, Yeah.

[C]

Where we recently found out through a prominent TikTok food critic they have way worse food than Lafayette.

[B]

Really?

[C]

Yes. Not even close, man.

[B]

And I mean, New Orleans is kind of known as a food. As a food city.

[C]

Nah, we're a food city.

[B]

Wow, wow, wow. Gauntlet throne.

[C]

Yes.

Alienating more of our listener base.

[B]

Yeah, that's right. So, okay, well, we're just going to head right back to the call board. So we've got Paul from Texas. No, I mean, no. Nothing more specific than that. Just somewhere in that great, massive, gigantic state that's like, almost bigger than Europe. Texas.

[C]

Public of Texas.

[B]

Yes. Paul. Welcome to Lord Spirits podcast.

[D]

Oh, thank you very much for having me, Fathers. I apologize. If it. If it helps, I was the. Have the. The notoriety of being the first caller to call twice in one episode.

I have a jaw repeatedly before.

[B]

All right, are you gonna try to. To make it a record and call that call three times this time around? Never know.

[D]

I mean, that really just depends on how stupid I am. Father, I'm sorry. If I. If I ask a question, I just keep not understanding. I'll just batter y' all until I figure it out, I guess.

[B]

All right, all right. We can always make. Make Mike hang up on you, you know, that is a thing.

[C]

Or I could just keep giving contradictory answers, leave you in a state of puzzlement forever.

[B]

That's right. Exactly.

[D]

Well, which. True to form, I do. I do have a small bonus question, if y' all will let me, at the end. But let's say that we'll. We'll see upon yalls grace. That will depend on how long this question is. The answer is at least true to form, though I still struggle with an old episode. I think it was one of the episodes that I called twice. In regards to the soul and the spirit and the distinction. I. I'm still. I'm still. There's. It's like a. It's like a. What's the word? Splinter. Stuck in my skin. Their father, Andrew Damek, on a recent episode. Well, recent to me, at least. Forgive me, I don't know what time it was. A podcast with Michaela Nikolenko. Forgive me if I'm missing her name.

[B]

Yeah, yeah.

[D]

The statement was kind of made along the lines of spirits. Super paraphrasing here being more of, like, a motive force. Like, of course, they're about action. They're about doing things. The spirit, the Holy Ghost, fills someone as they're about to do something. In the Old Testament, at least typically, when it's like, you know, made explicit.

And yet the soul appears to be something more fixed. Like when Christ says, fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell. Now, maybe that's just translation thing or not, I'm not entirely sure. But that's not necessarily against what y' all said before either. Y' all had said that the spirit is more of like the life itself. Or maybe that was the soul. Maybe I'm mixing up topics now, but I do know the odds said that the. The consciousness was more located with the spirit. And what confuses me is why would the consciousness and all the memories associated with who you are not be located in the soul? Soul.

Let'S say what I'm understanding is more of a fixed point, kind of like the body, although the body is obviously not fixed either. It's very malleable and moves.

Whereas the spirit is kind of what is the motive force to do actions. And it takes on a pattern, like your pattern of action. Do you take on the pattern of demons? Or do you take on the pattern of submitting to the Lord? And that maybe this would be why even if your body and your soul are quote unquote destroyed, not via annihilation. Yeah, annihilation. But like spiritual death in hell, the spirit being a motive force, maintaining that pattern of being that you had maintained in life is what keeps the kind of the death rolling, so to speak.

It. For whatever reason, there's still such an issue in my mind with the idea of the soul not being where the consciousness is. And I don't know why that's a problem for me, but I'm hoping y' all can, like, fix that.

[B]

All right, I'm gonna let Father Stephen talk about the consciousness stuff, but I want to at least talk about the distinction between soul and spirit. Okay, so the soul is the life of the body. Right. It is related to the body, like the soul is the life of the body. It's not a separate thing from the body. Spirit is a different category that can include the soul. So spirit is an animating force. So your soul can be the animating force of your body. And indeed your body can actually have multiple animating forces acting upon it. So your own soul as the spirit of your body, as the animating force of your body, but also you can be influenced by. By angels, by demons, by the Holy Spirit. Right. And it's not just individual either. It can also be collective. So the Holy Spirit is the animating force of the church, for instance. Right. So I think it's probably be better to think about spirit in terms of function. Right. It's. It's about animating.

And. And the soul is much more closely related to the body in particular. This is why Christ has a human soul, because he has a human body, right? So souls are, you know, are from bodies in bodies. Part, I don't want to say part of. I don't know. But in any event, the soul is the life of the body.

So, yeah, it's not that you have a soul and a spirit and so forth. It's that your soul can function as your spirit and usually does when you're still living in this mortal life. You know, it's the thing animating your life. But you can have multiple influences on you. You can have multiple kind of animating factors going on. Consciousness, memory, et cetera, et cetera. So I'm just going to pass the ball over to Father Stephen and see what he says, because I'm kind of interested myself, actually.

[C]

Yeah. So, yeah, in terms of what Father Andrew was saying about the soul, right. In Hebrew, nephesh, that we translate as soul can also mean a living thing.

So, for example, it talks about God creating all of the souls that swim in the water and all the souls that fly in the air. That's about birds and fish, right? It's that, like, disembodied souls. It's not some spherical origin Plato thing, right?

It's a living thing, right? Because life of the body, right? It's what makes you alive instead of not alive, right?

And so spirit.

As we've talked about, is always a collective consciousness.

We're not used to thinking about ourselves that way, right? Because we're used to, as modern people thinking of ourselves as individuals. But in fact, you as a body that is enlivened by a soul, right, are actually a walking big pile and hodgepodge of smaller organisms.

Your heartbeat is.

Actually modulated by your heart itself. It's not even your brain.

And we know this because of heart transplants. When you transplant someone's heart into someone else's body, it beats with the rhythm it used to be with in the other, in the original body, not the former rhythm of the new recipient.

There are all kinds of functions of your body that parts of your brain that are beneath consciousness are taken care of all the time. You don't have to remember to breathe, right? You don't have to consciously do all of these things. You don't consciously digest food. And your entrails are full of.

Bacterial colonies that are not only separate life forms, but are communicating with other people's bacterial colonies. Chemically, it's gross. You walk around. I love bringing that up because it so grosses out Father Andrew.

[B]

Right.

[C]

But so over the top of that, you have a point of attention that we call consciousness.

[D]

Right.

[C]

And that is forming the collective of all of that. Because you can, for example, choose to hold your breath at least for a while.

Right. You can take deep breaths and calm down your heart rate.

[B]

Right.

[C]

So it's. That's sort of over the top. And then we can talk about spirits, other spirits, as being more collective. Right. And that's when we're talking about, like Father Andrew was talking about, motivating people, things.

And so consciousness is an intrinsic part. Right.

Now the question is. Right. And this is part of why Father Edgar put it that the spirit often includes the soul. That's probably a good way to put it. Right. Because we've talked about before, there are a lot of fathers and even a lot of places in scripture where soul and spirit are not really treated as separate things. So the idea that they are ontologically separate things.

We shouldn't start out with that presupposition. Right.

They are separable in speech, but there are things that are separable only in speech.

So I would say, for example, that it is not possible to have a soul and not have a spirit in the sense that.

Anything that has a soul has some level of consciousness. It may be a very low level if we're talking about plants.

Right.

[D]

But.

[C]

But anything that has a soul has some level of consciousness. And in fact, I think there are even systems that don't have souls per se, and they are not organically alive that have some very low level of consciousness.

So that would mean that something can have a spirit and not necessarily have a. Have a soul.

But spirit does bring with it the idea, ideas of volition and communication. Right.

Because all of those are factors of. Of consciousness.

I don't know if that helps or if you're gonna have to call back.

I mean, this is deep water.

[D]

Would you say. Would you say that viruses kind of fall into the boat you just prescribed?

[C]

Yeah, because viruses are technically not alive.

They're shreds of genetic material. They're not actually alive in the sense that, like, a bacterium is alive.

[B]

Yeah.

[D]

So then souls are like the life itself, like, you know, just the. That which animates. And the spirits are that which house the consciousnesses. So, like, the. The spirit of a man might be like the cell within the spirit of the spirit of man itself. The spirit of a man might be the cell than the spirit of man itself. And that's when we get into terms like the zeitgeist or the Spirit of a people and stuff like that.

[C]

Right.

Right.

[B]

And. And they're right, I think, about what.

[C]

Christ says, you know, who. Who knows A man, but his spirit. Yeah, right. How is spirit being talked about? That's like your consciousness, right?

[B]

Yep.

[C]

You're able to search out know yourself. Therefore, there's a spirit of God who knows the things of God. Right.

[B]

All right, well, chew on that for a while, Paul. And if you need to call back, you know, we're. If you get through, we're willing to talk to you.

[C]

So that is. That is meat, not milk.

[B]

There you go. Exactly. Exactly. All right, thank you very much. Okay, our next caller is from Boulder City, Nevada, and it's Marcian. So, Marcion, welcome to the Lord of Spirits podcast.

[C]

Uhoh.

[D]

Hello, Fathers. Are you hearing me okay?

[B]

Yeah, yeah, I checked. By the way, Father, there is a Saint Marcion.

[D]

There is Saint Marcion. He was Bishop of Syracuse.

[C]

Okay, okay.

[B]

There's actually one.

[C]

In fact, I read some church fathers say some bad things about another Marcion. So, you know, there's.

[B]

There's a Saint Aras as well, by the way.

[C]

I'll go ahead and say you're my favorite, Marcion.

[E]

Thank you very much, Father.

[A]

Nice.

[B]

What's up, Marcian?

[E]

Yes.

[D]

So I wonder if you'd be able to give me perspective on something that's storming me for a loop. I learned some things about the old and new calendar. I learned about a patriarch that in the 1500s says that we shouldn't go to the new calendar. I've learned about old calendar monks that had visions that say we should stay on the old calendar, New calendar monks that say they had visions that say we should stay on, that we should go to the new calendar. It's only for a loop. I'm with the OCA myself, so I'm on the new calendar. And I am aware that you, not knowing me from Adam, you're going to be able to tell me if I should go old calendar new. But I just wonder if you could give me your perspective on that issue.

[B]

Yeah. Oh, wow. I feel like this is an easy one.

Well, number one, you should go. Say it again.

[C]

It could be a trap.

[B]

It could be a trap. I know, I know. This. This Marcion might be trying to catch us in our words, but I will just be guileless.

I mean, the quick answer is you should go with the calendar that your parish is on. That's the one you should go with. But there's a lot about. So people talk about old calendar and new calendar and Even just that kind of. I mean, it's a normal colloquial way of talking about it. Right? There's nothing wrong with using those terms, but when someone starts to, then it kind of has a moral authority begin to be attached to it. No, you should be on this one. No, you should be on that one. It's actually profoundly ignorant way of phrasing it because.

Historically within the Church, it's not as though there was one calendar and then Suddenly in the 1920s, there was this other calendar that came into being.

Historically in the Church, there have been many calendars in use, particularly before the schism after the Council of Chalcedon. And a number of those calendars are still in use by the non Chalcedonians. Still in use, like they were using them before the Council of Chalcedon. So those were Orthodox calendars. So for instance, the Coptic Church, which is not currently in communion with our church. Right. But the Coptic Church has its own set of months with its own set of days that do not line up with the Julian calendar.

You know, now you can say this day equals this day on the Julian calendar, but it's not like the numbers are the same, you know, they're not. They're not. You know, and the Armenians have another calendar and the Ethiopians and Eritreans have another calendar. Right. So these were all calendars that have been in use in the Orthodox Church.

And were not the subject of schisms. Right. They were just the regional calendars used in each of those places with different month names, and they didn't align the same as everybody else. And the feast days might be a bit different in some ways. Variety was kind of the norm in the earliest centuries of the Church. And I think that's a really important piece of background information as we think about calendars. And we. And frankly, some people try to sort of sacralize them. You know, they'll say, there's like, I've had people say there's the patristic calendar and then there's the new calendar. I'm like, well.

It just so happens that there are Church fathers now who are on the new calendar because there are saints who are on the new calendar, you know.

That have existed after that point. So which Church fathers are you talking about and where and when? Exactly. Right. I mean, the reality is like during the Byzantine period, the fact that.

The Pascalian, you know, the calculation of how you get Pascha was no longer lined up with the astronomical facts that it was originally based on, that was known, and there were actually Several attempts to try to fix it, but basically practical and political.

Problems got in the way and they. And it didn't get fixed right. So there were. There were points where people were just saying, oh, this is kind of, you know, this has kind of become a little bit obsolete. We need to fix it. Because the fathers who set this up actually made reference to astronomical facts, you know, But I think the, the overwhelming. The. The overarching question is not which calendar you're on, but that you are on the calendar that your bishop is. Is administering for you. You know, and also should be pointed out as we have a number of times in this podcast that we don't actually. Even Even though someone who's on the old calendar or the new calendar, there are. It's. It's at least two calendars happening at once. There's the one that's based on the day of the year, and then there's the one that's based on when Pasca was. Right. So it's actually two calendars going on at the same time. And there's variation between, let's say, Greek and Russian and Antiochian and Serbian and Romanian. There's variation between all of these. So there's actually many, many calendars in play right now.

So it's really kind of a collection of new calendars and a collection of old calendars.

And then, as I said, in the earliest years of the church, there were lots of calendars in play. So I think part of the problem, the biggest element when this becomes an argument between people is this idea that really is kind of unspoken, but it's this idea that. That bishops don't actually have authority to govern their churches, that all they're supposed to do is sort of repeat exactly the thing that came immediately before them, which itself was the product of many centuries of development and changes and decisions and so forth. But apparently bishops can't make decisions anymore, apparently, for. I don't know why, you know, some magical event happened. And now any bishop who makes a decision that's different from something before is simply wrong. It is not a question of heresy. It's just not. Because, as I said, the rule was variety. Early on, the church fathers never, ever said, you know, there is only one calendar that should ever have been used and will ever be used. It is true that you can get various bishops and maybe even saints and synods that at various points have. Have rejected things. Often they're rejecting them because there's a very bad relationship, say, with, you know, the Roman Catholic Church or something like this. But this idea that a particular set of dates laid out in a particular way is kind of utterly sacralized, it's just not. And like you didn't mention this, but this is one of my favorite examples, which I think is really lovely. So in Cephallonia in Greece, very famously, there's a church where on the Feast of the Dormition of the Theotokos, there's a whole bunch of non venomous snakes that all come into the church on the feast day. And they kind of will, they'll come into the church and they'll sort of slither around the ikanastasis and especially around the icon of the Theotokos. And the tradition, the custom is that they're there to celebrate the feast. Right. What's really interesting is that when in Keflania, when they switched from the so called old calendar to the so called new calendar, the snakes switched to. It's very weird, right? Somehow the snakes like knew to show up 13 days earlier, you know, the next year or something like this. And again, that doesn't prove that one count or the other is quote unquote correct. The point is that when the people of God are worshiping God and following the order set by their bishop, then God responds, you know, like.

The Divine Liturgy happens no matter what time zone you're in, you know, because it's God responding to the prayers of his people. You know, it's not like there's one moment on every single day that you have to do it. Even Pascha itself. Like maybe everybody in one time zone is roughly kind of celebrating Pascha about the same time, but the next time zone, it's at least an hour different usually. Although the reality is just here in Eastern Pennsylvania, the paschal services start at 10pm or 11pm midnight. Some actually are doing it like 9 in the morning.

And we're not all doing it at the same moment. And yet it's Pascha. Right. So, yeah, I mean, I think people need to have a little bit of perspective before we try to be rigorous about these things. So, um, rant over anything you want to add, Father.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

Q.

[C]

Counter rant.

[B]

No. Q. Counter rant.

[C]

No. I mean, ultimately I end up pretty much the same place in that the, the, the Orthodox Church you should join is the closest one and the calendar you should follow is the one they follow. Right. Because the calendar, like everything else, is something you live out in community. This is not an individualized thing. Yeah, right. And so you follow what you.

I'll put it this way. I don't want people to get the impression from what Father Andrew said that.

The calendar is not a sacred thing or not an important thing.

[B]

Right. That's not what I meant. Yeah, right.

[C]

Or that there can't be heresy involved. Right. I would point you to the. Several of the anathemas at the Council of Nicaea were about people celebrating Pascha at the wrong time. Right, Right. So there are anathemas about that. So that can be an issue of heresy, potentially related to the calendar. And the calendar has been a massive issue since before Christianity, since the Second Temple period of Judaism.

Ironically, the Julian calendar was the one the crazed liberals used in Second Temple Judaism. The Sadducees.

Were compromised because they were using the pagan Roman calendar, and now somehow it's become the holy patristic calendar.

But this is a major issue. Right. But the key is. The key is.

It is a heavy issue, and the heaviness of that falls on the bishops.

That's what they're there for.

That's what their office is about, is about carrying this heavy burden on their shoulders of having to make these decisions so that you and I don't have to.

[B]

Right.

[C]

One of the. One of the things that, to me.

Would be unbelievably hard about being especially an evangelical Protestant is that you have to figure out the whole Christian religion and every point of doctrine for yourself.

And you better be right, because you could go to hell if you get anything significant wrong.

That, to me, is a load way too heavy to bear.

Right. But what we know from Scriptures, right, in case of bishops, the New Testament, is that God appoints certain people to bear that load, and they're going to have a heavier judgment than the rest of us because of that.

[B]

Right.

[C]

But they're the ones who are in the position to suss those things out, and then we can just follow them.

And if their decisions are wrong, God will deal with them about it on the Day of Judgment.

And not us. And part of the problem we have, and I don't want to go too far into another issue.

But part of the problem we have in American culture, even people who weren't, who have never been Protestants, even people who've been Orthodox their whole life, is that our culture is so Protestantized that we think that we as individuals have to figure this out for ourselves. I have to figure out which calendar is the correct calendar, because if I'm following the wrong one, I might not find salvation. Not true.

Not true.

You just have to follow the calendar that your local Orthodox Church is following.

And if there's a problem with that calendar. If the bishop is letting or telling your parish to do things they shouldn't be doing, God will deal with the bishop about that. You don't have to worry about it.

It's a great gift. It's a great gift and a great reason why we need to continue to always pray for our bishops.

[B]

Indeed. Yeah. Does that clear things up, Marcion?

[D]

It does, Father. Thank you very much. If you could please pray for this sinful servant.

[B]

God be with you and your family and your parish. All right, our next caller is from right there in Louisiana. Father, so is this call coming from inside the house? I don't know. Joey from Spring Hill, Louisiana. I don't know where that is in relation to you. Is that nearby?

[C]

I don't think it's real nearby.

[B]

Okay, Joey, welcome Lord of Spirits podcast.

[D]

Thank you. No, we are, we are nowhere close. We are about six hours apart.

[B]

Oh, wow.

[C]

Are you up north?

[D]

Yes, right on. Right on the Arkansas state line.

[C]

Okay.

[B]

All right.

[D]

Yeah. I can spit on Arkansas from my front door.

[C]

Okay. Do you have occasion to do that?

[D]

No, no, no, no, no.

[B]

Arkansas.

[D]

No. My wife and I were actually at your, at your parish about three years ago, I think. We came, we came to town for a Weird Al concert of all things. And the next morning. The next morning we came to your parish, but we, we didn't stay. We left directly after service.

[C]

So lots of people, once they see me in person, sneak away. It happens a lot.

[B]

I do it as well as often as I can.

[D]

We had, we had a long, a long drive ahead of us.

[B]

So what's up, Joey?

[D]

I just, I wanted a little clarification and I wrote all this down because I don't want to ramble.

Just a little clarification on a couple of points. I've made some assumptions based on what I've heard you guys say here and in other places.

So if you'll permit me, I'm just going to read this out. In Genesis 4, we see Cain and Abel bring their offerings to God and they both bring food. So that's a sacrifice in the sense of hospitality and sharing a meal. Are we to assume that at some point God instructed them on the proper way to bring an offering? Because this is a structure of worship in heaven. Secondly, seeing how demons have no power of creation but can abuse and distort what's already been established is the worship we see pagans do in the Old Testament, a distortion of heavenly worship presented to humanity by the demonic powers. And lastly, Father Stephen, do you believe In Joe Hendry.

[C]

Wow.

[B]

I don't even know what that means.

[C]

Can I answer the last question first?

[B]

Yeah, go for it.

[C]

I do believe in Joe Henry, and the man takes an RKO like a champ, I have to say.

Now you can go for the other two questions.

[B]

Yeah, okay, so. So the first one was, did God instruct Cain and Abel in how to offer sacrifice? Because this is how it goes in heaven. And then also, is pagan worship a kind of distortion of. Of that?

I mean, fundamentally, we kind of don't.

We don't see God instructing them on how to do this. We just see it happening suddenly. You know, there's. And there's no indication later in the text that God says, hey, that's not what I said to do.

Or, hey, you got that right. Good job. I mean, the thing about pagan worship and the worship of the people of God is that the fundamental actions. I mean, not everything that goes along with them, obviously, but the fundamental actions are basically the same. It's about offering hospitality and sharing a meal with your God. And whether it's.

I don't know. I think that.

The relationship of that to what we see in the heavenly places, like, there's visions of an altar and so forth, you know, it's kind of.

I feel like it's reciprocal. Like, you could also ask, well, are we. Is the vision of worship in heaven that we're given, is it given because that's what our experience on earth is, and that's the language of worship that humans know, or is it that that's a prototype and, you know, this is what humans are doing? Because that's the prototype. I mean, certainly it does function in that way.

In where God tells Moses, for instance, how to construct the tabernacle, right? He gives them his division and says, now build one of those. But again, that vision is in earthly language, right? It's stuff that Moses recognized that he could build. I don't know that we need to figure out.

What comes first. I guess if you have to pick something, you'd say heaven comes first. But again, the question is, why is it being presented that way? You know, like God is. When God is speaking to Moses, he's speaking probably in some version of Hebrew. Is that to say that Hebrew is the language of heaven? I mean, there are. I think. Isn't it true that there are some church fathers that say that. I know that there is that idea that Hebrew is the language of heaven, or definitely the antediluvian language, right? Everyone's speaking Hebrew before the flood.

[C]

That comes out of the mostly rabbinical tradition.

[B]

Yeah, okay. Yeah.

But in any event, although it shows up in Beowulf, so that's fun.

[C]

But it's. It's actually a dialect of old Cada diet, and we know when it emerged.

[B]

But there you go. Yeah, right, right. Yeah, right. So I don't know. I think, you know, there's a certain level of, you know. Porque? No, no. With a lot of this stuff, it seems like a natural human thing to offer hospitality to an honored, feared, revered guest. Did God need to tell them to do that? I don't know. We don't have a record of him doing that. But to me, it's all just one big, beautiful circle. And that's fine. And it works. It's just human nature. That's how I see it. What do you think, Father?

[C]

Yeah, I mean, I think the fact that we don't get them ever being instructed.

In the text is just related to the ubiquity of.

Sacrifice. Right. That it was so ubiquitous. There was no one worshiping whatever they were worshiping any other way.

Right. And so it's definitionally worship. And so that's just what they do. And in particular, interestingly, Cain and Abel are particularly offering first fruits.

Which is an additional thing. And the instructions about first fruits doesn't come until much later in the Torah.

And part of how that works, there are a bunch of places where in Genesis, most of them are in the patriarchal narratives, but there are some, like Cain and Abel here, where you see people doing things that weren't going to be commanded until hundreds or even thousands of years later in the Torah. Um, and the way that's generally interpreted in Second Temple, Jewish and then Christian sources is that that's because the commandments of the Torah are not arbitrary.

They're not understood in a nominalist kind of way where these are just things God decided to say were bad. And they're bad because God says so. Right. Or these things are good because God says so. But that's the only reason.

Divine command theory kind of thing.

What those examples in Genesis show, according to the common interpretation over the centuries, is that those commandments bring life, and those commandments are true. And those commandments are even described as eternal in many places in the Torah because they're built into the creation itself.

So the idea of offering your first fruits and gratitude to God or having the Sabbath day as a day of rest. Right. That's built into how God created the world.

And God then reveals that at a certain point to people Makes it explicit in the Torah, which is a great help. Right. But that doesn't mean that that's when Moses on top of Mount Sinai is when God made that ruling and when that became true.

[B]

Right.

[C]

It was always true for as long as the creation has existed because it's built into the structure of creation. And so I think that's really how sacrifice is understood. But, I mean, that would include the angelic creation and the worship of heaven also, which is why you would then see a direct sort of parallel there and then. Yes. Everything that's going on with the demons of the pagan nations is a distortion of truth, a distortion of reality, a distortion of that created order.

[B]

Yeah. Which is part of why there's true things in it. You know, it's not some new invented bad thing. It's.

[C]

Right. A good lie is not every single word is false.

[D]

Yeah, yeah.

[C]

And by good lie, I don't mean a lie that's morally good. I mean a lie that's effective at its purpose of deceiving. Yeah, right. Contains some level of truth in order to win confidence and deceive. Right, right.

[B]

All right. Does that. Does that help, Joey?

[D]

I think so. I think so. I feel like I've asked a chicken and egg question. It's kind of go around and around.

[B]

Yeah, it kind of is. So. All right, well, thanks for calling. I mean, it's good stuff to think about, so.

[C]

Although, by the way, the egg came first because reptiles lay eggs.

[B]

There you go.

What about Platypi? Platypodus. Platypuses.

[C]

Platypodus, yeah, platypodus.

[B]

There you go.

[C]

I don't know. I just know they're poisonous. That's all I know.

[B]

Don't eat them. Okay, our next caller is Mason, who's calling from Kentucky. So, Mason, welcome to Laura Spears Pod.

[D]

Not Mason. Nathan.

[B]

Oh, Nathan. Excuse me.

[C]

Are you accusing him of being a freemason?

[D]

A good friend of mine is, and my grandfather was, but I am not yet.

[B]

Wow. We're gonna. We're gonna dock Mike's pay a little bit for misspelling your name.

[C]

Slandering.

[B]

I know, I know. Well, Nathan, part of from Kentucky, welcome to the podcast.

[D]

So, first of all, dead serious isn't a joke. But I did want to say thank you, fathers, because I felt like I really did appreciate K Pop Demon Hunters on a deeper level, thanks to this podcast and listening to you guys.

[B]

Yes.

[C]

And that's what we're really all about here at Lord of Spirits.

[B]

That's right.

I mean, I was Soup. I will say I was super duper skeptical. Super, super skeptical about that movie. I was like, no, this. No. But I, you know, I should have listened to my wife because she knew what she was talking.

[C]

And at least you've got. See, I've got. I've got a great movie that I think has tons of Lord of Spirits related themes in it, but it's, like, majorly R rated, so I can't recommend it to people publicly.

[B]

That's right.

[C]

Whereas, see, you have one that you can, you know, see cast about.

[B]

That's right. That's right. So, I mean, it's just. It's a fun movie and also just kind of, as the kids say, a banger of a soundtrack. So. Yes. So, Nathan, the not freemason from Kentucky, I'm sure you didn't call in to talk about this glorious piece of pop culture that has arrived on our doorstep.

[D]

I mean, I'd be fine for the next hour. But I did have a legit question, too.

[B]

What? That's legit.

[D]

What are you talking about.

Man? I. Or what Father DeYoung can participate in?

[B]

That's fine. It's fine. Hey, we should at least have one or two questions that I can just sort of answer authoritatively. And he sits there twiddling his thumb.

[C]

Just throw me a bone once in a while.

[B]

Yeah. Come on.

All right, what is on your mind?

[D]

What was your favorite song from this movie?

[B]

What was my favorite song from the movie? So, I mean, it's clear that golden is the massive huge hit. And, you know, EJ's vocal performance in that. Good golly, that woman has talent and skill and training. I mean, hot diggity. But I think the one that. That I think is the best song probably is.

Now here, I'm blanking on the name of it, what it sounds like, which is sort of the big, you know, the fight scene at the end. Right, Right after the finale. Yeah, exactly. The finale one where they. Where they kind of realize that repentance and communion and confession is the thing that they really need in their lives. And that's what kind of gives them the ability to heroically defeat the demons with their spiritual weapons. I mean. Right. Isn't that what's going on in that scene?

[D]

Yes, that is. I've listened to that song so many times for, like, the same reason. Just a beautiful expression of what y' all talk about, about retention and healing of community.

[B]

Right? It's totally. And it's a total earworm. I mean, a lot of the songs in that movie are Total earworms too. And I mean, one thing I'll say is, since we're on it, thank goodness, is that, you know, a lot of the people who made that movie are Christians.

And, and have commented in interviews about putting their, their Christian faith into the, the work that they did in the film. So even though there's like stuff there from kind of Korean pagan shamanistic tradition, it's very mixed together in a fascinating way that ultimately points in the Christian direction because, like, the key thing that happens in the film that is really the turning point of repentance for the main, for the characters is confession. It's, it really is. It's confession, you know, confessing to, to other people your, your shortcomings, your sins, your darkness, your brokenness, all that kind of stuff. And I mean, honestly, I. I really feel like this film, I mean, this film is crazy popular amongst especially like middle school aged children and certainly a lot of high schoolers and other young people too. But like, what an amazing tool that we have to be able to explain confession and the way that evil takes over. And when you live a certain way, then the demons are whispering in your ear. And the things that they say are plausible, right? Like when you hear the actual demons speaking to the characters, what they say is very plausible, you know, and it's when they come back together in communion and to confess to one another their sins and so forth that everything works and they're able to defeat evil and to smash the giant hellmouth at the end. So, yes, yes, what it sounds like is such a great song. So, okay, what else did you want? I know you're being very nice and you're throwing stuff out for me like this, but I know that's not what you actually called about. So what did you call about? Nathan? Not a free person from Kentucky.

[D]

So on the episode of Apostle Succession, Yes, I remember Father D. Young talked about that. He was saying it feels like people don't believe in either God or.

Life after the resurrection of the dead because we feel like if somebody dies, they have, quote, unquote, gotten away with it and won't be held accountable. But I think actually a lot of people's reaction to that is more of an attitude of Jonah, like, oh, we all know God's a big softy, that he's forgiving and merciful. So I think a lot of people can believe in that, but they believe that God will probably just let it all go. And I think there may be some question out there of, like, how does Orthodox see that tension between, you know, mercy and accountability. Like, you know, my father followed De Young and he misleads me about which Star Trek captain is best. You know, how would, like, God hold him accountable to that but still show him mercy and forgiveness?

[B]

I mean, it might give him very stern talking to.

[C]

That's a bad example because I only speak the truth about how Captain Kirk is.

The greatest Star Trek captain in history.

[B]

I mean, like.

[C]

But there are certainly things I'm wrong about, just not that he just doesn't.

[B]

Know which ones because obviously if he knew he was wrong about those things, he'd change his opinion.

[C]

I would change my opinion. Exactly.

Yeah.

[B]

There's nothing I'm consciously wrong about.

[C]

Yeah. Like, yeah, no. So.

Yeah, I think.

The, the.

There is definitely a certain amount of resentment out there.

[B]

That's.

[C]

Which.

I'm not just trying to sound French because I'm in Southern Louisiana.

That's Nietzsche's term.

For. For basically when you have sort of rage and anger and a desire for justice and no ability to make that happen.

[D]

Right.

[C]

And so this feeling builds up in you.

It's a sort of the frustration of your. Your will and your desire.

And so. But I think it's less a balance between God's mercy and accountability. Right. Because that isn't what happens at the end of Jonah where God explains like, no, here is the balance between mercy and accountability. It's Jonah, you need to get your mind right, right.

That, you know, you have a bunch of compassion on a vine that sprouted up overnight, but you have no compassion on all of these humans.

Because of the things they've done. Right? So what we're really presented with in Scripture, in the New Testament is.

All of this is going to get resolved. The accountability is going to happen. Judgment is going to happen. And if we're smart, right, and if we believe that that's true.

Then that should motivate us to resolve these things.

[D]

Now.

[C]

So that they don't have to be resolved at the day of judgment.

That's, you know, judge yourself and you will not be judged. Right. So I repent. I judge myself. Right. I confess. I admit to what I've done. I work to try to make it right now. I take accountability now so I won't have to be held accountable.

Later on that day. And so that's for myself. But that then implies in terms of what we want for the other person, we should not be looking at the other person who has wronged us and thinking, oh, you just wait till Judgment Day and then you're going to get yours, right? We know that that's true. But our hope should be, and what we should be seeking to do is out of love for that person and for that person's sake to try to be reconciled with them, to try to help bring them to repentance before that happens. But that repentance is not them getting off the hook. So this is part of the problem with how we see repentance. Like in contemporary America, we think repentance is, oh, you say you're sorry and then God just lets you off the hook and you don't have to deal with any consequences. That's absolutely not the case.

Tell that to David.

Yeah, right. David repented is when he is our icon of repentance, according to all the hymns, right? Icon of repentance after what he did with Bathsheba. Psalm 50, right? Made what God holds up before us as an example of how to repent. And yet.

He had a child die.

He had due to his sexual sin. He had his whole family descend into chaos. He lost his throne for a while. He lost another son, Absalom, on and on and on. There were consequences, all kinds of consequences of his sin. And part of his repentance, part of his accountability was accepting those consequences. When you read through those parts of David's life, every time one of those things happens, right, David mans up and says, this is not, oh, this is what I deserve. God is punishing me like we were talking about earlier, but I did this. I'm responsible for this.

He takes accountability and responsibility at each step. This happened because of what I set in motion.

This happened because of my failures. And that's why he's the image of repentance, right? Because by the time he ends his life on this earth, when the prophet comes and talks to Jeroboam and mentions David, he says, if you are like David and you keep all my commandments and all of my statutes.

Then you'll receive these blessings, right? So by the time David, the prophet and king, this is why he's a saint, right? By the time he gets to the Day of Judgment, it's not that he didn't have any sin. He had plenty of sin and garbage in his life, but it was all dealt with.

It was all repented of. That's what we should want for ourselves and that's what we should want for other people and not let our resentment become.

Right? The idea that, oh, you're going to get yours. And like Jonah, oh, I don't want to help you not get your Nietzsche, actually holds up.

As a prime example of what ressentiment is, he holds up a quote from the third part of Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologica. Now, proviso, Thomas Aquinas was dead. This was done from his notes. So he may not have said this directly himself, we don't know for sure. But the quote is that one of the things that will add to the bliss and the joy of those in heaven will be seeing the sufferings of those in hell.

[B]

Right.

[C]

And like I said, I'm not saying Thomas Aquinas actually said that. He may have wanted to nuance that, but I think that is a sub Christian.

View of things, I think. And it's Jonah's view of things, Right, that he was corrected on by God. So I don't know if that helps. Slash answers your question.

[B]

What do you think, Nathan?

[D]

I think, I think he makes a lot of good points. I'll definitely think on that some more. And as I said in chat, we saw in K Pop, Ginu repents in the end and he still suffers consequences. So.

[B]

Yes, he does. Yes, he does. I mean, he's basically vaporized by the great sort of missile weapon of Hema. You know, there's a. There's a lot of people holding out for the possibility of a return of Ginu in a sequel. So who knows? Who knows? Yes. All right, well, thank you very much for calling, Nathan. So, all right, well, staying in the same general reason region, we have a caller from Mississippi. So, Ian, welcome. Laura Spears podcast.

[D]

Good evening, Fathers.

[B]

Good evening.

[D]

First of all, the first, the first, the last caller convinced me to watch K Pop Demon Hunters.

[C]

So.

[B]

I know like it. I, you know, I'm saying, like, I'm sure.

[C]

I think Father Andrew's getting money from Netflix at this point.

[B]

Clearly, clearly I'm getting a massive payoff.

Obviously, because they need my help to promote the film. Clearly.

[C]

You bring it to a whole new audience of Orthodox Christians that they.

[B]

Otherwise might have reached. That's right. That's right. So, Ian, what. What is really on your mind, though? And I hope you enjoy the film.

[D]

Yeah, thank you. So my question has to do with the Council of Jerusalem now on the requirements that were given to the Gentiles after entering the church in honor stand abstaining from sacrificing the idols. And I understand abstaining from sexual morality, but I never quite understood what's going on here with abstaining from blood and abstaining with food that's been strangled. Now I understand that does come from the Law. And those are the requirements for everybody who lives in land, not just the Israelites, for the, you know, the stranger, the gentile and Israelites land. But I just not quite understood what's so important going on here that makes it so important to be major part of the Council of Jerusalem.

[B]

Yeah, I mean, this is all. This all has to do with pagan worship, right?

Father, why don't you flesh that out a bunch? It all, it's all kind of one big matrix of idolatry, Right?

[C]

Well, but also this goes back even further than.

Leviticus, right? Leviticus is the holiness code. In Leviticus is.

How it gets to the Council of Jerusalem. But the not eating blood part goes actually back to Noah, to Genesis 9 after the flood.

When God gives humanity as a whole. Right. This is part of why it's to everybody, not just Israel, God gives humanity permission to eat animals.

After the flood, but not their blood.

And this is somewhat fortuitous because I was just teaching about this in the book of Jubilees on Tuesday. So that's fresh. Yeah. And so there's a couple pieces there. This is first is related to the paganism issue.

So the.

Before the flood, the world before the flood, the world of the Nephilim. Right. What we've talked before about.

How. And this is explicit in the Book of Wisdom, it's in a lot of Second Temple Jewish literature, that part of what's going on with the giants before the flood and after, frankly, is human sacrifice and attendant cannibalism.

Texts like the Book of Jubilees extend that cannibalism all the way to the animal kingdom, cannibalizing themselves.

And so.

It'S really an image of sort of predation.

Right. So murder is one thing.

[B]

Right.

[C]

But human sacrifice with attendant cannibalism is even past that. Right. Is even more sort of predatory than that, killing someone and eating them.

As opposed to just killing them with some other motive. And so there is this sort of decline.

Right? In. In paradise, humans are eating fruit from trees, meaning they're not even harming the tree.

Right. You pluck fruit from a tree, it grows more fruit. Right? In its season.

After the expulsion from paradise, Adam is farming and working the land, so he's growing and killing and eating plants. Right? But it's just plants.

But then without permission, this snowballs right through Cain and his line.

[B]

To the.

[C]

Point where not only do they start eating animals, but they get to the point where they're sacrificing and eating each other.

And humanity has become truly like predatory.

And so after the flood.

God gives humans permission to eat animals, but not to eat or drink their blood as sort of a.

A stopgap.

On humans becoming predatory. And this is also where at this point after the flood, where God says, now there's going to be this alienation between humans and animals.

Right? You're going to eat them, but that means they're going to not be friendly with you and they're going to try and eat you. Right? Like that has a cost already in and of itself that gets further defined. Remember, Genesis is part of the Torah gets further defined in the food laws, right, where you have domesticated animals.

That you're allowed to eat and you're not allowed to eat non domesticated animals in general, for the most part.

And so those domesticated animals are raised in certain ways and treated in certain ways.

Sacralized in certain ways that allows for them to be eaten. But part of the eating of them is the sacrifice of them.

And the way Leviticus say 16.

Develops out of what's going on in Genesis 9 is the purpose of the blood of the animals that are being sacrificed and eaten. The purpose of that blood is to make atonement.

The purpose for which that life is intended is not for human consumption, but to make atonement for the sin in the world, Right? Not for.

Not for consumption.

And so.

That sort of paints the surrounding picture of why you don't drink blood or eat meat with blood in it, right? And from the perspective of the Council of Jerusalem, all of those issues and all of those points still pertain as they meet, right? There's. There's nothing in that that's been somehow.

Invalidated or changed by the coming of the Messiah other than the one place where we do drink blood, and that's in the Eucharist.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, right.

[C]

And in, in the Eucharist, number one, there's no predation because Christ offers himself to us and for us, right? We don't take his life. We're not killing him, he's offering it to us. And his life speaks a better word than that of Abel. And when he offers us his life when we drink his blood, right. The blood is the life of the thing he is offering us, his life, which is the life of God himself.

Does that cover it? You know, life.

[D]

The flesh is in the blood.

[C]

Yeah.

[D]

And I've given to you on the altar, when I had read that, I was wondering, is there something Eucharistic relation going on here? Because flesh, yes, Blood altar, there. There's some thread there. I was kind of wondering about right.

[B]

Yeah. It's ultimately pointing to the Eucharist. The Eucharist is the fulfillment of all of that, ultimately. Yeah.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

All right. Well, thank you very much for calling. We're going to go ahead and take our second break on this all live Q and A episode of the Lord Spirits podcast. Be right back.

[A]

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

[B]

The centuries after the Protestant Reformation brought.

[A]

About a radical reinterpretation of The Epistles of St. Paul, disconnected from any historical reality. But Paul operated during his entire life as a faithful Pharisee within the Roman Jewish world.

[B]

In St. Paul the Pharisee, Jewish apostle to all nations, Father Stephen DeYoung surveys.

[A]

Paul's life and writings, interpreting them within.

[C]

The holy tradition of the Orthodox Church.

[A]

This survey is followed by DeYoung's interpretive translation of St. Paul's epistles, which deliberately.

[B]

Avoids overly familiar terminology.

[A]

By using words and ideas grounded in.

[B]

1St century Judaism, DeYoung hopes to unsettle commonly held notions and help the reader reassess St. Paul in his historical context.

[A]

Available now at store.ancientfaith.com Again, that is store.ancientfaith.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 855-23-7-2346. That's 855-AF-RADIO.

[B]

We listen to the demons. We let them get between us. But none of us are out here on our own. Welcome back. This is the third and final half of this episode of Lord of Spirits podcast. We're just taking calls. It's been pretty good so far. What do you think, Father? Good question.

[C]

Fair to middlin.

[B]

Yeah. Yeah, it's okay. Okay. There's an interesting thing going on in the chat, chat there. And YouTube people are debating about, like, what about bloody stakes or whatever.

[C]

It's like, that's not blood. It's a prison.

[B]

Exactly. It's not blood. It's okay. It's not blood. It's not blood.

Yeah, yeah.

[C]

So they use it red because it looks, it's colored red because it looks more natural.

[B]

Yeah. Isn't it called like, if it was.

[C]

Blue, it weird you out, you would want to eat it.

[B]

Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, haven't you ever cut yourself and bled like that's blood. That doesn't look the same as what's coming out of your steak. Yeah, it's not the same thing.

Yes, we have a caller all the way from the other side of the world. We have Christian from Australia. Christian, welcome. Lord of Spirits podcast.

[D]

Good day. Good day. Good day. It is an honor to be here.

[B]

Good day. And so what time of day is it there for you? Is it about like, 11 in the morning?

[D]

11 in the morning, yeah.

[C]

Another quick question. When you flush the toilet, which way does the water swirl? Clockwise or counterclockwise?

[D]

It depends on the time of day. Okay.

And I would just like to also, as the representative of Australia, make the ruling that it is, in fact, platypi. Platypus debacle.

[B]

Oh, platypi. Interesting. Giving a Latin ending to a Greek word. That's right. Very daring.

Which way is the cultural appropriation going this time?

All right, so, Christian, what's your question? Comment? Concern? Brave rebuke of Father Steven DeYoung.

[D]

Okay, well, I feel like this is also the perfect question to Stephen De Jong, considering that he starch. But I had a question.

[B]

You kind of breaking up there a little bit, so.

[D]

Oh, hold on.

Sorry. Perhaps that's a bit better now.

[B]

Oh, way better. Yes. So much better.

[D]

Okay.

[C]

I mean, we're cutting you some slack because we know what the phone lines have been like there since the nuclear war.

[D]

That's right. And my ping's like 400 right now. Impossible. I had a question, especially perhaps Stephen DeYoung, because he is Dutch, because it's about paying taxes.

[B]

Okay.

[C]

A grievous thing.

[D]

So I was thinking in regards to your previous episode on Apostolic Authority, I found it very useful, but I had a nagging question in the side of me, and I feel like I kind of know which direction the answer is, but I'll just spill it out. How are we to interpret as orthodox Christians? How are we to properly integrate secular authority into our lives? Especially when it comes to things like paying taxes. Taxes. Because, of course, in the temple era, Jesus had no problem paying the tax, even though it was a complete rot of a system to enrich certain people. But some of us feel in some countries that not only is it just a get rich quick scheme for some people, but it's actively being used to destroy us in many ways. So, you know, a lot of us might be tradesmen, might be working in cash, and we can set aside a bit more money than we otherwise have so we can pay less tax and have more for the family. Et cetera, whatsoever. Classic things. You know all about this, Stephen DeYoung. So what are we to interpret within the orthodox tradition, the correct perspective on doing these things? Do we just take it?

[B]

What do you think, Abuna? So stick it to the man.

[C]

Yeah. So, I mean, Christ was asked this question pretty directly, right? Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar?

And I agree. I mean, I live in a country where. Where they take my tax money and use it to send weapons to murder my fellow Christians in other parts of the world.

So they're doing nothing good with it, right? But neither was Caesar.

Right? At the time, St. Paul was telling us to pray for the emperor, it was Caligula, and that it was Nero.

And what Christ says, and this is often misinterpreted, right? So they could try to catch Christ by saying, you know, is it lawful or no? And they're trying to catch him because if he says yes, then all of the deeply religious people are going to be like, oh, this guy's a Roman collaborator. If he says no, then, you know, oh, we got him. Because the Romans are going to, you know, take care of him for us. Because he's. He's saying not to pay taxes to Caesar.

And then what's funny is when he gives his answer, a lot of people interpret it as him just saying yes.

Right? Even though the text tells us that when he gave his answer, all marveled. Why would they marvel at him just saying yes, right? So what he says is he takes out the coin, right? And he says, who's, you know, whose face is this? Right? But what he actually says, if you read the Greek, is, who's.

Ikon? Whose icon.

Whose image is this? Right? And that's a little bit of a play on words.

Because the answer they give him is Caesar, right? But you get the play of what Christ is doing when he then responds to them and he says, okay, give to Caesar what is Caesar's, and give to God what is God's. Because.

That is Caesar's image is correct at one level. But whose image is Caesar?

[D]

Right?

[C]

Caesar's a human. He's created in God's image.

And so the idea is, hey, this coin, it's got Caesar's face on it. If he wants it back, it's his, right? If he wants it back, give it back to him, right? But then what is God's? Well, everything is God's.

I'm God's. The coin is God's. Caesar is God's, right? God possesses everything. And so, yeah, we owe Caesar his money. Back that he minted if he wants it back. But we owe God everything.

[D]

Right?

[C]

And that's why everyone.

Marvels at that.

[B]

Right?

[C]

And it points to the idea that what Christ does with that answer is he relativizes the value of money.

He's really saying to the questioner, why do you value this coin so highly?

Why is that the highest or a higher value to you?

Now, given you could say, well, it's not that I'm valuing the money, it's that I'm valuing what I could do with the money higher than what I know the government is going to do with the money. Right?

But that's not what Christ. That's not how Christ answers it, and that's not how St. Paul understands it. And so, yes, we should pay our taxes. We should not pay more taxes than we need to.

So, meaning we shouldn't cheat, we shouldn't lie, we shouldn't be dishonest about our taxes, but we also shouldn't be dumb and pay more than we need to. Right? Christ says, be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.

And if you're in a democracy.

Right, and you have some ability within that democracy to whatever limited degree, to change where that money goes or to better things rather than worse things, or to lessen that amount of money, then by all means, right, That's. Use that. Use that a power and ability wisely too. But tldr. Yeah, you got to pay your taxes.

[B]

There we go. All right. Well, thanks very much, Christian, for calling all the way from Australia, obviously where you are. It is fully my birthday. So thanks for calling for my birthday.

[C]

So listen, it's liturgically your birthday. You just need to understand you as a prophet will die on the date of your birth. This will become your saints day and it will begin at vespers.

[B]

There we go. Although I won't go into that. Okay. All right.

Okay. Jennifer, calling from the old north state, the land of the longleaf pine, North Carolina. Jennifer, welcome. The Lord of Spirits podcast.

[E]

Thank you and happy birthday tonight, today, tomorrow, Father Andrew, Amen.

[B]

What part of North Carolina are you from?

[E]

I live in Smithfield and I normally tell people we're near Raleigh. Yeah, we're about a half hour down Highway 70 from Raleigh towards the coast.

Our home parish is in Fuquay, Varina, which is also near Raleigh, but not Raleigh.

[B]

So.

I was at the consecration of your parish with Bishop Nicholas and I.

[E]

Heard you're moving back next year to the area.

[B]

That is correct. Next summer I will be back in Raleigh, North Kakalaki.

And who knows? Perhaps. I mean, I know exactly where Smithfield is because I used to live. I used to live in Raleigh. I did my undergraduate years there and I was in that area for 11 years. So my little sister graduated from Garner.

[E]

Garner High School while you were. Well, okay, so I know that area. And maybe I went to a concert when you were a stagehand at what used to be called Walnut Creek because I think that's where you used to work.

[B]

That was one of the many places I worked. Yeah, I'm sure It's had like 12 different names since it was Walnut Creek because some corporation buys the name every couple of years or whatever.

[C]

One of many places. Can you not hold down a job? What's going on?

[B]

I held down many jobs simultaneously.

[C]

Vagabond. Were you.

[B]

It's kind of the stagehand life is. You got like 12 W2s at the end of the year.

So. Well, so. Okay, I have to ask. Jennifer and I. And this might put you on the wrong side of the line. Tar Heels or Wolf Pack?

[E]

Neither.

[B]

Oh, are you a Duke Blue Devil? Is that your. Your deal or some other.

[E]

Yes. Well, I. In my younger days was right. I was raised by a rabid Duke fan and got to grow up going to basketball games and football games and I drank all the Kool Aid. But in my. My later years, that's kind of cooled off because that's a lot of energy I don't need all the time.

[B]

Yeah. Is it. Was that during the coach pay years when he was still. Oh, yeah, yeah. Wow.

[E]

Yeah, it was.

[D]

It was.

[E]

It was a fun middle and high school experience for me for sure.

[B]

All right, well, okay, so from. From Durham, or from people who love Durham as it's pronounced, many parts of Durham. What's. What's on your mind, Jennifer?

[E]

Well, we definitely. My family's probably listening from the other room and we definitely want to thank God and thank you both because you guys were totally our on ramp to orthodoxy. And we are thankful to have just celebrated our two year orthodiversary of being brought into the church on the feast of Transfiguration two years ago. So thank you for your part in that and thank God. So I have. I have two questions related to time. I know it's ticking away and I know no one really knows what time it is, but I have two questions. The first question is.

Brought to mind by my son Joshua. And I know in the story of the battle it says that the sun stood still, but having listened to you guys for the last couple of years, I know not to think of the heavenly bodies and bodies the way that I necessarily used to think of that. So I guess my one question is, what is a more full orthodox understanding of, you know, when it says that the sun stood still, what. How many and what are. What are the many ways we can understand that fully? And that's one question. I can give you both or I can stop and let you answer.

[B]

Let's do that one first. Yeah. I don't know, Father, what. What is the deal with the sun standing still?

[C]

Yeah, well, yeah, this is one of those things where people could get mired in weird modernism, right? Like, does that mean the Earth stopped rotating? Does that mean. Right.

[B]

I mean, if. If Superman goes the other way around the Earth, it makes. Time goes backwards.

[C]

Is this presuming a geocentric universe? And therefore should I believe in one and be a flat Earther?

So, yeah, that's. But that. None of that is what's in. In view. So first of all, you have just. At the phenomenological level, right? That's what they experienced, right? But yes, so this is actually an instance of something that gets talked a lot about a lot in some of the. The latter psalms and in.

Some parts of Isaiah that talk about sometimes in relation to the day of the Lord, the day of Yahweh, like the. The last Judgment, and sometimes just talking about judgment in general that talk about the actual.

Elements of the physical creation sort of going to war as part of God's army against evildoers.

Against the wicked. The idea being that.

Again, this idea that there is this created order by sin and wickedness, you set yourself at odds with that order, right? So think about, like Cain can no longer farm. Like, the earth won't yield its crops for him, right? After he. He commits murder. And so there's a sort of enmity there where.

And this is depicted in various ways poetically, right? Wild animals attacking people, right?

And this kind of thing. And we're used to wild animal attacks, right, As a thing that happens in the world. But the Psalms and Isaiah and these other places in the prophets will talk about like the sun and the moon going after people.

The stars going after people, right? The sun will not strike you by day, nor the moon by night, right?

The, the winds.

Right? A mighty, you know, God will cause a mighty wind that will sweep them away, right?

All of these different elements of creations, rivers of water, flooding, right? That sort of all of these things which serve God. And so that's part of the picture is that.

It'S not Israel making war against these. These giant clans, right, These people, it's God making war against them. And Israel is part of God's army, but so is the sun, so is the wind, right? So are the animals. Everything that serves God is part of his army to bring this judgment. And so the sun there.

Conceived of as a spiritual being, is cooperating, right, with. Is cooperating with Joshua's army, with the angelic leader, right, the angel of the Lord, who's leading Joshua's army.

In doing battle against the enemy.

[B]

Does that help you, Jennifer?

[E]

It does. We've. That's been a question.

[D]

We've.

[E]

We've talked about calling and asking that one for a while now, so.

[D]

Good.

[E]

Thank you. I appreciate that.

[B]

You made it. Okay. What's part two?

[E]

Part two? You know, everybody grumbles about daylight savings time and, like, standard time.

But the fact is, especially at this latitude, the winter days are shorter and the summer days are longer. You know, we change our clocks back, we get grumpy to adapt to it, you know, whatever. So do we have any understanding about how people, either in the time of Christ's earthly ministry or even earlier than that, you know, back to Moses or earlier, you know, earlier times. Do we know how the, you know, ancient people dealt with what, you know, daylight savings time with the days being shorter sometimes and the days being longer sometimes, you know, did the. Are there more night watches? Do the night watches last longer? Do they make other adjustments? Like, do we have any idea about how anybody back in those times would have adapted to that?

[B]

Yeah, I mean, they obviously knew that, you know, different times, year, that daylight and night last at different times.

Yeah. It's interesting, actually, if you ever get a copy of it. Depends on which edition, I guess. But there's a great big book called the Horologian, which is one of the liturgical books of the Orthodox Church. And part of it has at least a lot of versions of it will have a list of the snick saria for each day of the year. And then when you get to a new month, and you can see this sometimes in the mana, too, when you get to a new month, it'll say something like, the day hath so many hours and the night hath so many. Now, obviously, that's based on a certain latitude, whoever wrote that, Right. Because it varies depending on how far north or south you are. But nonetheless, there was this idea of, okay, this month has this many hours, and then this month has this many hours, you know, of daylight or night, night time. And the references in the Bible to like the first hour, the third hour, the sixth hour, the ninth hour, those don't line up to like the times that we have where it's like 8 o' clock in the morning or 9 o' clock in the morning or whatever. It really is based on.

The sun, you know. So, for instance, vespers traditionally happens at sunset, which means that it's not the same time of year all year round.

And there are. I don't know if this happens everywhere there, but definitely in, in places on Mount Athos they are still following this. Right. But they all have clocks too. So what happens is they'll say, well, in this month, Mattens is at 2am, but at this month it's at 4am, that kind of thing. So they're still doing it, but then they're kind of laying and overlaying on top of.

Our standard kind of clock times. So they've adapted and they're sort of doing both. But yeah, I mean, a lot more of it was just simply relative to where the sun was, which, I mean, in many ways strikes me as a much more kind of natural way to live.

Because with the advent of like electric lighting and this sort of stuff, that really changed the world and it made it so that the clock way of living that we have now became possible, you know, where you just turn the lights on and then you turn them off whenever you want to go to bed.

So that's my knowledge of a lot of that. Of course, I mean, different regions have different traditions about how to mark time. The fact that we have 24 hours in a day, doesn't that come from the Sumerian's father.

[C]

The Babylonians?

[B]

Babylonians, yeah, yeah.

Yeah. And my understanding is that that's actually based on the human hand. Right. So if you take your thumb as sort of the counting method, and then you look at each of your finger, your four fingers, each one has three segments. So you count 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1st, 2, 3, 1, two, that's 12. And so you do that five times, that's base 60. But you know, with two hands, you've got 24 of those segments.

[C]

Yeah, so you did 12 instead of tens, basically.

[B]

Yeah, exactly. So.

All of that is going on. And of course, modern inventions have radically changed the way that we experience time and think about time, that it's such that it's almost unthinkable to do it some other way, you know, and so. And of course, being able to travel very quickly introduces the problem of jet lag. You know, there's all that going on, too. So I don't know. I don't know if that just throws. Throws dust all over the question.

[C]

Personally, I'm an old clockist, so I just. I. I don't acknowledge Daylight Savings time. I just go by what time it is in Constantinople.

[B]

But, yeah, I'm definitely anti dst. That is for sure. Like, just.

[C]

But we will have it forever because every year they try to pass a bill in Congress to get rid of it, and every year they get into an argument about which time to make permanent, and so it never happens.

[B]

I don't want them to make. I don't want them to make Daylight Saving time permanent. Permanent. I want.

[C]

And that's why it will never end.

[B]

See, yeah, Because. Because I'm right.

[C]

And those are inflexible.

[B]

Deeply, deeply wrong.

[C]

Inflexible.

But, yeah, they would. They would add watches to the night.

[B]

Right.

[C]

There's. There's a vast variety of Latin literature that is, like. I mean, not really literature. Latin texts that are soldiers complaining about how dark and how long the night is in, like, Britannia and Germany, because.

[B]

It'S so far north.

[C]

Like, that's one of the reasons. Yeah, they thought it was dark all the time. Like, that's what part of why they thought it was, like, evil and bad. Like, it didn't want to go there.

[B]

That's right. And a home of wizards and, you.

[C]

Know, it's just dark all the time. Those woods.

[B]

Yeah. Yeah.

Does that help, Jennifer? It does.

[E]

It was just one of the things we were curious about. I think one of the last. Either this last time change or the time before when people were being grumpy about it. My husband said something to the effect of, that's just our modern way to get back to Byzantine time. Meaning, like on Mount Athos, when things start in the morning and I was like, oh, made me hate it a little less.

[B]

Well, yes. All right, well, tell Father James I said hello.

[E]

I will. Thank you. I appreciate you guys very much. Hope you all both have a good night and have a happy birthday.

[B]

Thank God. Thank you very much. All right, next we have Joe calling from the Sooner State. So, Joe from Oklahoma, welcome Laura Spears podcast.

[D]

Evening, Fathers.

[E]

Thank you.

[D]

Can you hear me well?

[B]

Yeah, yeah.

[D]

Awesome. Good. So my question, and I hope I'm making sense and try to follow me. So on this podcast, you know, you've talked a lot about.

Americanism, slash, you know, Babylon the Great, as opposed to, you know, the Kingdom of God.

[C]

Right.

[D]

The Church.

So keeping that in mind, here's My question. Okay. When the Roman Empire was baptized, one of the things that they did that you've talked about before is they went to all these pagan holy sites and buried saints there to, you know, make sure that, you know, the demons were kicked out. Right. And maybe I'm misunderstanding how that works. Exactly. Feel free to correct me. Right. In light of that.

How much of, like, our problems with Americanism or however one wishes to frame that is sort of because, like, we just don't have enough saints buried here yet. And, like, that's what we need to work on. And like, you know, and like, how does that inform, like, you know, how much of a waste of time, like, you know, culture warrior type stuff and whatever on the Internet is, you know, whatever. Right. Is when the ultimate goal on changing this country that, you know, a lot of people listening to this show live in for the better is ultimately, you know, hey, we, we need to bury saints here. Does that make sense or am I misunderstanding?

[B]

I mean, I, I think it makes sense.

Yeah. I mean, I. What I would say is I, I agree with you that, that we need more sanctified ground.

But I would also say that one doesn't sanctify the ground only by having the shrines of saints. Although I'm. I mean, I'm a big one for going on pilgrimage to the shrines of saints.

And I should mention that there are seven canonized Orthodox saints whose main relics are here in America, you know, meaning like their. Their whole bodies or the vast majority of their bodies.

And actually, I've done research recently that I discovered that there are 20.

I should say seven canonized orthodox saints who lived in America, whose shrines are here in America. But there are actually 20 other orthodox saints that have major shrines here in America. Either the whole. They're almost complete relics, or maybe a major body part like a skull or a hand or a foot or something like this that are in Catholic churches. Interestingly enough, I published an article about this on the Orthodox history website. I think I called it something like the other American Orthodox saints because a lot of Orthodox are not aware of them. Right.

But in addition to that, it's like, how do you change your country? You change it by making it holy.

I think it's St. John Chrysostom who says at one point he's talking about the city of Constantinople, and he said that if just 10 of us, if just 10 of us lived the Christian life for real in this city, we would light the place on fire.

And so, I mean, that's how you. That's how it's really done. The problem with culture warring is it's about trying to force other people to live according to the commandments of Christ. Hopefully that's what we're trying to. Hopefully that's what the. The goal is anyway. And not just my commandments.

Without them actually being on board with the gospel.

One of the things that. Father Stephen, you've said this a bunch of times. I know, on your whole Counsel of God podcast and maybe a couple times on this show, too. I don't remember.

That God never commands Israel to go and force the nations to live according to the Torah, but rather that Israel is supposed to be a light to the nations.

And that the command to the church as the renewed Israel is. Is the same. That we're to be a light to the nations, that we're to preach the gospel to the nations. And then once someone has.

Accepted the gospel and.

Begun their process of repentance, then they're taught the commandments of Christ and how to repent.

So the problem with culture warring is that you're asking people to live like Christians when they're not Christians. Or especially. Or we could even make it more specific, live like Orthodox Christians when they're not Orthodox Christians. Why would you live as an Orthodox Christian if you're not an Orthodox Christian? You know, what's your reason for that?

But it's much more effective to live a saintly life. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't participate in public life. Right? That we shouldn't participate in the civic community. But trying to use force to make other people live like Orthodox Christians, I mean, it's just not even going to work. So I don't get why we do it. It's like, just not successful.

Hearts have to be changed ultimately. But yeah, I mean, I'm a big fan of saints, shrines and making pilgrimages to relics. I now keep a list of all the ones I've been to. And I've been to five of our. The American Orthodox saints who lived here. I've been to five of those shrines. I have just two left to go. One is in California, St. Sebastian Dabovich. And then the other is the newly canonized St. Olga in Alaska. She's pretty hard to get to, but I intend to go there at some point.

But yeah, I mean.

Live as a saint. Sanctify the place you're in, make it holy. You don't have to wait until you're dead or a holy person around you is dead, you know, but certainly the body of a saint in your place is a powerful thing, for sure.

Yeah. What would you have to add to that, Father Stephen?

[C]

Well, yeah, I mean, building off a couple of things. You know, the culture war thing.

[D]

Part.

[C]

Of the perversity of evangelical Christian nationalism is that they want to force this outward compliance with the commandments of God onto people.

And these are people who believe that works have no value.

So they believe that spiritually, the outward compliance that they want to force upon people by threat of violence will do nothing to save their souls.

So what are they even doing?

Like, what are you even doing at that point? You're just trying to enforce your own will and your own preferences over other people. Right. That's just sort of a naked will to power, probably fueled by a lot of resentment not to bring that up again.

[B]

Right.

[C]

Your will has been frustrated and your ability to enforce it on other people. And so now you're looking for a way to grab the mechanisms of power and do that. But it is of no spiritual benefit to anyone by their own accounting, and yet they want to do it.

But, yeah, I think where Father Andrew ended up there, I think burying the bodies of saints at those places is step two. And I think that will be a great day. I think that will be a great day when we tear down Monticello and. And build an Orthodox church there. And when we rip down the apotheosis of George Washington from the Capitol Building and replace it with the icon of the Ascension, I think that'll be great. I'll be first in line. We'll have to change the street layout in Washington, D.C. because it's a big Masonic symbol. But we could do all that.

[B]

Right.

[C]

But that's like a lot of people.

[B]

Excited when you say that, Stepfather Stephen.

[C]

That's like step two.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

Step one is the U.S. needs to make the saints to bury. Right. And that's sort of where Father Andrew ended up there. So the way we work on step one is trying to be saints ourselves and trying to recognize the saints in our midst and follow their example in our communities. And that's how we do our bit toward getting there. Because I'm realistic, I probably won't, with my bodily eyes, live to see the day where we get to renovate Washington D.C. and its various pagan monuments.

[B]

But.

[C]

I still hope it'll happen.

[B]

Yeah. Yeah. What do you think? Does that answer your question?

[D]

Absolutely. Absolutely does. So thank you, Fathers.

[B]

All right. You're welcome. Okay, well, we've got someone calling all the way from Madison, Wisconsin. I'm probably going to mispronounce this name. So forgive me. Is it Anash?

[D]

It's Anosh. Yeah.

[B]

Good evening, Anush. Close, close. All right, well, welcome to Lord of Spears podcast. Anush, what is on your mind?

[D]

Thank you. I had a question about the story in Judges 21, which is about the Benjamite tribes, and I think they kind of, like, steal or just. Yeah, just pick up these wives, and it's always been a story that she's been like, oh, that's. That's a funny story. But, yeah, just wondering about what's the purpose of that story, I guess, in the Book of Judges, or like. Yeah. What do we draw from that? Is that just like, oh, here's something that happened historically, or is there something. Some other connection to it?

[B]

What do you think, Father?

[C]

Take a shot at it.

[B]

I have to look this up and reread it again.

Let me look it up while you give. Take a shot.

[C]

No, I'm gonna make you look it up.

[B]

Oh, okay.

I mean, yes. And there's days there was no king in Israel. I mean, I. If you read the Book of Judges, Right.

It just gets. I mean, you've said this last time, Father. It just gets worse and worse as you go.

So, I mean, I have no reason not to believe bad stuff going on in these stories.

Yeah. I wouldn't say, oh, this is just a kind of instructive story. You know, it seems to me like it's.

[C]

Yeah, yeah. The Book of Judges is a descent into madness.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

The arc of it, and it doesn't start in a good place. I mean, it starts with the angel of the Lord saying, I'm done with you people. I'm leaving.

And then, you know, it ends with the tribes of Israel making war against each other.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

And killing each other. And so the further you get in the book, the darker and darker things get right to the point that even though in Sunday School, you get Samson sort of ironically transmogrified into Hercules, which he's supposed to be critiquing.

It presents quasi heroic. That's where your Sunday school version of the book stops, because the stories after that just are not fit for children.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

There's no way to make them that. Right. Like, it just gets worse. And you have Gideon sort of in the middle as this ambivalent, kind of crafty.

Guile, some figure. Right. So, yeah, the.

When we're reading any text, including Judges, Right. We. We have to read it.

We have to read it as a literary unit. Right. And. And we've been taught to a certain extent to read Things in the Bible. As if. Well, if the Bible describes it, then it's saying it's good or something. Right. So, Jeff, that kill, sacrifices his daughter. Well, I mean, that must have been the right thing to do. It's right there in the Bible. Right. Or, you know, somebody has multiple wives. Oh, well, okay. Polygamy must have been okay. Right.

Or just in a purely sort of moral sense. But even though it's very ancient literature, there could still be a lot of nuance. Right. And description. And you have to look at. Yeah. The trajectory of judges that this is. This is a case of everything getting just worse and worse and. And worse and worse. And then as you. The next. The next part of the history, even though we have Ruth interposed in there in most of our English Bible, the next real part of the history is the beginning of Samuel, where things are bad, and then the king, as judges, sort of sets up with the whole. In those days, there was no king. The coming of the king, not Saul, but David, is what sort of then sets things back in the right direction. Yeah.

[B]

Yeah. Does that help, Anush?

[D]

Yeah, that definitely helps. Yeah. Appreciate you answering that. And I must say, this podcast is one of the rare podcasts that did mention my name because you talked about the genealogy of Adam and his line. So I don't get to hear my name on podcasts that often, so that was fun.

[B]

Good. Very good. Well, thank you very much for calling. Yeah, God bless you. Okay, our next call comes from one of those Dutch colonies, Grand Rapids, Michigan. So, Scott, welcome.

[C]

Laura, Spirits podcast, veritable New Jerusalem.

[D]

Oh, thank you, Fathers. Thankfully, though, I am not Dutch. So.

[B]

What. What do you mean?

[C]

Well, then you're not much good, sir.

[D]

And. And I just got done watching K Pop Demon Hunters, so.

[B]

And what did you think? Thumbs up or thumbs down?

[D]

I. Thumbs up. I actually thought it was surprisingly good.

[B]

Yeah, exactly. Surprisingly good. Like, shockingly good. Like what? How is this good? I don't know, but it's so good.

[D]

I know. It's great.

[B]

Which. Which one of the hunters is your favorite?

[D]

Roomy.

[B]

Yeah. I mean, she's the crowd favorite. Absolutely. Yeah.

[D]

Yeah, yeah.

[B]

She's great.

[D]

Yeah. I mean, she's gotta be the model of repentance for us.

[B]

Yeah, totally. And I mean, and you know the young woman who voice. Who does her singing voice. Ej. I mean, good golly. Right?

Unbelievable. Unbelievable singer. Incredible. I love. I love the direction. People are now giving me a little bit of love on this. It's kind of a weird thing, but. But here we are so, okay, okay. You're clearly buttering us up because you want to say something terrible now, I'm sure. So late on us.

[D]

Oh, no. So easy question. So.

I'm wondering about the question. So, like a lot of Northern European people, I have a significant amount of Neanderthal DNA. Turns out.

[C]

There we go. So now we're kidding.

[D]

I wonder.

I wonder how we think about the question of, do Neanderthals or did they. Did Neanderthals bear the image of God? Now, when I, growing up in a kind of fundamentalist background, I would have, I think, looked at this question one or two ways. I would either looked at it through a kind of strictly materialist sense of, you know, the. The Ken Ham approach of there's got to be some.

Kind of material scientific means to kind of explain that, or would have just rejected it outright as some sort of evolutionary propaganda. But how was orthodox Christians, who. We don't understand the scriptures and the ways of reading the scriptures in the same way as our sola scriptura evangelical fundamentalist friends. How do we think about that question? If the. If the Neanderthals, who some of us are genetically descended from, and I know that's a large question as well, did they bear God's image? And what does that mean?

[B]

Yeah, I mean, my understanding is that genetically we all have a little. Almost all of us, probably, particularly white people, I think, but almost all the.

[C]

More Northern European blood you have in you.

[B]

Right.

[C]

Yeah. So Africans have almost none.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. But you and I, on the other hand.

[C]

Yes.

[B]

We are probably among the most Neanderthal.

[C]

I am laden with it.

[B]

Yeah. Yeah. I think it's. The Dutch and the Lithuanians actually have some of the highest concentrations. It's true. Of Neanderthal blood. So, I mean, I don't know exactly. I mean, my gut feeling, which is not necessarily the best way to go, is to say that Neanderthals are humans.

You know, clearly we can interbreed with that. You know, everybody. They're all interbreeding with each other.

[C]

They're all Neanderthals, just bonobos, anyway.

[B]

All for some definition of all.

[C]

Okay.

[B]

Yeah. I mean.

Yeah. So, yeah. What do you do with the fact that there are. There are other humanoid hominid species. I don't know the correct term.

[C]

Well, no. Yeah. So.

[B]

No. Yeah, that's the question. Really?

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

Denny's and etc.

[C]

Yeah. No. So, okay, here we go.

[B]

Okay.

[C]

Everything that's in Genus Homo is a human.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

Right.

[B]

And that's my thought.

[C]

Anthropologists will tell you will tell you that species within the genus Homo does not mean the same thing as species does normally, because what species normally means is can interbreed. Speciation occurs when they can't actually interbreed anymore.

[B]

Right, right.

[C]

So you have differences within a species. Right. And then you have separate species. That's the mark. That's not how it works in genus Homo.

[B]

So they're more like breeds.

[C]

So this is, I'm just talking from a purely secular anthropological side.

[B]

Biological right now.

[C]

Yeah. So not only do people have Neanderthal DNA, but there are human remains from Siberia that have Homo erectus DNA and Denisovan DNA. So.

Now when you're talking about something like Australopithecines, like, unfortunately, that's not man is a hoax. Yeah, but we're talking about Australopithecines like Lucy and stuff. That's not genus Homo. Okay. So that's something that's not. Again, from a secular scientific perspective, that's not human. That's a different species.

So, yeah. Our ancestors in Doggerland were, were humans.

And meaning they're made in the image of God. They had human souls.

And.

Lived lives not that much different than Homo sapiens were living at the same time.

The, the differences that cause us to distinguish them are primarily their height, some of their bone structure issues with their shoulders. They had a slightly different shaped skull. And one of the things that did was it gave them very high pitched voices.

But Neanderthals buried their dead. They produced art.

They made tools and weapons.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

We have a cave that's covered with multicolored handprints made with different colored dyes from Neanderthals.

[B]

Yeah. So I, I think probably the short answer to your question, Scott, is yes, because they're humans.

[C]

Yes.

[B]

They have the image of God because they're humans, you know, descended from Adam and Eve.

[C]

And you could argue about how many years ago they lived. Yeah, yeah, I'm not interested in that argument. But you could have that if you want.

[B]

Yeah. So. Well, you know, there you are with all those Neanderthals around you in, in Grand Rapids, Scott. So it's okay. You can treat them like they're. They're in the, you know, created according to the image of God as well.

[C]

I hope being Dutch isn't too much of a liability to you there. Like, if you work for tips, I know you're in trouble.

[D]

It is, strangely enough, a liability. But that story, another day. Well, thank you. That's, that's really interesting and really looking forward to seeing you both at the Conference in October.

[B]

All right, we'll see you there. By the way, everybody, we should mention. I know I've mentioned this before, but just to remind everybody, at the Lord of Spirits conference, we are going to have a royal game of ur tournament, and I think we should refer to.

[C]

It as a tourney.

[B]

Attorney man. Does that require lances and ye old Ernie? I don't know horses and such. So, anyway. Right, okay, so our next caller is. I think. I think this is someone who's called us many, many times. Samuel in Virginia. Are you the Samuel who calls us from Virginia?

[D]

Yes.

[B]

Hello, One and only. You might be our most frequent caller.

[D]

You've said that before.

[B]

Yeah, well, obviously, this is the thing that I think about you when I.

[C]

Someone will have to make him a jingle that we can play when he calls in.

[B]

Oh, yes, I have a little Samuel from Virginia button that I just press. And he has his own theme music.

I think it's a great idea. So all of you creative people out there who occasionally send us stuff come up with a Samuel from Virginia jingle that you can send to me. And then whenever he calls, I can play that. What do you think about that, Samuel? Does that make. Are you in favor of this?

[D]

Okay.

[B]

Okay. If someone sends it to me and it's acceptable, I mean, I'm not saying I'm gonna guarantee you to accept it. It's got to be good. It's got to be good quality control. Yeah. It can't be long. You know, it needs to be snappy.

So that we can just announce the presence of Samuel from Virginia.

[C]

Pith is your byword.

[B]

Pith. It's got to be pithy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So. All right, Samuel, welcome back. What's on your mind?

[D]

So I was wondering what constitutes offering food to an idol? Like, I sometimes hear people say that you shouldn't eat halal meat because it's been offered to an idol. But.

Thinking about what goes on in halal meat preparation, I don't think it's being offered to anything. Yeah, I'm not sure. But on the other hand, some of the fruits that it gets used in certain Hindu ceremonies is definitely offered to Celtics. So on this spectrum, what's actually offered?

[B]

Yeah, yeah. Oh, I love the fact that you asked about halal. So, I mean, a lot of people have no idea what really is going on there. It is primarily a butchering method, and the only part of it that even seems slightly ritualistic is that when the throat of the animal is cut, the person doing it says bismalal. Bismalah. Which means in the name of God. That is all that it means, really.

So, you know, it's. It's probably a Muslim person doing it.

And they say in the name of God, which.

That does not constitute offering a sacrifice to an idol. You know, that involves, you know, offering sacrifices to idols, involves setting up an image and, you know, dedicating that.

[C]

Actually having an idol.

[B]

Yeah, exactly. Which if there's anything that Muslims are super duper against, it's idolatry.

Like, that's just kind of part of their core identity.

That's why they're traditionally very, you know, iconoclastic, at least of Sunni, particularly. Yeah, it's not. I mean, that doesn't mean. I agree with Islam. Islam has a lot of problems. But. But that's not idolatry. Halal meat is not idolatry. It's not. Yeah. Putting, like, fruit in front of a statue of Ganesh, along with prayers and, you know, incense and whatever. Yes, that is a practice of idolatry. You know, the idea is you're sharing a ritual meal with your God and you just think. I mean, just think about that in terms of sharing a meal with another person. What do you do? You put food in front of them and then you share it with them. Right, that's. And. And, you know, with idolatry, you're doing that with an image that has been specially dedicated for this purpose. Right. And has a whole ritual matrix surrounding it. Not just the dedication, but then the ongoing worship of it. And, you know, there's the care and feeding of an idol, all that kind of stuff.

So. So, yeah, I mean, halal meat. People get really excited about this, but it's just not. It's just not. Again, this is not a validation of Islam. But. But someone cutting the throat of a lamb and saying bismillah does not constitute sacrificing to an idol. It just doesn't. So, yeah. I don't know. Is there anything else to add to that seems.

[C]

Well, I think part of the. Part of the confusion is that. So that Bismillah does come from sacrificial ritual. Yeah, but the killing is not itself the sacrifice part. Right.

[B]

And they're also not even like. They're not even. They're not like burning lambs to.

[C]

No, no, no, no. Yeah, no, I know, but that's. But see, people are confused because they think killing something is sacrificing it.

[B]

Right.

[C]

They have that in their head. And so when they see the Muslim person saying that while they kill the animal, they think that is the act of sacrifice. That is not the act of sacrifice.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

That is the act of killing, which is partially being sacralized by what they say. Right. But then the sacrifice. And there are Muslims who do offer animal sacrifices.

[B]

It's kind of a folk tradition of sorts.

[C]

Yeah, but that's not here in this country. Before. It goes to the halal pizza shop down the corner.

[B]

Right.

[C]

The.

The sacrifice then comes out after that. That is preparatory to sacrificing the thing that is not itself sacrificing the thing. And so frankly, you should treat halal food the same way you treat kosher food. I've never known anybody who was like, I can't eat this dill pickle because it's been.

Rabbi. Certified by a rabbi.

So, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's all how you kill the pickle.

[B]

Yes. Okay. Well, thanks very much for calling, Samuel. We're going to take.

I have three more calls on the board. We're going to take those three people and then, then we're going to say goodnight. So.

[C]

Coward. So I would do another three hours were it not for Father Andrew's human weakness.

[B]

I know, I know.

Well, you know, people can go if you, if you start up your twitch stream.

[C]

Yeah. After.

[B]

People can go and they can ask anything that. With no microphone, you know, to get in the way.

[C]

Yes. You could ask me any question and people ask me about all manner of things.

[B]

That's right. Actually, someone was asking the chat. Someone was asking in the chat. They wanted to know how you felt when you met William Shatner. So will you answer that one first before we go on there?

[C]

There are certain feelings of ecstasy in the true sense, when one feels as if one has left one's body that could not be adequately described in words.

[B]

Okay. All right.

[C]

It was ineffable.

[B]

It could not be effed.

[C]

Yes.

[B]

So, all right, well, we've got Janine calling from Fresno out in your home state of California. So, Janine, welcome to the Lord of Spirits podcast.

[D]

Hi.

[E]

Thank you.

[B]

What's on your mind?

[E]

Well, this is a bit of a difficult question because I'm not sure how to phrase it properly, but recently in my life, I'd say over the past, I don't know, let's say eight months, I have been exposed to. I found myself exposed to evil in various forms. That has been more disturbing than usual. Let's say the death of a young person and pretty awful circumstances and the terrible cancer and parents praying for a miracle and prolonging his treatments and suffering for a long time.

A friend that I had Kind of distanced myself from, is found to have murdered her husband in a pretty horrific and sensational tragedy that happened this summer. Anyway, incidents like that.

My background is Armenian. A more ancient part of Armenia has been now ethnically cleansed and its churches are being defaced. Things like that, that strike me as very evil. My question is about how God uses evil events even to, for God's purposes in our world and sort of a two parter, like how do we, how are we to meet those events?

[D]

That's my question.

[B]

Yeah, well, really the two questions are, are kind of one.

So if we look for instance at.

Great evil that happens in the Old Testament to the people of God.

Say, you know, the Assyrians coming and massacring huge numbers of the 10 tribes and carrying off a lot of the rest of them into exile forever, or even the Babylonians carrying off Judah into exile, you know, for a while, most of them still again, forever, or you know, getting conquered by various peoples or disease or snake bite or. I mean, the list goes on and on of all kinds of terrible things that happened to the Israelites. Slavery for 400 years in Egypt. You know.

What God always calls the people to do in response to these things is repent. And it's not that God is saying you were bad and so I'm beating you up because you have to suffer, right? Rather, the point is, is that.

Israel in many cases is.

Off the mark, has, has lost its way. And so God permits, or even the language is used sometimes of God sending, you know, these various nations to come conquer Israel and this kind of thing so that Israel would turn back to God and would renew their faithfulness to the covenant with God. Right? But also at the same time we see holy people suffering, right? So it's not just in response to some great sin that suffering happens. We see holy people suffering, we see prophets suffering, we see the apostles suffering. Like the apostle Paul very famously said that there was a messenger from Satan or an angel from Satan that was attacking him.

And he asked God three times, take it away. And God said, no, my grace is sufficient for you. What's the point of that? It's not that Paul was bad and God was beating him up.

It was that this very holy man, like the prophets, like any of the righteous people who suffer in the scriptures, that they're being actually given an opportunity for greater repentance, an opportunity to become even holier, right? And so the, the response to suffering, whether it's I'm in sin and then suffering comes, or you know, by God's grace, I'm living a righteous life and suffering comes. It's, it's either way, the response is repentance.

And repentance is not just to say I'm sorry or to feel guilty. Repentance is to increase faithfulness to God. Sometimes that means going from, you know, rebellion to faithfulness, but sometimes it can mean going from faithfulness to even more faithfulness. Right? But either way, that's the purpose and that's the purpose for demonic presence in the world. That's the purpose for so called natural disasters, all of this kind of stuff. The presence of evil in the world. God permits in the world as an opportunity for us to repent. And it says in Scripture that he chastens those whom he loves, whom he loves. Right? And so whether we use the language of God sending it or use the language of God permitting it, it's all within God's economy, that is to say, his plan for the salvation of as many people as possible because he's not willing that anyone should perish.

So, you know, when suffering comes, we have an opportunity to use it for our repentance. A lot of times we squander it by complaining, right?

By shaking our fist at God, by whatever it might be, you know, or even by choosing to fall into despair to turn away from hope in God, which is what, like the word despair literally means to, you know, unhope.

So, yeah, I mean, it's, it's, it's not fun, it's not great, it doesn't feel great to see. Like some of the stuff you described is horrifying. It's just absolutely terrible.

But, you know, for, for someone who sees it and experiences it.

The response is to increase their faithfulness or if, if they're living in any kind of rebellion to turn away from that to faithfulness. Right. It's like I said, it's not, it's not always a, it's not a punishment in the sense of God is going to smite you because you were bad. It's a call to repentance. And repentance is something that we do even if we're living in faithfulness. But if there is any unfaithfulness, then that definitely needs to be taken care of. So that's, that's what I would say to that. I mean, it's, it's hard. But we can see very clearly in Scripture all the kinds of things you describe plentifully, and we can see what God says that people are supposed to do in response to that, both collectively and Individually.

Father, is there anything you wanted to add to that or.

[C]

I mean, I, I think part of it too, we always have to remember is that when we become aware of these things, the reason we become aware of these things is because of how well we've insulated ourselves.

Especially in the United States and most of the other countries probably that are like listening to this tonight, at least live in that, you know.

Not only have we not been invaded anytime recently or had a military coup or had a complete economic collapse or a civil war.

Right. Any, any time in living memory. And, and these things are lived realities for huge swaths of the world today and all of the accompanying horrors and violence and everything that happens there.

Not only have we not directly experienced it, but we have a great capacity to shut it out. I mean, if you don't want to know what's happening, the horrors, the absolute nightmarish horrors that are being inflicted on children in Gaza right now, if you don't want to know about it, you could not know about it. You could just pretend it's not happening, not look at anything.

And that insulation is a horrible spiritual detriment to us.

It's sort of like what God says to Israel when they're coming into the land of Canaan. And he says, you know, you're gonna, you're gonna get in there, you're gonna, you're gonna forget God, you're gonna forget about me, you're gonna plant your vineyards and get, get about your day to day life and you're gonna forget all this.

And that's the incredible spiritual danger that we face that leads us away from repentance. It leads us away from the idea that God put us here to do some things.

Not like virtue Signal on social media, like actually do things to actually help people, to try to change things.

To try to do good in the world. And so.

I think when the reality of the sin and depravity of wickedness in the world inevitably intrudes, as it's intruded on you in a very powerful way recently, all sort of at once.

It'S a call not just to repentance.

In the broader sense, but also to.

Sort of realigning our view of the world and of our life in it and its purpose and of instead of forgetting, remembering.

Remembering God, remembering what reality is and remembering what it is that we're here to do and be about, which isn't just having a nice lifestyle and enjoying. And enjoying it as much as possible.

[B]

So, yeah, yeah, God bless you, Janine, and all of Your friends and your family. God be with you.

All right, we're gonna take.

[C]

That was really heavy.

[B]

It was pretty heavy.

[C]

But did you ever see the. The short lived television show Fresno?

[B]

No, I. I did not.

[C]

Starring Carol Burnett.

[B]

Really?

[C]

Yeah, it was a parody of like 80s nighttime soap operas like Dallas and Dynasty and stuff. And it was set on a raisin ranch in Fresno, California.

[B]

Wow. I'm gonna have to look that one up.

[C]

There you go. I don't know if any streaming service has it. It may be lost media at this point, but it was a thing.

[B]

Yeah, like some of those old Doctor.

[C]

Who episodes that Pepperidge Farm remembers.

[B]

Yeah. All right, well, we've got Tim calling from Minnesota. Tim, welcome Lord of Spirits podcast.

[D]

Hey, fathers, thanks for taking my call.

[B]

Yeah.

[D]

I have a question about Leviticus 12 and ritual purity. But before I get to that question, I wanted to drop a comment to Father Stephen. He dropped some hints earlier this year that led me to put some pieces, some clues together that make me think that I actually graduated with his sister about 20 some years ago deep in the heart of Texas.

[C]

Whoa.

[D]

That was kind of a fun connection.

[C]

That is very possible. Although it was not so much deep in the heart of Texas as over on the east end, but.

[D]

Right. The piney woods of northeast Texas.

[C]

Yes.

[D]

Yeah.

[C]

Yeah, that is very possible.

[D]

Anyway, fun little. Fun little thing. I went digging in my crates and found a grainy photograph of us being like a. I don't know, I guess we were kind of in a group of what you might call the valedictorians there at graduation time. And so.

[C]

Yeah, that would be her. She was a. She was a nurse.

[D]

Yeah.

[B]

Is this the other Dr. DeYoung?

[C]

Yes, this is the younger Dr. DeYoung.

[B]

That's right. Three siblings on that campus. Only two have doctorates.

[D]

So that's pretty good numbers.

[B]

Yeah. Yeah, that's pretty good.

[C]

So Meatloaf told us.

[D]

So. So my question, earlier this year, you did cover Leviticus 12 in. In 1 respect. This is the. The purification after childbirth. And I appreciate the helpful distinction between.

A ritual uncleanness, impurity and sin. But one of the things that still I have a question about, and someone near and dear to me in my life still has a question about is the.

Difference, the distinction that's made between male and female children and the length of. Of.

Uncleanness and the length of time for purification. It's like twice as long after girls are born as after boys. And sitting here in 21st century America, something feels a little unfair or off or unbalanced. About that distinction that's made there. And. Whereas I can in some of the other places in the law, like compensation for female and male servants when they're injured. And I can kind of attribute that to, well, economic value and kind of a simplistic explanation there. But this one about purification after childbirth, I'm really struggling to explain why boys only require half the purification that girls do, or the mothers after the birth of boys. Boys and the birth of girls. So wondering if you can enlighten me on that.

[B]

That's straight to you, Father Stephen, what's going on there in chapter 12 of Leviticus?

[C]

Yeah, well, interesting fun fact, since I'm teaching through it right now.

Jubilee gives an interesting reason for that, and it's that.

Cain was born seven years after the expulsion from paradise, and Adam and Eve's first daughter, who became Cain's wife, was born 14 years after.

[B]

Oh, interesting.

[C]

So it says the one week in two weeks came from that.

Yeah. Which is not my answer to your question. It's just.

[B]

Yeah. Interesting, though.

[C]

So. So part of the thing here is that we tend to see this period of purification, even if we've managed to break free, that, like, this isn't about sin. We still see it as sort of a punitive measure.

[B]

Yeah. Some kind of negative thing.

[C]

Right. As some kind of something wrong. Right. And let me suggest that that is not the best way to understand this in that there is an expectation that there are things that the person is supposed to be doing. Right. So the person is restricted from leaving the house and going and doing certain things, but that's in order that they would be positively doing certain other things.

So another example of this is, you know, at various points in Numbers and Deuteronomy and Joshua, where the military age men of Israel have to go and do certain business that involves killing other human beings. They have this period of purification where they have to stay outside the camp. That's not punitive. Right. That's God's way of helping them work through what we would now today call ptsd.

Where there's a whole process where after a certain number of days, they wash all of their weapons and their armor and their clothing.

And after another period of days, they wash themselves. Right. That it's. There's sort of this process. So what we have to understand in terms of male and female children is that in the ancient world, there was very much a world of men and a world of women.

And the world of women was in and around the house, and the world of men was outside the house.

Now, Often that wasn't very far outside the house that was working the fields. Right. Because this is primarily an agrarian kind of thing. So if you lived outside of cities, as most people did, right. The woman was in charge of the household and the man was out working the fields and in charge of whatever laborers were out there and whoever else and the sons were out there assisting. Now, obviously.

The child is not at the end of this period of purification, ready to go start working the farm. But the idea is that the male children were sort of separated earlier from their mothers.

There is within the story of Jacob and Esau, right? This is one of those subtle things. But the story of Jacob and Esau in Genesis, it is somewhat problematic, the fact that Jacob as a son is spending all this time with his mom around the camp and not out with the other men.

And part of the way that ends up playing out in the story is that.

He. He becomes.

He becomes sort of advanced in the ways of women, meaning.

Women did not have power in that society. And so when you are the party that is out of power, when your husband has all the actual power, well, how do you exercise power and influence?

Talking, gossiping, scheming. Right? And that's how that plays out. Right. Rebecca sort of initiates Jacob into all of that. Right. And that's sort of how Jacob becomes this trickster character who he starts out as, and then he has this growth arc, right? But from the perspective of the text in that culture, part of where this went wrong is that man. Why is he hanging out with all the women folk all the time? Why isn't he out there with the. With the men?

So.

The. The idea here is that we want to. Male children need to not become overly attached to their mothers in that way, whereas we want a greater attachment between a daughter and a mother.

Because the mother is going to be raising the daughter to be a woman in that culture and society. And that daughter, when she's old enough, is going to be helping around with the business of the household while her brother is out there with their father and other brothers and.

Hired hands and everything and everything working the farm. So we tend to read that, and we read it as if it's this putative thing like, oh, you messed up. You had a girl.

Because we think that the period of purification is in some way or other retributive. But actually, if anything, it's actually penalizing the male children. The male children get separated from their mothers earth earlier.

Than the. Than the female children do.

[B]

All right, well, Tim does that.

I mean, how does that strike you?

[D]

So it's somewhat functional, but it's all. But it's more. Is it didactic more than functional at that point in terms of saying this? Women are to be. Function together, women are to work together, men are to work together. And we're not necessarily the young girl, the infant isn't doing that, but we're sort of saying this is how society should be ordered or structured.

[C]

Right, right. And so it's an image, it's a practice that sort of reinforces those general, broader ideas.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. All right, well, thank you very much for calling, Tim.

[C]

And this is where St. Paul gets things like. So you get. St. Paul is getting all of this stuff from the Torah. This is where St. Paul gets, like, the women in the church should not be teaching the men, they should be teaching the other women.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, right. Which.

[C]

That's where he's getting it. He's not getting it from nowhere or being a chauvinist or whatever.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's. And it's clear, like if you, particularly if you raise children, if you have children of both sexes or within your extended family unit or just within your parish community.

It'S clear that men need men and women need women. And the young men really need the older men and the young women really need the older women. And it's not that we don't need each other, but there's a way in which the older ones of your same sex train you and you should gravitate towards them in a way that just doesn't work the other way, you know, So I can't.

[C]

I mean, I. I may have some kind of ideas, but I don't know what it's like to live as a woman in our society.

Or even how. What it is like to function as a woman in the church, because I'm not one.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

But there are older, established holy women who do know what that's like. They could. They could teach the younger women how to do that and guide them in a way that I can't necessarily.

[B]

Yeah. So. All right, thank you very much for calling, Tim. Our final call for the night in this all live Q and A episode of Lord of Spirits comes from Samuel in Washington. Washington State or Washington, the wretched hive of scum and villainy?

[D]

D.C. washington state.

[B]

All right, all right. Up there in the Pacific Northwest. So still relatively early in the evening for you.

[D]

Yeah, it's about seven o'. Clock.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. So, Samuel, what's on your mind?

[D]

Okay, yeah, thank you for taking my call. Fathers. Yeah, I have a. A question about.

The calcitonia divide in 451. I'm Oriental Orthodox.

I'm ethnically Jordanian, but I'm Alankar. So I just had a question. Like, I just wanted your opinions about this because.

I mean, everybody says different things in both of our churches. But I'm just. Because I respect you guys a lot. I just really. I want to know your opinion about. Do you think it's a difference in expression.

Between what happened in 451 and onwards, or do you think there's a real difference between us and what's just dividing us as kind of bishops not, I guess, meeting or had dialoguing as much. I'm just interested in what you guys think.

[B]

Wow. And you know, on the call board it says that you had a quick question on Chalcedon. Is that what you actually said to Mike? I have a quick question.

[D]

I'll take the blame. Forgive me.

[C]

You bet. This question cuts to the. The quick.

[B]

There we go. That's right, there we go. Nice archaic use of quick.

Wow. This is like, you know, the whole define the universe, give three examples thing.

[C]

So.

[B]

Wow. I'm trying to think of the best way to put this.

[C]

You want me to go.

[B]

I mean, yeah, go ahead.

[C]

I mean, I held the fire on that other one.

[B]

So I'll. I have things to say about this. But. But.

I'll say this briefly before you go, Father Stephen. I think it's, number one, it's. It's really important that we figure out a way to heal that break in communion.

Number one, because I think all Christians should be in communion with each other. But it has to be on the basis of a common, of the common Orthodox faith. Like, we can't compromise on that. So if it can be determined, you know, that we do truly believe, teach, practice the same Orthodox faith, then, you know, then communion should be. But if we're not there yet, then we have to hold off on that.

So one of the things that it's my understanding, and this is by much smarter people than I am, much better informed people than I am, have told me, is that there is variation within the Oriental Orthodox communion about expressions of Christology.

And that is one of the things that it's my understanding remains an issue that even within, like I've been told, again, this is what I've been told, like, within the Coptic communion itself, there are debates about significant theological issues that are a pretty big deal, that the way that Christology is defined is not exactly the same between the Armenians and the Copts and the Malankara Church and the Ethiopians and Eritreans and the Jacobites, the Syriac Church.

And obviously that's not a communion dividing thing between those churches. And yet from the point of view of the Chalcedonian Orthodox, it can be difficult to.

Work through that because it's like, well, what are we saying we're trying to agree with here?

So all of those are complicating factors, and also a big issue is the fact that on both sides of the question, there are anathemas leveled against people that the folks on the other side regard as a canonized saint. So that's not something that can just be sort of brushed away either. Right. So all these are kind of complicating factors. But, I mean, I would say that, you know, I've had a lot of personal experience with people from the Oriental churches, and it's always been great. I've loved it. I have some good friends, you know, people I went to seminary with actually in the Melanco Church, and I've. I've spoken at some of their events. I've been invited to do that, and I've always loved doing that. I have a great sense of warmth and love for my friends in those groups. So that's what I would have to say about that. So dive in, Father Stephen.

[C]

Yeah, well, yeah, I mean, a lot of that's the core of it. I mean, honestly, historically, the real reason for the split is Roman soldiers killing a lot of non chalcedonians in the 6th century.

And what I mean by that is when people have died over something and the memory of them dying over it is still alive, it makes it almost impossible to resolve.

By just talking. Right.

That's just a reality.

Across the board. Not just in terms of this issue, not even just in terms of religion, but politics, all kinds. You know.

It'S hard to just say, okay, water under the bridge, let's make a fresh start, you know.

But yeah, as Father Andrew said.

[B]

The.

[C]

Fact that we have two communions now.

And the fact that there is variation, such variation among the Oriental Orthodox.

Is. Is the biggest issue, I think, because, for example, right.

I mean, really, most of the churches in the Oriental Orthodox Union function kind of independently.

But they're in communion with each other. So let's say, you know, the Patriarch of Constantinople sits down with the Cthulhuilikos of Armenia and they hammer something out, right? And say, no, we really agree on these things. We really agree on these things. We accept each other's traditions.

If they restore communion with Armenia. And Armenia is in communion with, say, the Copts. And there's some significant portion of the bishops among the cops who don't agree with the bishops of Armenia and the bishops of.

Of.

The Synod of Constantinople on major issues of theology. That creates a huge problem.

[B]

Right.

[C]

So we kind of. From the Orthodox side, we have to kind of talk to each group individually, but it's really hard for us to act on anything until.

We'Ve hammered out the same kind of agreement with every single group. Right.

In order to actually make anything happen in terms of restoring communion. And that, I think, is what creates the huge current impasse. And I, too, had fellow seminary students who are Malankara. I've never gone and participated in events because I'm not an ecumenist like Father Andrew.

[B]

But.

You just don't like Indian food to the same level that I do.

[C]

I like Indian food. I like it more. My. Well, so there's a whole issue there, because my wife. This is absolutely true. If she's in the chat, she will confirm. My wife, if she eats real curry. Hallucinates. Has a weird reaction to it. Really. Yes, she has actual hallucinations.

[B]

Wow.

[C]

You may not remember this. This happened during Holy Week when we visited West Virginia. You took us to an Indian restaurant and my wife wanted to be polite at 8 and then couldn't attend services that night because she was.

[B]

I did. I honestly did not remember that at all. I mean, a long time ago, Father.

[C]

So that has mitigated my ability to enjoy Indian food.

Wow.

[B]

But she cannot eat curries without worries, as the title goes.

[C]

Yeah, it's.

[B]

She has just shown up in the chat and confirmed.

[C]

Yes, yes. For her, the spice and curry is like the spice in Dune. Like.

Yeah.

But, yeah. So I think. I mean, I think that's the impact. And. And those are good people who. And they're people who I love, you know, And I think it would be.

A beautiful thing if we could all come together around shared faith and then based on that, share the Eucharist. I think that would be wonderful. But I think it's very difficult right now. And I think step one is actually going to be. I mean, I don't want people. We may have Coptic listeners. I don't want you to think we're picking on you, but right now there are some major theological divisions, as Father Andrews said in the Coptic Church.

[B]

That's what Coptic people have told me. Yeah, that's.

[C]

Yes, yes. That's where I know about it, too.

And I think. So the first step, I think is going to be. Those have to be resolved and hopefully those will be resolved in a positive way that will bring us closer together rather than being resolved the other way.

But I think that's going to be step one toward making progress in that direction. And that's something that the Coptic Church needs to do themselves. I can't come in from outside. Nobody can come in from outside and try and force that. Yeah, that's what got us into this mess.

[B]

Indeed. All right, well, Samuel, thank you very much for calling. God bless you.

Well, that wraps up this all live Q A episode of the Lord of Spirits podcast. So that's our show for tonight. Thank you very much everybody for listening. If you didn't happen to get through to us live and we, I mean we had a lot of calls is great. We'd still like to hear from you. You can email us at Lord of spirits and ancient faith.com you can message us at our Facebook page. You can also leave us a [e-mail] Lord of Spirits and if you have basic questions about Orthodox Christianity or you need help finding a parish, then go to orthodox intro.org and join us for.

[C]

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[B]

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[C]

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[B]

Thank you, Good night. God bless you.

[A]

You've been listening to the Lord of Spirits with Orthodox Christian priests, Father Andrew, Stephen Damick and Father Stephen DeYoung. A listener supported presentation of Ancient Faith Radio. And I beheld and I heard the voice of many angels round about the throne and the beasts and the elders and the 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.