← The Lord of Spirits
The Lord of Spirits
Yesterday, Today & Forever
Icons of God in the Old Testament depict Jesus. The Hymn of Kassiani includes "I will kiss Thy feet whose tread, when it fell on the ears of Eve in Paradise..." How can this be? Fr. Stephen and Fr. Andrew discuss the eternality of the incarnation of Christ.
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- [01:07]
A
Greetings, dragon slayers. Giant killers. You are listening to the 130th episode of the Lord of Spirits podcast. Why you're still here is a mystery to me.
- [01:19]
B
They have nowhere else to go.
- [01:23]
A
I know there's a thousand channels and there's nothing on. Um, nevertheless, I am Father Andrew Stephen Damick, and with me is the professor and confessor to the stars. I used that joke last time, but I still like it. Father Stephen DeYoung. And we're not live. We're celebrating Christmas like most of you. Father Stephen is getting. Is it Chinese takeout or Vietnamese? What is it you normally get on Christmas?
- [01:46]
B
No, we go. You have to go to the Chinese restaurant and eat there with the local Jewry.
- [01:51]
A
Oh, eat in, Eat in, I said. Yes. Okay, all right, all right.
- [01:55]
B
The whole Jewish community is there. I'm not joking. This is not some kind of anti Semitic slur. No, you're an accurate thing.
- [02:03]
A
Very Catholic area, so I'm sure they.
- [02:05]
B
There are always Jewish people there.
- [02:07]
A
Yeah. Gather together. Yeah.
- [02:10]
B
Yeah, so I've been told. That's for two reasons. Number one, they're open. But number two, actually, apparently you could find kosher food pretty easily at a Chinese buffet. Huh?
- [02:19]
A
Although I feel like Chinese buffets have been going down over the years in quality. Is that the case with yours or is it just here in Pennsylvania?
- [02:28]
B
It's probably just there in Pennsylvania. I mean, the one I used to go to in Hamlin, Pennsylvania, was literally a Chinese buffet next door to a closed pet store. Wow, this is an amazing beginning for this episode. This is just a fact. I'm not saying anything. I'm not conjecturing. I'm just saying factually, that's where it was located.
- [02:53]
A
Northeastern Pennsylvania. How we love you. Well, the great gatekeeper Mike only plays Wingspan. Dagan is not going to be taking your calls this time because as I mentioned, this is a prerecorded episode. That said, over the years, the gate.
- [03:08]
B
Is inaccessible and therefore must not be kept.
- [03:11]
A
The gate is shut. We've gotten a lot of questions about exactly what it means when God appears bodily in the Old Testament. And we've said, this is the incarnate Christ. We have resisted using this word pre incarnate. This is kind of a mind bending thing for human beings to consider. So for our Christmas episode, we're actually going to be dedicating the whole time to exploring this question closely. So let's start with a spicy take. Father, you say that time and space don't exist. Does that mean that lunchtime is Also an illusion.
- [03:49]
B
Yes. All right. And further, that means, as a corollary, you can eat and drink whatever you want at any time you want at any.
- [04:00]
A
Because time and space and calories presumably do not exist. Kilocalories.
- [04:05]
B
You want to have pancakes at 8pm, do it yesterday. You want to have a double Western bacon cheeseburger from Carl's Jr. For breakfast, do it at 8am doesn't matter. Plus, you're not fooling anybody by putting tomato juice or orange juice in your vodka. You're still drinking early in the morning.
- [04:30]
A
Wow. This is having a very, very dark beginning today. But yeah, so we are talking about the Incarnation.
- [04:39]
B
Why is that dark? People are celebrating.
- [04:41]
A
Good. Let's say that. Yeah, that sounds good. Yes, we are talking about the Incarnation brunch. This is Christmas.
- [04:49]
B
We're not about drinking. The Puritans told me so that's why they don't celebrate it.
- [04:53]
A
That's true. As maybe not by your definition, but friend of the show, Deacon Sarah from Richard Roland would say, have the kind of Christmas Oliver Cromwell would outlaw.
- [05:06]
B
He may be your friend, but it's not your friend. The man of. The man of a thousand aliases.
- [05:12]
A
It's true, it's true. But yeah, we should say that you're not going to walk away from this episode, like, understanding the Incarnation or having explored every single dogmatic aspect of it.
- [05:25]
B
Yes. We're going to fail at our mission terribly.
- [05:27]
A
Yes. But the point here is to talk about this particular question of the Incarnation as it relates to. To time, which is not an easy thing to master. And I think, largely. Am I correct in thinking that the church fathers largely don't address this kind of directly?
- [05:49]
B
I think they do. It's just those aren't the passages people read.
- [05:53]
A
Okay. Okay.
- [05:57]
B
Yeah, yeah. So this is one of those things. Because, you know, on my twitch stream lately, I've been getting a lot of questions about particular things in St. Augustine. And what I keep having to point out is that people don't actually read St. Augustine. Right. Our Protestant friends quote mine. St. Augustine.
- [06:20]
A
Yeah.
- [06:21]
B
Like they invented that. Right. So when you point out just basic things, like they're saying St. Augustine believed that everyone is born with the guilt of Adam's sin. And you point out, you know, hey, when. When St. Augustine talks about sin, does he talk about it in terms of juridical guilt? No, he doesn't. Right. Or like our last episode when we pointed out, you know, he says pretty clearly that God doesn't control human wills when he's talking about astrology and City of God.
- [06:48]
A
Yeah.
- [06:50]
B
So how are you saying he's a predestinarian?
- [06:53]
A
Yeah.
- [06:54]
B
Bunches of these things. And so even, even leaving aside all the stuff from the Church Fathers that isn't translated because people don't find it interesting or just haven't gotten to it. Even what is translated into English, people read on certain subjects.
- [07:11]
A
Right.
- [07:12]
B
They're looking for and not others. And the stuff that seems confusing, they don't read. And so you get this phenomena that happens to the hosts of this program a lot where we say something we don't give a thousand tedious footnotes. How dare we. A bunch of people pop out, we're like, you're speculating and making this stuff up. And then someone who's actually read things pops up and is like, no, actually this is.
- [07:40]
A
And you know, much like the Samson thing where we literally point out, say about him what the Church Fathers and the Scriptures say about him.
- [07:49]
B
Yes, yes. This happened when I gave that, that talk involving Nietzsche at Peugeot Fest.
- [07:57]
A
Right.
- [07:57]
B
Almost immediately somebody popped up in the, in the YouTube comments when he released it and said, this is just Father Steven speculating. This is an orthodox teaching. And then it took about five minutes and a Romanian person was like, this is all from the Philokalia, and started listing like authors. All that is to say, yes, actually, if you, if you go and study how the Church Fathers talk about the eternity of God.
- [08:21]
A
Yeah.
- [08:22]
B
You actually do get what we're going to be trying to convey tonight.
- [08:29]
A
Yeah. And also just the, the obligatory plug for George Monserridisi's Time and Man, which, you know, deals with a lot of this and kind of related contextual stuff.
- [08:43]
B
Yeah. So, yeah, this is not. This is actually something that they're fairly. But you have to be reading for it. And if you have other presuppositions. Right. This is the other thing. You come to the text of the presupposition that eternity means an endless succession of moments in the past and future. We'll talk more about this as we go forward. But if that's what you're just assuming eternity means, then whenever you read the word eternity in an English translation of the Church Fathers, you're just going to assume it means that.
- [09:17]
A
Yeah. Endless time.
- [09:20]
B
People don't take the step of saying, okay, how is this author using this word? It's not necessarily what I think this word, quote unquote, dictionary definition means.
- [09:32]
A
Yeah. I mean, it's, it's much like the way that frankly, a lot of fundamentalists and many other Protestants read the Bible, like, well, that's what it says. You know, they'll just point at something like that.
- [09:44]
B
Yeah, yeah. Even when they disagree, both sides will say that because they're just making those assumptions based on their presuppositions. So we have to. If we're going to talk about what it means for Christ's humanity to become eternal by being united to the second person of the Trinity, which is another way of stating our topic for this evening. Right. We have to break that down. We have to start with, okay, what does eternal mean? What does it mean to be eternal? Because there are multiple definitions of that or multiple ways of understanding what that could mean that are mutually exclusive. So that's where we're going to start. We're going to start with, what does it mean for something to be eternal? What does it mean for something to be timeless? We're not talking about Toni Storm primarily here. That's a reference that Father Andrew didn't get, but he just chuckled at.
- [10:44]
A
Anyway, I feel like I'm getting it. Keep talking. It sounds familiar to me, but I don't know.
- [10:54]
B
I doubt it, but okay, okay. Yes. And so we do begin with time and space don't exist.
- [11:04]
A
I think it flipped a switch in my head that was like Tony Stark. But maybe it turns out this is not the case.
- [11:11]
B
Yes. So when we say time and space don't exist. Right. And people say what? Or they say, dude, because they're intoxicated. We have to even break that down a little bit to what does it mean to exist? And here's a teaser. By the time we're done with this first half, we're going to talk about the fact that God doesn't exist.
- [11:44]
A
Dun, dun, dun. So which the church fathers say that.
- [11:50]
B
Yes. Yeah, yeah. Saint Maximus the Confessor says exactly that. But so what does it mean to exist? Right. And what we usually mean by exist in our. In our common parlance is something exists if it exists externally to a subject. We've talked about this before on the show, and I know we're already getting some people's brains splody, but if I look at the wall of my office here, Right. As we've said on the show before, the color, which I can't describe because I'm a dude, but greenish.
- [12:43]
A
It's not one of those ancient people. Couldn't see blue. Father Stephen can't see.
- [12:47]
B
No, no. It's just a kind of green gray thing that I'm sure there's a name for, but I don't know it because I'm a Dude. But anyway, that color does not actually exist. Because if I wasn't here looking at it, right, Color, remember the mantis shrimp. Color only exists as a relationship of perception.
- [13:15]
A
Right.
- [13:16]
B
There are certain wavelengths of light that are reflecting off of that wall, striking the human eye in a certain way to produce that color. Right. But no human eyeball, no color. Right. No light in the room, no color. Right, Right. So the color doesn't have external existence. The wall itself does. I can turn off all the lights, close my eyes, try to walk through the wall. I will hit the wall 100 out of 100 times.
- [13:46]
A
Yeah. I mean, the things that you see are literally a thing your brain is doing. That's what seeing is.
- [13:55]
B
Right. How you're interpreting it. But there is an actual existence out there. Right. It's not a hallucination. Right. If it's a hallucination, I could walk through the wall. Okay? So we'd say the wall exists. The color of the wall does not exist in the same sense. At least the color of the wall exists in my consciousness, and specifically my consciousness, because another person with different eyes looking at it might see a different color. We can all think of, like that goofy dress photo and things like that, where there are things where some people see something one way and other people see something another way even though they're looking at the same thing.
- [14:31]
A
Or even that Yeni oral thing. That is an aural question.
- [14:35]
B
Yeah, yeah. Or just, you know, hey, somebody who's red, green, colorblind, because they're kind of greenish, Right. They're going to see it. They're going to be like, greenish. There's. It's gray. Right. Like, so that's what we mean by exist. Right. And so when we say time and space don't exist, what we're saying is that the categories of time and space are categories of human experience, like color and not things that objectively exist without any people there. Right. Without an observer. Right. And we've all, frankly, noticed this with time. People who want to argue with me on this point would say, well, no time exists. Time passes one second per second. Right. It's a. It's a uniform rate. Da, da, da, da, da. Of course, we know from physics it doesn't move at a uniform rate. It's at different relative rates. Right. But. But even beyond that, even beyond that, just in our own personal experience, Right? Because that's what we're talking about is our personal experience, you've had periods of time that seem to take longer or that seem to be shorter, even Though objectively, an hour is an hour. Right. Sometimes an hour if you're really involved in something, seems to go by very quickly. And sometimes an hour if you're less involved, like you're sitting in a zoom meeting, seems to drag on forever. Yeah. Right. Even though, quote unquote, objectively an hour is an hour. And again, we're not going to go into all the physics because neither of us is a physicist, and that's just cringe when people try to do that. But hopefully folks have added up high school slash college physics that they know, you know, at least some basic Einstein stuff, that the. That experience to difference in the passage of time can become quite literalized in certain circumstances. And also that time and space as categories are intimately connected. So part of the issue here is that this is. This is just a thing that's hard to wrap our head around.
- [16:57]
A
Yeah.
- [16:59]
B
So there is, for example, scientifically an edge of space, which is like.
- [17:07]
A
We know that's true. And they'll say things like, the universe is expanding, but. But into what? Like, is there space beyond space that it's expanding into into?
- [17:19]
B
Right. Well, that's what people assume.
- [17:21]
A
Yeah.
- [17:22]
B
That there's just sort of this endless succession of points in all directions. Right. But that is actually not the case. Scientifically. There is an edge of space, and our brain can't wrap our head around that because we're like, okay, so you come to the edge of space, Right. We're at the very edge of space. Well, so what if you go one inch further and you get told there is no inch further. You're at the end of space, you're at the end of inches. Right. And our head can't wrap around it. And this is the same problem we have, right. To tie this back to our point tonight. Right. That we have thinking about time and creation, for example, right. So if we say, okay, God. God created time and space, obviously. Right. He created everything. Right. So we're gonna say God created time and space. Okay, so God creates time. What about like 10 seconds before that?
- [18:26]
A
Right.
- [18:26]
B
And our brain can't fathom there were no seconds before that, because if there were 10 seconds before that, then that would be the beginning of time. Right?
- [18:35]
A
Right. Yep.
- [18:37]
B
So the finitude of time and space is something that's very difficult to wrap your brain around. But the fact. The fact that the human brain has trouble say, sorry, William Lane Craig. This is one of the. If we're getting past him being the fractally wrong pan. Heretic to William Lane Craig, the bad philosopher, he's the kind of guy who says that if you can't. If something doesn't work for human logic, if you can't wrap your brain around it, then it's not true.
- [19:16]
A
Wow. I mean, I would think that that should be classified as extreme hubris, just to put it mildly.
- [19:29]
B
Well, he believes God can't do logically impossible things.
- [19:32]
A
Wow.
- [19:33]
B
You see, I'm telling you, guy is wrong about everything. Right. There's nothing he is right about. So you could say, well, he's right that a God exists. It's like, well, yeah, but the one he thinks exists is the wrong one. The one he thinks exists doesn't. Yeah, but contra. That seems like anyone sensible, especially anyone coming from the Christian tradition. Right. Would say, well, obviously there are things regarding God especially that the human mind cannot comprehend. The fact that something is incomprehensible about God to the human mind actually may be evidence that it's true. It may actually go the other way. Right. That we should expect God and his ways to be beyond human comprehension because he told us they were.
- [20:22]
A
Yeah.
- [20:24]
B
And so that's okay.
- [20:26]
A
My ways are higher than your ways, except for when you don't understand them or something.
- [20:31]
B
Yes, well, that was just true because he was talking to Bronze Age people. See, now we're modern people, we're so scary. The science and the logics. And so now we can understand everything. I mean, just go the next step, go full, full Hegel and be like, we're practically God ourselves, you know? So that said, the actual reason why we can't comprehend those things.
- [20:55]
A
Right.
- [20:56]
B
So, so the. We've kind of made two points so far, and we're trying to take this slowly and deliberately because I know, we know it's Brain Breaking Point 1. Time and space exist really within human subjectivity, within human experience, not external to it. And number two, that they have borders like a beginning and an end. Right. There's borders to space. There are borders or endpoints to time. And that's true. Even though the human brain can't really wrap its head around the fact that there are borders to space or. Or time. And that's because. Right. The second point is because of the first point, because space and time exist within the realm of human experience. They're part of the grid through which we understand all of our experiences. So categories of time and space are part of the grid before and after.
- [22:00]
A
Right?
- [22:01]
B
Near, far, right, movement, change. All of these things are. Are part and parcel of how we experience and interpret everything we experience. So when you're asked to imagine experiencing something that falls outside of that grid. You can't imagine or understand it.
- [22:22]
A
Right. We don't have the categories of thought for it.
- [22:27]
B
Yeah. We don't have another set of categories that we would have to use to. Right. And so, yeah, just, just basic things like our understanding of cause and effect. Cause and effect. Understanding of cause, effect presupposes number one, a temporal sequence, right? Like if, if one thing happens and then another thing happens 100 years later and you want to say thing one caused thing to. You've got to establish a whole chain of events, right? Like all set up all the dominoes in between the two to connect them, right? Because we assume there's got to be a connection in time and if they happen on other sides of the planet, right. Then yes, there are sides to the planet throwing strays at flat Earthers. You've. Right. Then you're going to have to establish, right. In that chain of causes also crossing the distance, right. Someone or something is going to have to go from one place to the other place and carry that causal chain. Right? And David Hume came out and said cause and effect don't strictly speaking exist because they're not strictly speaking observable. But even he admitted, but yeah, you kind of have to assume cause and effect or you, you can't live and function, right. Like as, as a human. Right. So even someone who wants to try to make the argument can't really escape these categories of thought and experience, right? You can't really escape or get out, get outside of that grid. When we're saying that time and space aren't things, not in the modern usage, that's not a thing. But in the very literal sense of you can't like grab some space or hold onto some time, right? What we mean is that they're the description of a relationship between things, right? If you're talking about time before and after, for example, if you're talking about space over, under, and we all accept, so for example space spatial terms, we all kind of accept that those are relative. Unless like you're a flat Earther and then you're like how there be people on bottom of globe, right? But like we accept that if you go out in space, there's not an up and a down really. Right? Like South America is South America because it's like toward the South Pole, not because it's on the bottom of the earth.
- [25:18]
A
It's funny to me how in almost every sci fi movie or TV show, the shapes never go up or down, they always turn Left or right or turn around or whatever.
- [25:33]
B
But you can use to your advantage in the Mutara Nebula. Yeah, they're treated like sailing ships, basically. Yeah. Like there's an up and a down when they approach Earth. Earth is always oriented north to south, you know, like a globe. Yeah, yeah. There's no reason to. Right. I mean, Antarctica, you could say, is the top of the world just as easily, because top and bottom is completely relative, right? So we all accept that. Again, unless you're like, a defiant, flat Earther, we all accept that those things are kind of relative. And like we said, we start getting into physics, you kind of start finding out that weird things happen with time, too. But we're not, again, here to talk about science per se. We're here to talk about God. So when we're talking about eternity and what we mean by eternity, we're really talking about what it means when we ascribe that quality to God, we say that God is eternal. If you've been wondering why so far we've been talking about time and space instead of just time, it's because, hopefully, as you've already seen, the two are intimately connected. And thinking about it in terms of space is at least a little easier than thinking about it in terms of time. For us, we're going to start using space and then analogize from that over to time to try to help explain this, when we're talking about space, spatial categories and ideas like distance in space, we're speaking from the point of view of a finite creature, because everything created is finite. And so for us, we at everything else we know that exists, right? From other people to chairs to globes, to windows to atmospheric gases, right? When we say those things exist, part of their finite existence is that they fill a certain series of points in space. They occupy a series of points in space could be big or small, right? Relatively more. Relatively fewer points in space. No, we're not getting into Zeno's paradox right now of how much space is a point, but the idea being whatever unit of measurement you want to use, right? There is a finite quantity of space taken up by the volume of the object, right? And for it to occupy, as a finite object, including a human body, for it to occupy another series of points in another place, that finite object has to cross the intervening points in space, and then it could go and occupy another set of points in space. Going from occupying one set of points in space through the intervening points in space to occupy another set of points in space is what we call movement, right? That Is something moving. And it moves because it's finite. And so it has to cross all of those points in space in between to get from one to the other. And we can then measure that movement in various ways as to direction, as to continuity. Most common one we use is speed. Right. How much time is elapsed while it is crossing from one set of points to the other and crossing the points in between. Okay. So that's. That's your basic. Right. Your finite objects, which includes pretty much every created thing. So then we talk about God and we say that God is omnipresent. So as God's eternity is to. Is to time, God's omnipresence is to space. That's the analogy we're making here. So we say God is omnipresent. And what do we mean by that? Because there are different ways that someone could see that.
- [30:04]
A
Yeah. I mean, when we think about presence, we probably think about, like a human person, you know, being in the same room with us. And then we say God is everywhere.
- [30:17]
B
Occupying nearby points in space. Yes.
- [30:19]
A
Yeah.
- [30:20]
B
And so you could say, well, okay, someone could imagine, like the Monty Python prayer and Meaning of Life, that God is just really, really big. That is just huge. And he's sort of spread out through the whole universe.
- [30:35]
A
Right.
- [30:36]
B
So. So he's occupying sort of all of the points. He's just so big that he occupies all of the points in space. Right. And that's what we mean when we say he's omnipresent. But that's kind of weird if you push on it a little bit.
- [30:53]
A
Yeah. I mean, in some ways, it kind of reduces God to being like a pagan God. Just a really big thing.
- [31:01]
B
Yes. He's still a thing. Right. He's just the biggest thing. Right. And also it definitely depersonalizes him. Right. Okay. There's some element of him in this room. Right. But does that correspond to, like, a human toe? Right. Does that. Right. You know what I mean? Like, that's not a. Right. And that isn't really the idea. Like, there's some piece of God here that we could reach out and theoretically touch. Is that usually what we mean when we're talking about God's omnipresence? We usually mean he's there in person. Right. Like, as in you could interact with him. Right.
- [31:44]
A
The whole God, as it were. Yes.
- [31:47]
B
Someone could also say, well, it just means that God is everywhere at once.
- [31:52]
A
Right.
- [31:53]
B
Like the whole Earth is just packed with a nearly infinite number of identical Jesus. Right. Just sort of all at once. Right. You Know. Yeah. So that everybody can interact with him. Right. Like, I. Again, that's. That's weird, right? Because that makes it seem like there's just more than one of Him. Like, instead of the Holy Trinity, you've got a nearly infinite number of persons that all have a hive mind or something, which is not the doctrine of the Trinity at all.
- [32:28]
A
Yeah. I mean, this kind of. This kind of reminds me, me of the joke with the. The Father Guido Sarducci joke where he says, you know, if. If God is invisible in a spirit and I'm made in the image of God, shouldn't I be able to turn invisible? You know, it's this kind of thinking, right? Which, I mean, it's. I. I guess it makes sense, Right, because this is the finite human mind trying to grapple with the presence of the power of God, you know, the infinite.
- [32:57]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's weird. Right. So what do we mean then? Right. And we would definitely say that even though, you know, people will talk about the Holy Spirit moving or something, they're using that as an analogy.
- [33:15]
A
Yeah, Right.
- [33:16]
B
Like, we. We don't literally think God has to cross intervening space. Like, we wouldn't say, you know, I, in the liturgy say Christ is in our midst. Right. And then they say the same thing two minutes later in Metairie, Louisiana. And that means Christ has, you know, two minutes to get from here to there. Right. Like, no, obviously, that's dumb, Right? That's not what. Right. God doesn't have to, like, move from place to place across all the intervening space where you can, like, measure his speed. Right. So that doesn't make any sense. Right.
- [33:50]
A
Yeah.
- [33:50]
B
And that. That part really brings us to the crux of the matter, is that we're talking about God's omnipresence. What we're really talking about is the fact that, unlike us, he's not finite.
- [33:59]
A
Right. Which is just an apophatic thing to say. He's not this.
- [34:02]
B
Right. He's not finite. Meaning what we're really saying is, unlike us, he is not occupying a particular set of points in space.
- [34:12]
A
Right. Even all the saints, Even all the points.
- [34:15]
B
Even all of them. Right. He is not. So what we're ultimately saying is this is what Saint Duitre Staniloy means when he talks about God's attributes being supra essential. Right. Is that what we really mean when we say God is omnipresent is that these spatial categories that we use to describe our own experience and to describe, you know, other objects in the world that we Encounter, those categories don't apply to God because God is not a thing in the world. He doesn't exist in the way we do and the way created things do. Right. If we understand that regarding spatial categories, they just, they don't apply to God. That's what we mean. Now let's turn to ideas of eternity, right? And there are some weird views of eternity, but here it comes again. Plato, brain. Most of Western thought has gotten its ideas about eternity, at least the more, the more subtle ones, the actual better ones. So, you know, we're going to say Plato was wrong, but he was more on the right track than some folks like William Lane Craig. So in terms of what eternity is.
- [35:37]
A
How did I know that when we did. Whenever we do an episode on Christology on any level, you're going to mention William Lane Craig a number of times.
- [35:46]
B
I'm going to relentlessly bash William LANE Craig. Yes.
- [35:51]
A
Dr. Craig, if you're listening, please send us an email. We'd love to hear from you.
- [35:56]
B
No, he won't.
- [35:57]
A
Yeah, I know, I know.
- [35:59]
B
He does this whole he doesn't debate his fellow Christians thing.
- [36:02]
A
Yes.
- [36:02]
B
So he doesn't get called out as heresies. But as I've said many times, I don't consider him to be my fellow Christian, so he could debate me. It would be fine on any topic. Plato's idea of eternity, right, is essentially stasis. This is a problem, right? But the reason for that is what is time in terms of how we use it? Time, the way we most commonly use it, is a way of measuring change, right? Think cooking time. Think how old is somebody? And so for Plato, timelessness then must equal changelessness, because you would have to have time in order to have change. Therefore, for anything that is truly eternal has to be completely unchanging and therefore unmoving. Because even movement is a kind of change, right? Movement requires time, speed, right? So you get this idea of stasis, no movement, no change, no activity, no nothing. And this in the Platonic period, that is not St. Augustine's fault, but which was triggered by St. Augustine in the west, gets adapted into, particularly in Latin theology, the concept of God. Well, it may not immediately be obvious why that's a problem, because you may be saying to me, well, no, God doesn't change. And that's correct, right? God doesn't change. And we just said God doesn't move per se in a literal sense, right? So that's not a problem. It becomes a big problem when you get to God doesn't act, God doesn't do anything.
- [38:10]
A
Yeah.
- [38:12]
B
Because this is where you get the idea in Latin theology of absolute divine simplicity, for example.
- [38:20]
A
Yeah.
- [38:21]
B
That God is actus puris. And, you know, I'm a fancy lad because I could have just said pure act in English, but no, I use the Latin for some reason.
- [38:30]
A
The Latin phrase is the one.
- [38:33]
B
Yes. And so this idea that God is unchanging builds in then the kind of Platonic idea that leads to the development in Latin theology of the idea of created grace. And this is why Latin theologians, who are being consistent, reject St. Gregory Palamas and will even accuse him of being a polytheist and a heretic, because they have this firm belief that God cannot act and therefore he needs a created intermediary through which to act.
- [39:17]
A
Yeah.
- [39:17]
B
So for Plato, this is simple. But you can see how as Plato gets adapted into religion, like in Neoplatonism, you get this kind of quasi Gnostic series of emanations, right. From the actual God who is in stasis. Right. And the things that are acting are sort of derivative. You can see how that deforms your view of the Holy Trinity. You can see. Right. If you're just thinking about it a little bit. Right. You can see how you get these ideas created intermediaries. You can see where you get Arianism. I mean, all of this stuff is in some sense is fruit of this poison tree, right? This idea that eternity is some kind of stasis, and therefore God in true eternity, cannot directly act, cannot do anything, cannot move vis a vis creation at all. Now, what's a better way then of thinking about God's eternity? Right? And this is why we spent the time talking about omnipresence. So just like the way we think about space and distance, the way we think about time is conditioned in our human experience by the fact that we're finite. Right. In the same way that we exist at a certain series of points in space, we exist at a certain point in time. That point in time just sort of keeps rolling forward. Right? Time zero.
- [40:58]
A
Yeah.
- [40:59]
B
See, there's a Next Generation episode reference for it. You're welcome. Yeah, it just flows that one direction. And you say, well, okay, it just flows in one direction. I could move in lots of directions in terms of space. Well, you could, but imagine this. Imagine someone did a bunch of research on you, like Palantir is doing right now as we speak, and decided to map your movements for your whole life. They could draw one line with an arrow at the end and trace all of your movements, your whole life. So your Your physical movements in space are not all that different than your movement through time. In fact, as we said, they're. They're connected. Right. And you only experience them in one direction because we're finite. And as we mentioned, time we think of mostly in terms of growth and change. Right. Sundial. The shadow moves. Right. The position of the sun changes. Right. And we use time to describe. Right. Seconds, minutes and hours are kind of arbitrary divisions.
- [42:08]
A
Right.
- [42:09]
B
They were done a very long time ago. That's why they're in base 60 math. But they're arbitrary divisions. Right. If you have to define a second 1/60 of a minute. Right. They only make sense with reference to each other. There isn't something out there that's described by it.
- [42:34]
A
Yeah, Right.
- [42:35]
B
But so the place where we start then, to understand God's eternity is that God does not exist at a point in time, nor does, as we said with space. Does he exist sort of simultaneously at all points in time? He doesn't exist at a point in time any more than he exists at a particular point in space.
- [42:56]
A
Right.
- [42:56]
B
Because he doesn't exist in that way. He's not finite. That also means for God to do X at one time and do Y at another time. He does not need to cross the intervening moments in time. He doesn't have to sit and wait any more than he has to go from one place to another place across all the points of time. God is not sort of spread out through time, obviously. Right. Like there's part of him here, and then three days from now it'll be a different part of God. Right, that makes sense. It's just that temporal categories do not apply to God. Now if we follow this out, this is our ultimate. Sorry, Calvinists, but let's not pick on Calvinists. This is also. Sorry, Arminians.
- [43:49]
A
Yeah. Because it's all based on this kind of idea that God is subject to linear time, that God is somewhere along the timeline, that time is bigger than God, so to speak.
- [44:00]
B
Not only does God exist at a point in time, he exists at the same point of time that I do at the same time that I do.
- [44:07]
A
Yeah. So he's like making predictions. It's just. He's way better at it.
- [44:11]
B
Yes. Right. So if. If someone told you. If someone asked you where is God? Or if you asked someone where is God? And their response was, well, he's up in heaven. Like he's occupying this space that is somehow up.
- [44:26]
A
Yeah.
- [44:27]
B
Like parallel to the Earth down here. Right. You'd be like, you don't mean that literally. Right. And if they said no literally, then you. Right. You'd be like, right, okay. But they say, oh, God is just on this parallel time track to ours.
- [44:48]
A
Yeah.
- [44:49]
B
And not only does no one ask any questions, not only does no one say, you don't mean literally. Right. They're like, oh, yeah, yeah. No, that's true. This weird assumption that God experiences time the same way we do. Right. That he's existing in this moment. And why do we say this is the ultimate. Sorry. Calvinist. And sorry. Arminians and sorry. You know, because of course, William Lane Craig is a molinist. Because he can't be normal. Right, right, sorry, Molinists, sorry. Open theists. On and on. Right, yeah. All of these positions in Western theology all have as a basic presupposition that God exists at a point in time. The question, does God know what's going to happen in the future? Is an incoherent question. It is an incoherent question. There is not an answer to it because it's not coherent. Okay. It's like asking what color something is in absolute darkness. There is no answer because it. The question does not make sense. It's like asking what color is the number five.
- [45:55]
A
Right. It's a category error.
- [45:57]
B
Yeah. It's an incoherent question. There is no future for God. God is not finite. He does not exist at a point in time with more points of time, potentially infinite points in time ahead of him. That is absurd. Okay, speaking analogically. Cool. Right? Whatever. We have to speak analogically. We have to speak anthropomorphically of God sometimes.
- [46:24]
A
That's what we got.
- [46:25]
B
And God speaks to us that way sometimes. Right. To help us understand. Because we're humans and as we said, we can only understand from our finite perspective. But thinking that that's accurate, that that is literally accurate. Right. Is preposterous. So saying God chose people in advance for salvation is incoherent. Saying that he made that choice based on his foreknowledge. Equally, if not more incoherent. Saying that he's learning as he goes. Incoherent.
- [46:55]
A
Yeah, Deeply incoherent.
- [46:57]
B
Right. Because he doesn't go. Okay. Saying that he foresaw all the possibilities that arranged them. Like playing three card money. Because you're a weird molinist. Like William Lane Craig is incoherent.
- [47:10]
A
Sorry.
- [47:12]
B
Like this is all just incoherent. It's not serious. It's not serious. Guys, I know you've been having these arguments for hundreds of years. But you've been wasting your time. Bad news, okay? It's all incoherent. There is not a future for God. There's not a past for, for God either.
- [47:31]
A
Yeah.
- [47:32]
B
Like you do you think there's a past for God? Like where he could look back and be like, oh, you know, hey, what would have happened if I had done this? Like what? Right. The God you're talking about is just a giant person. It's just a giant human. Yeah, right. With more in common with the pagan conception of God than the Christian conception of God. But notice also, notice also I was careful to do this. We're not arguing for Plato. We're not arguing for spheres and circles and tight circles and any of that. We're not arguing for any of that either. Right. Like this is not Platonism. Right. Plato got it wrong. Right. As well. Maybe in the other direction or down a different side channel. Right. Temporal categories don't apply to God. There's not a before and after for God as God. All that prohed anti Calvinist literature you've spent all that time reading was a waste of time. You should have been playing Marvel Rivals or something.
- [48:38]
A
Yeah, I mean, I think that part of the reason why a lot of this language gets used for God is that in some way or another it's found in the scriptures. But the problem is when you, when you flip the, the, the lens around or whatever you want to say and, and rather than using it as this is human beings experience of what it's like to interact with God, instead say this is what it's like for God to be God.
- [49:08]
B
Right. You literalize it. Like talking about heaven as being up there or something is fine. Unless you're serious. Right. Like if you run it to someone, I'm sure they're out there because flat earthers are out there who really believe that the heavens are a dome and God has a literal throne sitting on top of it. Right. We would say this is a wacky person. Right. Because hey, yeah, the Bible speaks that way all over the place.
- [49:36]
A
Right.
- [49:37]
B
But it's speaking that way poetically and by analogy, not literally. Right. The sky is not a literal hard dome. God does not sit on a literal chair that is sitting on top of said dome. Right, Right. And pretty much no one thought that. It's not that. Oh yeah, that's what all those primitives thought. But now, you know, modernists like Father Andrew and Father Stephen now they say, you know, that's just an analogy. No, no, everyone understood people, ancient people were not stupid.
- [50:10]
A
Yeah. Okay.
- [50:13]
B
I mean, read the poetry of the Psalms. It's great poetry. Okay. Like, they understood poetry, illusions, imagery. They understood all this. Okay. They were. They were. Had the same kind of mind that you have.
- [50:28]
A
Yeah, yeah.
- [50:29]
B
So all that said. All that said about God's timelessness, temporal categories just don't apply to God. Before and after don't apply to God. There is no future for God. There is no past for God. Right. God is not at a point in time. He does not experience time as a succession of moments the way we do. Right. Infinite or otherwise, going backwards or forwards at the same time. Contra Plato, God does. And this isn't just analogy. God does in the Scriptures, as is recorded in the scriptures and in the history of the Church, God acts at particular times. He does things at particular times. And that's not just a time thing. It's also a space thing. God is in particular places, Right. This is that weird puzzle. We've pointed to a bunch on this show where it's like, well, yeah, God is omnipresent, but he's also like, really present in the tabernacle and the temple. He's like, extra there. And you're like, wait, what? Right. Like, how do those two things fit together? That's where we're going tonight, right? God acts at particular times and in particular places and is present in particular places. God enters into human experience. Now, at no point can we try to figure out what it's like to be God and how God experiences this, because you don't know what it's like to be a bat, let alone God. Right? But we have this tension because, as Lucha said, God as God, the divine nature, Right? God. Spatial and temporal categories don't apply. Those are categories of human experience. Nonetheless, God appears to Abraham in a particular place at a particular time. He appears once a year in the tabernacle, and then the temple bodily, even at a particular time. So we have all of these episodes in the Old Testament where despite God not existing in the sense of occupying points in time and space, where God is described, as it talked about, as occupying points in time and space.
- [52:53]
A
Right? That's a human experience.
- [52:57]
B
Right. So how. How do we bridge that gap? Right. How could both of those be true? How does that work? And that's what we're going to get into in our second half.
- [53:09]
A
Alrighty. Well, we are going to take a short break and we'll be right back.
- [53:24]
C
Poised between east and west, between Orthodox and Catholic, Lithuania, the last of Europe's pagan nations did not forget its ancient tales such as that of the giantess Neringa Eglay, Queen of Serpents and the Iron Wolf. Rather, they fulfilled and enriched them with legends like the hill of Crosses and the miracle working icon of Our lady of the Gate of the Dawn. In the Wolf and the Cross, Father Andrew Stephen Damek and Deacon Seraphim Richard Rowland take a very personal pilgrimage into a land where history and land legend have met and fused, where orthodox Christians have lived as a minority for nearly seven centuries, their faith founded upon the blood of martyrs and the witness of dozens of saints. To find this book and others like it, you can go to store.ancientfaith.com again, that is store.ancient faith.com.
- [54:36]
A
And we're back. This is the second half of this special pre recorded Christmas episode of the Lord of Spirits podcast. We're talking about the relationship of the incarnation of Jesus Christ to time. And in our first half, we. I don't know how do you even summarize all that, but we kind of walked through.
- [54:57]
B
We talked about what eternity is.
- [54:58]
A
Yeah. What is eternity? And what, what does it mean for God to be eternal?
- [55:04]
B
Temporal categories and spatial categories don't apply to God.
- [55:08]
A
Yeah, that's basically the summary. Yes. There is language in scripture that refers to God functioning in time, but that's a human experience. And we shouldn't, unlike the Calvinists, unlike, frankly, a huge amount of Western soteriology, consider that God is subject to time, especially not linear time. So there we go. That's a good summary.
- [55:30]
B
Right. Probably doesn't exist at a particular point in time in space, but Little Desert does talk about him doing things at particular points in time and space. And in bodily terms. Right. Is in occupying a set of points in space at a point in time. Yes. And so now we're going to talk about the Incarnation, because the fact is, if we really understand the Incarnation, which William Lane Craig doesn't, I'm just going to bash up the whole episode. It's a dead horse. I know, but I'm at least on this show. But if you understand the Incarnation. Right. Then the Incarnation provides us the key to unlocking that dilemma completely. Because the incarnation of Christ is the entering of God into human experience. The definite article.
- [56:24]
A
Yeah. Right.
- [56:26]
B
The entering of God into human experience. And we mean that in several senses. Okay. So we mean that it is the paradigmatic entering. Right. It is the peak, it is the pinnacle of God entering into human experience. But we also mean it's the basis for all of it. Right. All of it is the incarnation.
- [56:47]
A
Yeah.
- [56:48]
B
And this is the Only way to take on board the actual language of scripture, especially the New Testament.
- [56:59]
A
Right.
- [56:59]
B
No one has seen God at any time, says St. John, but the unique God who's in the bosom of the Father has made him known. Right. He's not saying, ignore all those passages of the Old Testament where people saw God. He's saying that was Jesus. Yeah, yeah, right. So Christ, and in particular the incarnate Christ is the means by which. Right. That is possible through the whole Testament, to get at more what we, what we mean by that. There is a basic problem, a basic foundational problem in, for example, Judaism and Islam. There is a fatal flaw, religiously, theologically speaking, and that is that neither Judaism nor Islam can explain how God can communicate and interact with humans.
- [58:01]
A
Okay, what do you mean by that?
- [58:05]
B
How can God within. Right. Rabbinic Judaism, non Christian Judaism.
- [58:12]
A
Yeah, we're not talking ancient Judaism here.
- [58:14]
B
We're talking, yeah, communicate about himself to humans, truthfully, so that humans can have some kind of understanding.
- [58:25]
A
They probably say he, he speaks, but he talks to us.
- [58:28]
B
Okay, so human language, finite, historically contingent human language is capable of accurately describing God.
- [58:42]
A
I mean, that would have to be the claim.
- [58:45]
B
Well, well, no, there is a way they try to get around this because that's obviously a flawed claim. Right, right. That, that's. Well, yeah, that's a problem. Right. God is. They would agree with Christians that God is ineffable. Right. That God cannot be accurately described in words in general. Right. But so how do they try to get around this? Well, you have to have an eternal language. So what you do is you take a language, the case of Rabbinic Judaism, Hebrew, in the case of Islam, Arabic, specifically the Arabic of the Quran. Right. You take the text itself, in the case of a lot of Islam, and in the case of a lot of Rabbinic Judaism, the Torah or the Quran, and you make that eternal.
- [59:37]
A
Yeah.
- [59:39]
B
So you say, well, it's not a finite human language, it's divine language. And because it's divine language, it can accurately carry, Right. God's, God's self revelation. Here's the problem with that. That doesn't solve the problem. Right. Because the core problem was you have humanity down here, finite. You have God up above, metaphorically. Right. Infinite. All you've done is taken language as a go between and moved it from the human side of the divider to, to the God side of the divider. You haven't broken down the divider.
- [60:23]
A
Yeah. And, and doesn't, and doesn't Rabbinic Judaism even say that the Torah itself exists before creation.
- [60:33]
B
Yes. Islam says that about the Quran too.
- [60:36]
A
Yeah.
- [60:38]
B
Some forms of Islam, the pre.
- [60:40]
A
Eternal word meant hyper literally.
- [60:46]
B
Yes, yes. So here's what I mean by that. Not solving the problem, we just moved to the other side of the divide. Like, okay, now you've got a divine language that is eternal and infinite and therefore able to convey God. How can humans understand that language?
- [61:02]
A
Right. I mean, that's.
- [61:03]
B
You've just moved the problem.
- [61:05]
A
Yeah, we, we understand.
- [61:06]
B
You haven't solved it.
- [61:07]
A
We understand it as like, like apparently some in Rabbinic Judaism will say that Hebrew becomes kind of limited at the Tower of Babel. But I mean, that just essentially says that there's a human Hebrew and a divine Hebrew, you know, that are related somehow.
- [61:29]
B
That isn't bridged.
- [61:30]
A
Yeah, right, right, right. And of course, then there's also just the very kind of obvious linguistic problem, which is that we can, you know, linguists, especially philologists, watch these languages change over time and, you know, have derivative elements and even stuff that's in the Torah. Right. Like there's loan words in the Torah.
- [61:58]
B
Yes.
- [61:59]
A
Which is kind of a problem.
- [62:00]
B
It's not even totally clear that the Quran is in Arabic. It may be in Aramaic.
- [62:04]
A
Yeah, yeah.
- [62:05]
B
An Aramaic dialect. It's not actually Arabic yet.
- [62:10]
A
Yeah.
- [62:10]
B
So that means it's on a line of linguistic development.
- [62:13]
A
I mean, textual criticism presents big problems for both of those traditions if you're going to focus on those texts in that way.
- [62:23]
B
Yeah, yeah. And so this is a massive problem. And it's a problem pagans didn't have. Right. Because pagans don't worship infinite gods. The gods they worship are finite. So a finite God who's just bigger. Right. Essentially can reveal itself to a finite human. Just. I mean, there's no issue there. Right. That's why we singled out or doubled out Judaism in Islam, because Judaism and Islam, Rabbinic Judaism and Islam talk about an infinite God, Right. So they have this problem of how does an infinite God communicate with finite humans? As Christians, we have the solution to this problem. Right. It is in the incarnation, correctly understood, in which God, the fullness of God, the infinite God, not a subset of God, not a reflection, not an emanation, the fullness of God, the fullness of deity, everything it is to be God. Right. Becomes finite, becomes man.
- [63:36]
A
Yeah.
- [63:37]
B
Becomes a mediator, bridges the divide.
- [63:41]
A
Well, and even I recall in the long ago times when I was an undergraduate studying English literature, that one of my bolder professors talked about modern problems of language and, you know, like, like deconstructionism. And all that kind of stuff and said, you know, that a lot of these writers, they point to the fact that the word and the thing that it's referring to, or to use the technical language, the signifier and the signified, that there's a gap between them. That when you say something that doesn't convey the thing, that just sort of points to the thing. And he said that what a lot of these guys don't contend with is that Christ is the word who means himself, that there is that. Likewise, that there's no gap between, again, to use this technical language, signifier and signified, that he actually does. He is God's spoken word, fully revealing himself, not by just pointing at something else, but by being himself. I don't know if I'm expressing that well, but I found that to be a useful way of trying to understand what is very difficult to understand.
- [65:05]
B
Right, yeah, yeah. So this is. Yeah. So the point of the Incarnation there. Right. The relationship between sign and things signified is that. And this is one of the rougher passages of St. Augustine. But he kind of talks this way at one point. This is again, the correctly understood Incarnation. The doctrine of the Incarnation, as Christianity has historically taught and believed it and dogmatized it in councils. Right. Says that Christ is not a human person or Christ's humanity, considered as a separate thing is a pointer to who God is or a representation of who God is. But he is God. Right.
- [65:55]
A
Right.
- [65:58]
B
And not at the expense of each other. Right. But so now that we've repeatedly used that phrase, Incarnation correctly understood. Right. Obviously we could do 100 episodes on this. This is already kind of. I mean, we've done more than one episode on Christology before this one. We're taking a particular trajectory. Right. But just to quickly sort of summarize what we mean by Christology, as it's taught by the Church. Right. Is that there is a second person of the Holy Trinity.
- [66:32]
A
Right.
- [66:33]
B
The Son. Right. Son. The Divine Logos. Right. The Word or wisdom of God, that he is begotten of the Father without reference to time. So this is another thing. There's no before. Right. He's begotten. He's generated for the Father, but with. No. There's no before and after.
- [67:04]
A
I mean, the most you get is like before all ages. But ages is a reference to time itself.
- [67:14]
B
Yes.
- [67:15]
A
Yeah.
- [67:16]
B
So it's outside the boundary of time. Right. So there's no before and after. Right. The. The Son is begotten. Yeah. Right. That's. And that's what the fathers all say. Again, this isn't a weird modern thing. This is all the way back, right. Everyone who disagreed with Arius. Right. And so. And he is the express image of the Father, everything the Father is, He is the only difference between he and the Father. Right. The only difference between them is that he is begotten and the Father is not. And that divine person is made man. That divine person takes upon himself human nature. And we talk about him taking upon himself human nature. Again, there's some sloppy talk about this, right. People will say, oh, he takes a human nature. This is sloppy talk, Right. Because you say he takes a human nature that makes it sound like a human nature, makes it sound like a thing.
- [68:29]
A
Right.
- [68:31]
B
Like he adds this thing or he attaches this thing to himself or himself to this thing. Right. Which, sorry, William Lane Craig is not how this works. Right. Human nature is something that all humans share the way the divine nature is something that the three persons of the Holy Trinity share. So he takes upon himself our shared human nature. What is a nature? Well, we've talked about this on the show a bunch, right. We've talked about how the earlier language, the older language. So nature is a feces is a Greek term. It really comes into Christian theology through St. Paul using it. It's not used in the Greek translation of the Christian Old Testament for the most. I mean, we're not going to get into. There's an edge case, but it's not really used as a concept. Okay. That the older language was body. And if you've been listening to this show for very long, you know how we define a body in this case in nature, that it's a gathering of powers and potentialities. Right. Sort of a cluster of powers and potentialities, a nexus of them. And so Christ is a divine person, possesses the divine nature, powers, potentialities. Right. All of that of God. He adds to that the full set of human powers and potentialities, which includes a human body, which includes a human soul. William Lane Craig. Yeah. Which includes.
- [70:19]
A
That's the heresy he's especially known for.
- [70:21]
B
This is Apollinarianism. And includes a human will and include. Right. All of that. Right. That also includes what are added. Right. He takes upon himself what are called the blameless passions. We've talked about this before. This is a distinction the fathers make. Right. So there are sinful passions, anger, lust. Right. There are also blameless passions like getting tired or hungry, hungry, thirsty. Right. And would include passions, the way we think of the passion of Christ. Right. Being able to be injured, harmed. Right. Christ voluntarily accepts Those.
- [71:13]
A
Right.
- [71:14]
B
He allows those to happen to him. Right. But again, that is additive, right. That is added. And why am I making this big point of additive? Well, so there's a lot of folks out there, some of them well meaning, some of them clueless, who take the use of the word kenosis in Philippians 2, like, way too seriously.
- [71:43]
A
Oh, yeah. They'll say stuff like, well, he set aside being God or he set aside his powers as God, or like. No, no, no, stop it, stop it. God does not stop being God.
- [72:01]
B
Right. He had no way stopped being God at any point. Right. He was everything he always was. Plus. Right.
- [72:12]
A
Yeah.
- [72:13]
B
Plus these human powers and potentialities, plus allowing himself to suffer these blameless passions. Right. That's what I mean by additive plus. Right. There's the prayer that we say a lot as priests talking about Christ when he died, when his human soul was separated from his human body, that Christ. We say that Christ's body was in the grave. His soul was in Hades, harrowing it. And he was on the throne.
- [72:50]
A
Yeah.
- [72:51]
B
With the Father and the Holy Spirit.
- [72:53]
A
In the grave of the body.
- [72:54]
B
But in Hazel is God in paradise with the thief.
- [72:56]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [72:59]
B
Right. Filling all these. So he. He didn't stop being God. Okay. And the reason. Part of the reason, I think, why people go down that road is again, humans rejecting what's beyond their understanding. Right. Which is. Well, wait a minute. How could he be, like, omnipresent?
- [73:24]
A
Yeah.
- [73:26]
B
And standing there, right, in Galilee and walking from place to place, crossing, like we just said, finite, crossing points in. Right. How can he be infinite and finite at the same time?
- [73:40]
A
Yeah. And I think one of the things that probably gets people into trouble with regards to this when they are reading it right. In the sense that they realize that kenosis does not mean that he stopped being God or he's less God or anything like that. There's the language in Scripture of him being the same yesterday, today and forever. And then also the language in our hymnography of that he is incarnate without change. So it is correct to read that as meaning. Look, he's still God in every way, completely. He's still the Son of God in every way. But as we'll see, it actually means more than that.
- [74:26]
B
Yeah. The emptying is about his suffering and his humiliation, as is clear in context when you read the whole hymn.
- [74:34]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, Right.
- [74:35]
B
That's what they're. Right. Emptying himself, even unto humbling himself, even unto death. Right. Death on a cross, his humiliation, his suffering, his death. That's the emptying it's talking about. Not that he stopped being God.
- [74:50]
A
Yeah. Taking it a little too literally is the problem.
- [74:53]
B
We have trouble understanding how he could be finite and infinite at the same time.
- [74:57]
A
Yeah.
- [74:58]
B
How he could be everywhere. And also, well, there he is at that synagogue in Galilee, and now he's walking from Capernaum to Bethsaida. Right. Here's the point I want to make. That's the way God is described all through the Old Testament.
- [75:16]
A
Yep, that's right.
- [75:18]
B
As being both everywhere and in the.
- [75:23]
A
Holy of holies, or both everywhere and sitting down at the table with Abraham.
- [75:31]
B
Right. On and on and on.
- [75:33]
A
Yeah.
- [75:34]
B
Right. Walking over with Abraham to look at Sodom. Right. That's the way he's described all through the Old Testament. If we didn't understand the Incarnation until the incarnation is revealed to us in the Gospels, until the incarnation is revealed to us, that is just a mystery. That is just a contradiction that makes no sense in the Old Testament. That God is presented as infinite and finite at the same time, that he is presented as being unable to be seen, and then he's seen by people at the same time. All of these things are just these contradictions and paradoxes in the Hebrew Bible. And when the incarnation is revealed to us, all of a sudden we see how that's possible.
- [76:20]
A
Yeah.
- [76:21]
B
I think it's all of the language we're referring to right now that comes from the councils and stuff is descriptive.
- [76:29]
A
Yeah.
- [76:29]
B
It's just a long series of.
- [76:31]
A
Oh, yeah, I think it's worth underlining. And we'll talk way more about this. But it's worth underlining the language that you just used about the incarnation being revealed to us. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [76:49]
B
It's almost like I did that deliberately. Hey, there's a madness to my method. So. Right. And so we have God.
- [77:02]
A
Right.
- [77:02]
B
This also solves the problem we were talking about with Islam and Rabbinic Judaism. Because God is now able to be seen and touched and spoken with and interacted with by humans.
- [77:14]
A
He is revealed.
- [77:16]
B
Christ's humanity is the bridge.
- [77:19]
A
Right.
- [77:20]
B
Between God and man. Literally. Right. And further, this explains how we've talked about this before. You go all the way, way back in the long ago time to our episode about God's body. Right. We talked about how a lot of times we get it backwards. People will say that the Bible uses anthropomorphic language to describe God.
- [77:50]
A
Right.
- [77:51]
B
But really, from the perspective of the Scriptures, from the perspective of man being made in the image of God. Right. Actually, it talks about humanity in theomorphic Terms.
- [78:04]
A
Yeah, so. So my right arm is just a lesser reflection of the strong right arm of God.
- [78:12]
B
Right? Yeah, right. Which is the reality, right?
- [78:17]
A
So.
- [78:20]
B
At the beginning of our first half, we sort of posed this problem, right? The problem of God being described in the Old Testament throughout the Scriptures as being both sort of finite and infinite at the same time. This half we talked about how the Incarnation solves that. And now as we come back to the temporal element, we come back to time, we're going to sort of narrow in on a particular aspect of this problem and that's going to be what we talk about in the third half. And so here's, here's that sort of sub problem, right? Christ in his post resurrection appearances, right? One of the common features. And if you go to matins regularly, Sunday matins, you hear all of these over and over again, which you should go, you should go.
- [79:16]
A
You guys. There are some churches where you look out at the beginning of matins. Orthros, there's no one there. I have to just give a nice little shout out to the church in Raleigh, North Carolina, where I'm about to go. Last time I was there, I looked out at the beginning of matins, there was like 85 people standing there waiting for it to begin. I was like, am I in the twilight zone here? How is this a thing?
- [79:37]
B
But then There were probably 387 people once the liturgy started.
- [79:41]
A
That's right. There is no what outside the Orthodox Church? There is no parking outside the Orthodox Church.
- [79:49]
B
Yes.
- [79:53]
A
Yes, sorry.
- [79:54]
B
Yeah, go to Madden's, everybody. Go to Mellow Parkus. Yeah, so the. So but a comment featured all of these, right? When Christ appears to his disciples is. And this is twofold. Part one is Handle me and see, which was we literally heard this past Sunday, Handle me and see. For a spirit has not flesh and bones that you see that I have, right? So and another very, you know, St. Thomas is another variation of that, right? See the wounds? Put your finger, right? Touch me, right? I have a physical body. And this is presented as proof that Christ is really risen from the dead, that he's not a spirit, he's not a ghost. His. He's really still embodied, right? And then the other piece of that is Christ eating in front of them, right? Eating fish, eating a honeycomb, right? These things and these are all there, pretty much everybody agrees. That's why they're there. They're there to show that it's a bodily resurrection. He has experienced the bodily resurrection, okay. And obviously implied and in some cases outright stated. Is that if this was a spirit like God or an angel or something, or a ghost, you could not touch it and it could not eat.
- [81:22]
A
Right.
- [81:23]
B
But remember back there in the Old Testament, some of those times when God was described as finite, we see him touching people and eating.
- [81:33]
A
Right? Yeah. And relatedly, there's the question of, like, you know, we already made reference to the hospitality of Abraham. If you keep reading that passage, and especially the, the beginning of the chapter that follows, you know that it's, it's God and two angels who have showed up and sat down. And so you might well ask the question like, okay, well, this says that they, they all ate. What does that mean? Exactly. So you're saying, well, God is eating because of what we're about to talk about, but the angels, what's going on there? And there is actually an explanation for this not found in that passage, but elsewhere in the Old Testament scriptures, namely in the book of Tobit, where the archangel Raphael accompanies some of the main characters. And the question is raised, hey, you know, buddy's in disguise as a human. You know, hey, buddy, what's the deal with you eating if you're just an angel? Because they all agree, you know, angels don't eat. And the archangel says, well, it just appeared that I was eating. You know, this is just an illusion. And so taking that paradigm and applying it to the hospitality of Abraham, what you get is God eating because he's got a human body and two angels appearing to eat at best. So. But yeah, we'll. We'll obviously break out all the rest of that stuff as we go.
- [83:10]
B
But so to put a finer point on this, okay, what is this wrong? Because this may not seem like a big problem to you at first, okay, whatever, you know, God's God, he can do whatever he wants. Right? Okay, Imagine you're arguing with a docetist. Okay? You could do this with the actual original Jewish docetus, or you could do this with just about any gnostic who has a descetic view of Christ. Docetism comes from dokeo, to seem or to appear. Right? And the idea is that they believe that Christ just appeared to be human. He was not actually incarnate. Okay? And the docetus says to you, especially if it's one of the originals, the Jewish docetus, they say to you, okay, yeah, Jesus in the gospels, right? They're going to say to you, jesus in the gospels is just a theophany like the Old Testament.
- [84:08]
A
Right?
- [84:09]
B
Right. What is the argument? What is the argument? That all the church fathers use against that. He ate, he drank, people physically touched him. He had physical wounds. So if the dossa says to you, yeah, look here, the Old Testament, here's God eating and drinking and touching people, the angel of the Lord, they, let's say they agree with you. The angel of the Lord is Christ. Sure. The angel Lord is Jesus. That's the same person. And look, when he appears before the quote, unquote, incarnation. Quote, unquote. Before the quote, unquote incarnation. Right. They'll say to you, he touches people and eats. So see, that is a proof that he was really incarnate. Yeah, that's why there's a problem. That's why there's a problem here.
- [84:56]
A
Yeah, yeah.
- [84:58]
B
And the counter argument by the fathers still the same. It's no he, him eating and drinking and touching people proves that he's incarnate, period.
- [85:12]
A
Yep, yep. All right, well, on that bombshell, we're going to take our second and final break and we'll be right back.
- [85:27]
C
Ancient Near Eastern texts such as the BAAL Cycle portray the pagan God BAAL as a rebel, the hero of a revolution, worshiped and glorified for his long string of victories. In the Baal book, A Biography of the Devil, Fr. Stephen DeYoung shows that the Hebrew Scriptures consciously turn the Baal story on its head, depicting him as a failed and defeated rebel who nonetheless tries to steal the glory that belongs to Almighty God. From these scriptures, the figure of the devil emerged within Jewish and Christian tradition. Father DeYoung works through the Old and New Testament passages that refer to various BAAL stories. And he surveys BAAL worship through followers, beliefs, religious practices and liturgical life. In these pages, we will see that the figures of BAAL and the Devil, the Prince of demons, are one and the same. To find this book and others like it, you can go to store.ancientfaith.com again, that is store.ancient faith.com.
- [86:46]
A
Hey, welcome back. It's our special Christmas pre recorded episode of the Lord of spirits podcast here, December 25, 2025. There's something kind of beautifully numerically rhyming about that, and we're talking about the incarnation of Jesus Christ and its relationship to time in particular. So we just finished the second half talking about the. The handle me and see problem, the fact that Christ points to the materiality of his body as proof of his bodily resurrection. And then we connect that, of course, to the fact that there are handle me and see moments in the Old Testament as well, that God does things that are experienced materially through a body there in the Old Testament. So we're going to then talk about exactly how that can be. How is it that handle me and see can show up in both Old and New Testaments. So where do we go from here, Father?
- [87:59]
B
Well, so we have to talk about another aspect of the Incarnation. Okay. In the last half, we talked about the Incarnation sort of from the top down, right. The movement downward of the divine person, of the sun, the divine Logos becoming man. And now when you go at it from the other direction, moving upward, that is that Christ, by taking upon himself our humanity, and Christ being God, deifies our humanity.
- [88:42]
A
So what does that mean?
- [88:44]
B
Yes. The downward movement that we talked about last time or last half is the prerequisite right. Of the upward movement. Christ comes down to us so that he can then elevate us. And this is right there in the New Testament locus classicus, for it is Ephesians 4, 9, and 10.
- [89:10]
A
All right, so in Ephesians 4, 9, 10, we read this in saying he ascended. What does it mean? But that he had also descended into the lower regions, the earth. He who descended is the one who also ascended far above all the heavens, that he might fill all things. And often when this is translated, it's put into parentheses as a kind of aside. Do you think that's right, that it should be in parentheses?
- [89:47]
B
I.
- [89:47]
A
No, no, because certainly in the manuscripts there's no parentheses. There's hardly any punctuation at all.
- [89:58]
B
Yeah, no, he's just repeating his argument.
- [90:01]
A
Essentially, it's an apposition as the word.
- [90:04]
B
Yes. There's a downward movement, then an upward movement. This is standard. So remember St. Paul's thinking in a Semitic language, parallelisms. Right. But this idea, right, if you're familiar even vaguely, with orthodox theology, Saint Athanasius on the Incarnation, famous quote, God became man so that man might become God. Right. That the purpose of Christ's descent was the elevation of humanity.
- [90:45]
A
Yeah. I mean, in the verse right before this, it talks about, it says, you know, when he ascended on high, he led a host of captives and he gave gifts to men.
- [90:54]
B
Yes. Which is. Well, we won't go down that rabbit hole right now because St. Paul does something interesting with the Old Testament quote there. But. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you're tempting me to rabbit trail.
- [91:07]
A
Maybe this will be our next.
- [91:08]
B
Must be the one keeping me on task.
- [91:10]
A
I. Well, you know, I not only have to fall apart, keep you on task, but keep you generating new episodes so that people can have those five more years that you. You promised. What Was it last time or the time before?
- [91:23]
B
I made no such promise. It's my recollection. But so this is also expressed at.
- [91:35]
A
St.
- [91:35]
B
Basil the Great expresses the same thing, talking about man being created in the image of God as man, being that being, that created being that is commanded to become God. Now obviously such a thing. Right. Or St. Peter saying that we become partakers of the divine nature. Such a thing is only conceivable because of Christ in the Incarnation. Right. I think about it once again. If we just take St. Basil's statement literally, okay, you are commanded, become God. What's step one?
- [92:16]
A
Right. Yeah.
- [92:19]
B
Right. So this is clearly that the way some of our Protestant friends would like to read it anytime they hear commanded. Right. Works, righteousness or something. Right. Like, what would be the works that you do to become God?
- [92:32]
A
Right. Well, and even, like, even within the pagan context, I mean, number one, pagans do not understand God in any of the terms that we just talked about.
- [92:43]
B
Right, right.
- [92:44]
A
For them, gods are just very basically very big, very powerful. Not humans. Exactly.
- [92:50]
B
But let's just. How do you get big?
- [92:52]
A
Yeah, exactly. And, and certainly humans do become gods in, in paganism, most, of course, do not. It is a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny little fraction of a fraction of a fraction who get to do that. And but the, the great works that people do don't gain them godhood. It is that the gods see the works you do and say, ah, we will give godhood to this one, you know.
- [93:20]
B
Yeah, yeah. But all they're giving you is like more power. Right.
- [93:25]
A
You don't become the infinite God because there is no infinite God in that, in that frame.
- [93:31]
B
Yes. The ones who would grant it are finite.
- [93:35]
A
Right. It's just like, you can join their club.
- [93:38]
B
They don't have themselves. Right. But so this is only possible because of Christ. It's only possible because of who Christ is. That in Christ's person, he has perfectly united God to humanity. That then makes it possible through God's grace, through divine action. Right. For people to become God. We're going to talk about what that means. But a piece of that on the way. Right. Is what St. Basil the Great says regarding the creation of man in God's image, he's commanded to become God. As we've said, that's only possible because of Christ's incarnation. So even though Christ's incarnation had not been revealed, nobody knew about it directly. Right. At the time of the creation of the world. Because at the time of the creation of the world, the creation of man, obviously there Was nobody to know it except God himself. Right. Like, duh.
- [94:39]
A
But.
- [94:40]
B
Right. Christ's incarnation then, is being posited by St. Basil. Right. And how he understands what being made in the image of God means, that Christ's incarnation is the basis for the creation of humanity.
- [94:56]
A
Yeah. Which. Which is the reason that for the promo image for this episode, we. And we've used this before in other contexts, but the icon is of Christ creating Adam in a big mosaic from before the Great Schism. And if you look at traditional orthodox icons of the creation of Adam, it's Christ creating Adam. And they have the same face, that they look like identical twins. So that Christ is himself, as you said, the basis for the creation of Adam.
- [95:34]
B
Right, Right. And so what the Father say, what we're saying here is that Christ is the cause of the creation of humanity in all senses.
- [95:46]
A
Yeah.
- [95:48]
B
Right. In the sense of purpose. Right. Because humanity is created with the purpose. We talked about the image of God in terms of purpose. Right. Of the evocation of himself in the world. Right. Transfiguration of the world. That's only possible because of the Incarnation. So the purpose of Adam before the fall, the purpose of him being created. Right. Requires the Incarnation to be true or it's not possible. Right. So in terms of purpose, in terms of being the one who actually did it, the efficient cause, that's Christ too. Right. All things are made through him. Without him was not anything made that was made. That includes humanity. Right. The formal cause. Right. Christ's humanity is the paradigm for humanity, our shared humanity. We share it with him. Right. So his humanity is logically prior to Adam's humanity.
- [96:48]
A
Right. Say that again for all the kids in the back. Christ's humanity is logically prior to Adam's humanity.
- [96:57]
B
Yes.
- [96:58]
A
Yep.
- [96:59]
B
Adam's humanity is a reflection of Christ's humanity.
- [97:03]
A
Theomorphic.
- [97:04]
B
It is the image. Yes. Of Christ's humanity.
- [97:07]
A
Theo. Anthropomorphic. I don't know how to work that out. Yeah.
- [97:13]
B
If you want to do a deep dive into this, read St. Mark, the ascetic of the Philokalia, where he talks about the Kyriakos anthropos. The.
- [97:24]
A
Yeah. The lordly man.
- [97:27]
B
So we were talking about Christ's resurrection body at the end of the last half. Right. In terms of this problem.
- [97:40]
A
Right.
- [97:42]
B
Or proposed problem. Right. That it could be handled and touched. Right. That he eats. Right. But something else that you very clearly see in those same resurrection appearance accounts of Christ. In fact, a point is made of this is that Christ's resurrected body has a different relationship with space than his body did before his crucifixion. Yeah.
- [98:13]
A
It's clear that, for instance, he just appears in rooms with the doors being closed. The doors being closed. A detail that is mentioned very explicitly in that text.
- [98:24]
B
Explicitly. Yes. That Christ did not cross all the intervening points in space to get from point A to point B.
- [98:30]
A
And also that whereas I was going.
- [98:33]
B
To say all through the Gospels, we see him walking from point A to point B. Yeah.
- [98:37]
A
And getting tired and all that kind of stuff. But also, as we covered in our episode about the post resurrection appearances.
- [98:47]
B
That.
- [98:47]
A
For whatever reason a lot of people don't recognize him, that he seems to look different than he used to.
- [98:53]
B
Yeah. If you want to know more about that, go. Go back and.
- [98:56]
A
Yeah.
- [98:57]
B
To the archives.
- [98:58]
A
Yep, yep.
- [98:59]
B
We talk about that recognition. Yeah. And so his humanity. Right. Including his human body, has a different relationship with space than it did before. And this, of course, is what Christians have always pointed out. Here's another. Sorry. Calvinists, the, the early Calvinist tradition had a big problem with this saying to Luther, the Lutherans, hey, but how can Christ's body be on all those altars and all those churches at the same time? Yeah. If it's a human body, it's like. So let's, let's not even talk theologically. Let's look at the resurrection appearances. Right. Like Christ does not need to cross intervening space. Like he can be. Right. Christ is everywhere. That includes his humanity. So, but within Calvinist theology, there's this thing called the extra Calvinisticum where they literally argue that Christ's divine nature is everywhere and his human nature is only in one place. That Christ's body is seated at the right hand of God, which is seen.
- [100:09]
A
As a place somewhere in 3D space.
- [100:13]
B
And so his divinity extends farther than his humanity. And even Martin Luther could see that was historian. But our Calvinist friends don't or don't care. But. Yes. Right. So Christ, it's everywhere. It's the whole Christ. Right. Who is everywhere. So what does that mean? Well, you know, just to use straight theological terms, that means Christ's humanity is now participating, partaking. Right. Of his divine omnipresence. Right. Qua divinity. Spatial categories never applied to Christ. Right. And now his resurrected body.
- [101:07]
A
Right.
- [101:08]
B
His resurrected human body, his resurrected humanity. Right. His ascended humanity. Spatial categories no longer apply to his humanity either. Yep. Right. So that's space. About time.
- [101:26]
A
Right.
- [101:26]
B
And so what we're positing here, what solves this whole problem, what the Father saw, is that the same way that those Spatial categories that spatial finitude no longer applies to Christ's humanity. Right. Temporal categories, which never applied to Christ quad divinity, also no longer apply to his humanity. There's no before and after. Therefore, the incarnate Christ can create Adam, the incarnate Christ can eat with Abraham, but it is still true that he became incarnate in the womb of the Theotokos. Those two do not contradict each other.
- [102:03]
A
Yeah.
- [102:03]
B
In any way, shape or form.
- [102:05]
A
Yep. Right.
- [102:07]
B
Because human nature is created in finite, but in union with Christ becomes infinite by partaking of the divine nature. And so when we think about. Right. We're told over and over again in the New Testament that our future destiny in the bodily resurrection as humans, what that looks like, what our salvation looks like in the life of the world to come is something we can't fully comprehend now. Right. Something we can't fully understand, probably because parts of it involve things being infinite. Right. But the resurrected Christ is always posited. His humanity is always posited as our window, our glimpse. Right. Of what that will be like. We will be like him. Right. And so this means we have to change our thinking about what eternity looks like for us. So it doesn't make sense for us to view eternity as just, oh, we're going to have an endless succession of moments going into the future.
- [103:26]
A
Right.
- [103:27]
B
So that's not what eternity is for God. Right. And us being made eternal is us coming to partake in divine nature. It is us becoming like Christ, like Christ's humanity. And Christ's humanity is not experiencing an endless succession of moments.
- [103:42]
A
Yeah. And even if we, like, if we posit that that's what the life of the age to come is for humans, then it's essentially saying that the dividing wall between God and man remains, that the incarnation didn't happen, didn't do it.
- [103:59]
B
Yeah. Yeah. And it's certainly not some kind of Platonic stasis.
- [104:05]
A
Yeah.
- [104:06]
B
Staring at the orb or otherwise. Longtime listeners will know what I'm referring to. Longtime Roman Catholic listeners will probably gnash their teeth at that again.
- [104:18]
A
Yes. Yep.
- [104:22]
B
It is. It is also not like a big circle, like a big cycle that repeats itself. Right. Like.
- [104:28]
A
Yeah.
- [104:28]
B
Just the same thing. It's none of that. It's none of that. Well, what is it? Well, we don't know. That's where we started, remember? We only know what it's like to be finite.
- [104:40]
A
Yeah.
- [104:41]
B
We don't know what it's like to partake of the infinite, even though we're promised that that's what we're gonna do.
- [104:47]
A
We get glimpses of it in this life, you know, but it's just glimpses and you can't really grasp it.
- [104:55]
B
What is it like to not occupy a particular point in space? To not have to cross intervening distances to get from one place, to be in one place and then be in another place?
- [105:04]
A
I mean, the closest.
- [105:05]
B
I don't know what that's like.
- [105:06]
A
The closest that human beings get to.
- [105:07]
B
That.
- [105:11]
A
In any kind of, I don't know, palpability, as it were, is some of the ecstasies of the saints, you know?
- [105:21]
B
Yeah.
- [105:22]
A
St. Paul being caught.
- [105:23]
B
Some of the saints that bilocate.
- [105:24]
A
Yeah, yeah.
- [105:25]
B
But they didn't tell us what that's like.
- [105:27]
A
Right? They didn't. We just. We occasionally get testimonies to it. You know, even St. Paul, when he describes his experience of being caught up, he says he heard things that are. That cannot be uttered by humans. Like. Yeah, like, oh, he's about to. He's about to, you know, open, pull.
- [105:45]
B
Back the veil, utter just a couple.
- [105:47]
A
Let us know what it's like. Yeah. Could you utter a little bit, buddy?
- [105:50]
B
But no, no utterances.
- [105:51]
A
Because I think it's. Because it's unutterable. Because it's not a thing that could be said.
- [105:57]
B
Right. It's not a thing that we as fired at can understand until we're there and we're doing it right. Like. Yeah. And so we just have to accept that there is no model based in our finitude that explains the infinite. There can't be definitionally.
- [106:17]
A
Yeah, Right.
- [106:21]
B
But the other place where we see this and think about this and where this has to shape our thinking is in terms of the saints. Right. So one of what I was going through in whole counsel of God, the book of Revelation, one of the things that broke people's brains is I pointed out that according to pretty much all the earliest interpreters, this is pretty well locked in the 24 human elders who St. John sees worshiping in heaven. Right. Are the 12 patriarchs. Right. From the tribes of Israel and the 12 apostles. Everybody's like, oh, yeah, okay, that makes it, you know, 2412 apostles. Yeah. But if you pause for a second, you may remember that St. John is one of the 12 apostles, right? So he was seeing himself in glory. He was seeing himself in what was, from his perspective as a finite human, the future. But it's not presented as seeing the future. It's presented as seeing the present. And then you remember St. Paul says in Ephesians that we are already seated with Christ in the heavenly places.
- [107:30]
A
Yeah. Right.
- [107:33]
B
So this isn't an idea that had to develop. The idea of timelessness as we've been talking about it tonight, is one that you could conceive of just by negation. Just. Here's what we experience. God is not that. Right. You don't need a developed, really super developed philosophical system, Right. To get this right. This also answers the, the really silly objection that some of our sillier Protestant friends sometimes use, which is how can the saints hear all those prayers? Here's why I say this is silly. Right. They're positing that the soul of a departed saint hears prayers based on sound waves passing through the atmosphere.
- [108:23]
A
Right.
- [108:25]
B
At this, like 775 miles an hour from you to them. Is anyone claiming that? No, no one is claiming that. That's how the saints hear prayers. Right. Like, no one, literally, no one thinks that. Right. Why would a departed saint not be able to hear five people praying at the same time? They're not hearing with ears. Right. This is again, projecting our finitude. It's assuming they have some kind of blue force ghost body or something. They haven't.
- [109:06]
A
Right.
- [109:08]
B
Right. Like, or something. I don't, I don't know. I don't know how that would work. But yeah, so, yeah, we see in the saints and the saints, right. St. Nicholas kept for a long time, kept popping up places.
- [109:27]
A
Yeah.
- [109:28]
B
Even while alive out at sea, we have appearances of saints. Right. You know, folks, especially folks who aren't orthodox, get all excited when we say that the Theotokos has shown up somewhere. But, like, there's lots of other saints who show up places. Right. St John Klimiga, St John of the Latter, when he was the abbot of the monastery at Mount Sinai, like, had Moses stopped by, had. I mean, a whole bunch of saints, right. This is part of Christianity. Right. And why can they do that? Well, because as saints, right, their humanity has been conformed to Christ's humanity, which is perfectly united to divinity, which means it is no longer finite. It is partaking of the infinite, growing.
- [110:21]
A
To the fullness of the stature of Christ.
- [110:23]
B
Yeah. And so, yeah, hopefully this episode, because we get lots of questions because we keep alluding to it in different episodes, this idea of the relationship between the eternal and the incarnation and people. Right. And right. I think the first time I mentioned it on the show, Pageau mentioned that he had been listening to that and was like. And thought to himself, will Father Stephen go there? And then, of course, like the Kool Aid man, I just burst through the wall. And yelled it.
- [110:55]
A
Right.
- [110:58]
B
Oh, yeah. We thought it appropriate in the piece of the nativity. It's obvious connection to the incarnation of Christ. Now would be a good time to spend a little time. This may be one of our shorter episodes, actually. We stayed kind of on task.
- [111:18]
A
But.
- [111:18]
B
To lay out sort of the argument and the understanding behind that instead of just alluding to it and tantalizing the listener.
- [111:24]
A
Yeah.
- [111:26]
B
So hopefully not that we've exhaustively explained it, there's plenty to ruminate on, but I think we've laid out sort of the basic concept at least as clearly as we've ever done.
- [111:38]
A
Yeah. I like the fact that for this episode, the place that we ended it is with the saints, because it's one of the principles of orthodox theology that Christology and soteriology are distinct and yet completely indivisible theological discourses, as it were. Not that they're reducible to discourses, but you know what I mean, that if you understand who Christ is, then then we understand who the saints are and we also understand what our own task is as Christians. This is, you know, we've only done a couple of Sorry, Calvinists for this episode, but I mean, this is one of the problems. This is. This is the problem. Well, I shouldn't say the problem. This is one of the many problems with Calvinism is that Calvinism, of course, is mainly the thing that most people think about it is that it's a soteriology.
- [112:41]
B
Right.
- [112:42]
A
Monergism and I mean, there's literally websites with that as their title, pushing Calvinist soteriology. You know, the idea that it is God alone and God is the only one doing anything about salvation. Right. But the thing that they don't seem to realize is that whatever you posit about soteriology has an analog. Not just an analog, a basis in your Christology. So if monergism is true about soteriology, then monoenergism must be true about Christology. In other words, that Christ has only one energy, meaning that he's not actually really human, because if he doesn't have human energies, he has only divine energies, then he's not fully human. And so that's one of the big reasons why Calvinism tends towards Nestorianism, because it posits this kind of disjunction between the divine Christ and the human Jesus. Not explicitly. Not explicitly. Most Calvinists would not affirm Nestorianism, but nonetheless it's baked into the soteriology where that's really important for most Christians who, thank God don't care about those particular debates is that when we begin to understand the Incarnation as eternal and is manifesting at a particular point, as revealing at a particular point in human history, then we see what the Christian life is about. It means that it's not only about what will happen in what is for us, the future. In other words, do I go to heaven when I die? Which, of course, we've talked about ad nauseam. Why that is not a correct eschatology. But you know what I mean. It's not just about what happens to you when you die, although it is about what happens to you when you die. But that the infinite God and the infinite possibility of human exaltation, elevation, salvation, deification is available to us right now. Right now. One of the things that is said by kind of pop anti Christianity is, you know, you're going to live this whole life this particular way, hoping that something will be different for you after you die, that you're going to get rewarded in heaven, right? And I mean, that's not based on nothing. Certainly our experience here and now is that there's elements in the future that the life of the age to come is to come, that it's not now, but it is also now. The basic gospel message, repent for the kingdom of God is at hand, doesn't mean it's just coming next. It means it's present. It's present because Christ is the kingdom of God. He is the king. And so his kingly influence, his kingly reign is wherever he is. And so, inasmuch as we are in Christ, as it says in Scripture, the kingdom of God is within you. And when we begin to grasp that, or just at least to acknowledge it, what that does for me, and maybe it does for you, listener, is inspire a sense of wonder in you. Wonder that the infinite God, the God who is beyond time, beyond space, who cannot be captured, who cannot be understood, whose ways are. Are higher than our ways, that that God enters into the womb of his mother, the Virgin Mary, that in that entrance he becomes truly man and that he's born. And in this feast we see him not just a baby in a manger, but we see God in a manger. We see the One whose will upholds all of creation as the most vulnerable, helpless state of what it means to be human. And that's astonishing. And also because, as I said, Christology and soteriology always go together. But also that as we participate in him, as we are faithful to him, as we partake in him, that we begin to transcend the boundaries of our createdness. And I find that a profoundly comforting and even relieving thought. That the mercy of God is such that the sins that I have, the weaknesses that I have, the utter failures that I have, all of the flaws that I have are transcendable by kneeling at the manger of Christ, kneeling at the altar of God, giving my life to him, obeying his commandments. That in that we, to use the language of the church fathers, become uncreated, become God. And because we are finite, then that means that it is an infinite road, that this life is not the only time of progress in this, but that the life of the age to come is also a life of progress. See, the great love that God has for us, it's impossible to imagine, impossible to fathom, and yet here we are. And that's why even the greeting that we have in the Orthodox Church, which comes from one of our greatest sets of hymns, the Canon for the Nativity, contains within it everything that we just said actually in. In a very compact form. Christ is born. Glorify him. That the infinite one is born, that he is human. And we glorify Him. We glorify him because he is God. And in glorifying him, then we also participate in his glory. So that's what I have to say about all of that. Yeah.
- [119:43]
B
So, of course, being an Antiochian priest.
- [119:47]
A
Right.
- [119:47]
B
We also say Christ is born, glorify him in Arabic. And once I learned that, you know, it was a relief to me because I found out when all those people were calling me Miznoon, they were wishing me a Merry Christmas. There's a. There's an inside baseball joke. Yeah. A small portion of our listeners will. And we'll get. And.
- [120:11]
A
And you can always spot the Egyptians because they call you Magnoon. Yeah.
- [120:19]
B
I thought. I thought about spoiling the. The series finale of the Good Place as an intro, but I'm not gonna. I'm not gonna do that.
- [120:27]
A
I'm not.
- [120:27]
B
I'm not gonna. I'm gonna resist my. My darker urges in this regard and not spoil it. But I think one thing that's often missing when we talk about time is because we're kind of in denial of this, is the relationship between time and death. We made a lot of comparisons this episode between temporal categories and spatial categories, categories of time and categories of space. And in spatial terms, you know, the. The spatial term that becomes a problem is distance. Distance between people. Distance between things becomes a complication. But, you know, we're. We've. We've got A lot of techne to help us overcome distance. Whether we're talking about, you know, airline travel to physically cross great distances, high speed rail, whatever, or we're talking about the Internet, right? Means of communication that we have to cross physical distances and reconnect people and things. But we're sort of powerless in the face of time. And in terms of the relationship between time and death, time kills everything. Every moment in our life ends sometimes. That's good, right? Moments of pain, agony, mourning, horror, difficulty, struggle. Those moments end, they die. But so does every moment of beauty, peace, love and joy in our life. Because we're finite. Time rolls on, things end, right? And that's a constant, right? We can't bring people back to life, at least I can't. Some of the saints can in some select cases. But you know what I mean? We can't return to a better moment in the past. It all just sort of goes away. And in the face of that, then there is this failure when we think about what the resurrection means, the resurrection of our bodies, the resurrection of the world. Because frankly, if you talk to most people who identify as Christians, first of all, they won't even be talking about the life of the world to come or the bodily resurrection. They'll be talking about going to heaven, right? But you talk to them about the positive version of the afterlife, right? The good place and what eternal life looks like. And the idea you get is that, well, I'm going to live forever, but sort of, right, because especially if they're among our Protestant friends, but even among a lot of our Roman Catholic friends, and unfortunately even some of our orthodox friends probably who have partaken of this, they've had baked into them to one degree or another that most of their identity is sin. They don't believe in total depravity as such. They have this idea that pretty much every aspect of their personality and their life and everything is touched by sin. And why that's an issue is that the them who they think is going to live forever, the me who's going to live forever, how much is that actually going to look like the actual me once you take everything sinful out of it? What I've been told that almost everything I do and think is sinful. But so something corresponding to me or some version of me is going to experience some endless succession of moments in someplace nice. Everything's just going to be nice, happy forever. That's not a lot of hope. It's definitely not what Scripture teaches. Fortunately, that's not Christianity. But that's not a lot of hope either. But the consequence of what we've talked about tonight is different than that. It means that the promise of the resurrection, not just of ourselves, but of the whole creation, of everything God created, it doesn't just all go away. Is that all of those moments, all of those times, all of those places, all of those things, everything that was good, everything that was beautiful, everything that was joyous, every experience of peace, while it seems to have died to us in our finitude in this life, it is all going to come back. That is all going to be made eternal. And all of the other stuff that dies that time kills, pain, suffering, sorrow, difficulty, all that stays dead. All of that is gone. And everything that stopped you and I, everything that's been holding us back, everything that's been making it a struggle and making it hard, we're just straight out, stopping us and blocking us from being good, from being joyous, from being at peace, from being beautiful. All those hindrances, all those difficulties, all those barriers are going to be gone. And we're going to be free to be those things and free to be those things eternally in a state where time will never take them away, time will never draw them to a close. Time will never separate us from each other. That's the promise that we have in the resurrection of Christ. That's the promise that we have in Christ taking our humanity into himself. That's the promise of theosis. That's the promise of salvation, that Christ and who he is as we participate in him being born on this day, as you're hearing this, that's what it's all about. So that's what I have to say.
- [126:50]
A
Amen. Amen. Well, that's our Christmas special. Thank you very much, everyone for listening. We love to get email and messages through Facebook and so forth. So you can contact us@lordofspiritscientientfaith.com you can send us a message through our Facebook page. You can also leave us a voicemail@speakpipe.com LordOfSpirits and if you have basic questions about Orthodox Christianity or you need help to find a parish in the 3D world, which is where we do all this stuff, go to orthodoxintro.org and get.
- [127:25]
B
Some help and join us for a live broadcast on the second and fourth Thursdays of the month at 7:00pm Eastern, 4:00pm Pacific. Go ahead, baby, go ahead go ahead and light up the town and baby, do anything your heart desires.
- [127:39]
A
And if you are on Facebook, you can follow our page there you can join our discussion group and please leave us a review wherever you listen to this podcast and more importantly, share this show with one of your friends who is going to benefit from it.
- [127:56]
B
And finally, be sure to go to ancientfaith.com stroke support and help make sure we and lots of other AFR podcasters stay on the air. Remember, I'll always be around and I know, I know. Like I told you so many times before, you're going to come back.
- [128:09]
A
Thank you you Good night. Merry Christmas.