Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick: Good evening, everyone! You’re listening to The Lord of Spirits podcast. My co-host, Fr. Stephen De Young, is with me from Lafayette, Louisiana; I’m Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick in Emmaus, Pennsylvania. And if you’re listening to us live, you can call in at 855-AF-RADIO; that’s 855-237-2346. Matushka Trudi will be taking your calls tonight, which is we are doing all this episode. So welcome to our first episode of 2022. We’re doing an open-line night, answering your wackiest, hardest, most abstruse questions. Do you think your uncle is one of the nephilim? Are reptilians running your local post office? Do you want to make a pitch for why unicorns really aren’t monsters? This is your chance. Call in at 855-AF-RADIO; that’s 855-237-2346.

Before we start taking calls, I just want to mention something really fun that I found out about recently, and that is that there is this idea that ancient Egyptians worshiped onions. Have you heard of this, Fr. Stephen?

Fr. Stephen De Young: Yes, I am aware of this.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Of course you are! And I ran across this because someone asked a question, like: Why does St. John Chrysostom say that Egyptians live in fear and dread of onions? And I was like: Well, that… I’m sure he said that. And so I looked it up, and, sure enough, there’s two different places where he mentions Egyptians and onions, and one of them where he talks about them living in fear and dread of them, the other one where he actually refers to onions being god according to the Egyptians. And there’s also references in the Roman pagan writers, Juvenal and Pliny, who mention Egyptians worshiping onions. It turns out that onions are depicted all over the pyramids. And it shows up in Egyptian mummification practices, that onions were actually placed in the eye sockets of some of the pharaohs.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, they’d be buried in onion leaves and onion plant, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah! Now, I could not find—and maybe you could add something to this, so I get to ask the first question, I guess, maybe—I could not find actual references to them worshiping onions, but it does seem to be the case that they were doing something ritually with onions, and certainly the Romans seemed to think that they were worshiping onions. I mean, were they offering sacrifices to onions or just, you know, of onions?

Fr. Stephen: Well, mostly of onions. Onions were a sacred plant, and if you slice an onion in half and you look at the concentric circles and the shapes, that was taken to be a representation of eternity and of eternal life in particular. That’s why it gets involved in burials. But they also used onions for disinfectant qualities and, since this is a family show, I can’t explain how this worked, but as a pregnancy test.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Wow! How about that! So there you are, everybody: your first weird ancient paganism fact for the night.

Fr. Stephen: And I want to say, as we go into this, I know that even though—and I’m going to go for some Mick Foley-style cheap pops here—even though we have the greatest audience in the history of any media, some part in the back of your head, Fr. Andrew, is concerned that we might run out of calls.

Fr. Andrew: It’s true!

Fr. Stephen: And I just want to assure you that if that happens and we don’t get any calls, I have something to talk about as a back-up.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, awesome!

Fr. Stephen: And that is, if we run out of calls, I’m going to talk about my latest film theory, which is that the movie, L.A. Confidential is a period remake of the 1986 film, Dragnet, starring Dan Aykroyd and Tom Hanks.

Fr. Andrew: Ha. Well…

Fr. Stephen: And if Tom Hanks is listening and calls in, I will lay it all out for him, and he can confirm or deny.

Fr. Andrew: Well, Tom, give us a call. Please call in tonight. As everybody knows, Tom Hanks is an Orthodox Christian; we have Tom Hanks sightings every year at Holy Week. So, Tom, please call in.

But first we are going to take some calls—

Fr. Stephen: Unless they all hung up because they want to hear the theory.

Fr. Andrew: Right!?

Fr. Stephen: I was worried that could go bad.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Exactly. All right, well, we’re going to take our first call, and our first one is Samuel in Virginia, whom I think we’ve actually heard from on several occasions. So, Samuel, are you there?

Samuel: Yeah, I’m here. Good evening again.

Fr. Andrew: Good evening, Samuel. Welcome to The Lord of Spirits podcast. What is on your mind?

Samuel: Well, in the second October show, I had a question, but you guys didn’t have time to answer it, but then I thought of a couple more questions that day when I was on the line. So the original one, when you were talking about werewolves, was how… what we were supposed to make of depictions of St. Christopher with the dog’s head.

Fr. Andrew: Okay. So, are you asking if that’s a werewolf depiction? Is that what you’re asking about?

Samuel: Yeah, is that connected to werewolves?

Fr. Andrew: I think that it’s within the sort of continuum of cannibalism and… I mean, he’s often depicted as being a giant as well, so there’s this kind of othering element that goes along with this. I mean, I’ve seen it, and I’m sure, Fr. Stephen, you have more to say about this, but I’ve seen it described as: Well, he was just really ugly—but I’m pretty sure it goes beyond that. I don’t know. I think that there is a suggestion of that, that he may have been involved in that kind of thing on some level. Obviously, we’re talking about before his sanctity and so forth. But I don’t know. Father, have you looked into the St. Christopher with the canine head stuff?

Fr. Stephen: I’ve kind of left that to Pageau. It’s kind of his whole bag, man.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, he kind of talks about it all the time. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: And then the day after that show, he announced his work, God’s'Dog, and I thought it was really interesting then: the next day after I thought of that question, that was announced. That’s where I would go, because he can give you the whole… I mean, he has that whole Orthodox Arts Journal article we’ve referred to before, which is kind of the locus classicus of his discussion of it, but he’s done a lot more with it and about it since.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Honestly, it’s not something I’ve ever looked deeply into. I have read some of his stuff about it, but that’s about it. And I am looking forward to getting my own copy of God’s'Dog which I think is supposed to come out this month or next. All right.

Fr. Stephen: Did he put you up to this? Did he want just the free commercial?

Fr. Andrew: Me or Samuel?

Fr. Stephen: Either one.

Fr. Andrew: Not me.

Fr. Stephen: Okay, just making sure. Making sure. No paid consideration.

Fr. Andrew: No money changing hands. [Laughter] I mean, I am paying for my copy of God’s'Dog, if that’s what you mean: it goes the other way.

Fr. Stephen: Okay.

Fr. Andrew: So I don’t know if that helps you, Samuel. But you said you had another. We’re looking at a lot of calls tonight, so we’re going to give you just one more.

Samuel: So when you were talking about Leviathan, you kept mentioning the seven heads. I kept thinking of Revelation’s seven hills and how that was also an enemy of the people of God, persecuting them. How much of a connection is there between that and the Old Testament Leviathan stuff?

Fr. Andrew: Oh, that’s a good question. I want to know the answer to that!

Fr. Stephen: Uh, yes.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] There you go!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so there’s a play going on there between the fact that Rome of course was built on seven hills, the city of Rome, and St. John is very deliberately positing the present-day, for him, Roman Empire as the current embodiment of Leviathan. So there’s very much a direction connection there, because we talked about how the monstrous depiction is to convey certain things about Leviathan, but this is a spiritual being and a spiritual entity. And so it is a spiritual entity that animates not just individuals but also collectively people and empires and cities. So St. John is very much trying to communicate that the embodiment of Leviathan at that time was the Roman Empire. This is why Revelation both is and isn’t about Rome: it is about Rome, but it’s not just about Rome, because that spirit is embodied, just like all the demons who were worshiped as the pagan gods by the nations, they had these multiple embodiments in different places and different times. In the same way, Leviathan, Behemoth (Behemot), they find these embodiments in different places and different times.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Is that helpful, Samuel?

Samuel: Yes, it is. Thank you, Fathers.

Fr. Andrew: Okay. Next up, we’ve got Aidan calling from Fort Collins, Colorado. Aidan, welcome to The Lord of Spirits podcast.

Aidan: Thank you for having me.

Fr. Andrew: You’re welcome. What’s on your mind, Aidan?

Aidan: My question is clarifying one from one of your time-honored sessions of ruining the Bible study.

Fr. Andrew: Breaking Sunday school, as it were?

Aidan: It has a good name, so maybe that works or not; maybe you guys could come up with something, but you had mentioned that in the gospel of John, that he’s using these two terms, phileo and agape in a conversation with the Lord, and that that was really… that those words were likely being used interchangeably, and I was hoping that you could expound on that on where you get the information that causes you to come to that conclusion, because I’d never heard that before.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean there’s a lot of sermons that have been preached on the idea that there’s something different going on: “Peter, do you love me? Peter, do you love me? Peter, do you love me?” and then underneath, the Greek is a little bit different. And even you’ve got—I say this with all respect for one of my favorite authors—you’ve got C.S. Lewis’s The Four Loves. He uses that same kind of idea. So the problem is this, and this is how I understand it—“Um, actually” me if I need it, Fr. Stephen—the problem is that those two words are used synonymously in a lot of other places, including in the rest of the corpus of the Evangelist John. So if you’re going to say that he intends them to be taken in different ways, then you would need to show that that is his usage, or show from something contextually that that is indicating that. And part of the problem is, of course, that it goes the opposite direction in other places in his works, and I’m trying to remember a particular example where if you take it that phileo is just sort of brotherly, friendly love, then that would make no sense in the context. Am I remembering that correctly, Fr. Stephen? Is there something like that?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, you’re on the right track. So a lot of people have been taught—I don’t think this happens as much in Orthodox circles, but it may, but a lot of people have been taught to sort of use this concordance mode, where you go and follow a particular word in Hebrew or Greek and you follow it all through the Bible, and you find all the places it’s used, and you do kind of a word study and say, “Okay, here’s what this word means,” and then you plug that into all the places where it occurs. And that’s not a normal way to read anything. Like, you would never do that with something other than the Bible. Like, you wouldn’t pick up my books or Fr. Andrew’s books and say, “What are all the ways that Fr. Andrew uses the word ‘green’ in his published books and blog posts? Okay, so here’s what Fr. Andrew means every time he says the word ‘green,’ ” and then you go plug it in—you’d never do that. But a lot of people have been taught to do that with the Bible.

And what that assumes is that a given word just has this universal meaning attached to it, which is sort of bad linguistic theory. So words derive their meaning from usage, and there’s lots of examples of this, where there’s a word that used to mean one thing and now means another, like in the same language.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, “green” is a good example: you can be green with envy, green with sea-sickness, and be green because there’s going to be a tornado, and the grass is green…

Fr. Stephen: And you can refer to part of a golf course as the green.

Fr. Andrew: Right, or “he’s a green recruit”—and they all mean completely different things.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so you have to look at how they use them. So there are times when a particular author uses a word as a technical term, meaning they’re doing a particular thing. So one example of that that we’ve talked about on the show is when you look across St. Paul’s letters, when he uses the word “dead,” the noun “dead,” without an article, he means just dead people; when he refers to “the dead,” with the article, he’s referring to deceased Christians. The way we discover that is we look at all the places where he uses it with and without the article, and we see if there’s a pattern. And then if we see a pattern, we say, “Hey, St. Paul is totally consistent about this, every time.” Then we see: Okay, there’s a pattern, so these mean two different things; he’s using this as a technical term to make a distinction.

So you could, if you’re going to say, “Well, I think in John 21 that he’s switching between phileo and agape to make a distinction,” the way we decide if that’s true is we go and look at… And we can just look at the gospel. We can take the rest of the gospel of St. John, and we say, “How does he use those words throughout his gospel? And is there a pattern?” And what you find when you go through and look at how he uses the word is, for example, when Christ says to his disciples before his death, “The Father himself loves you,” the verb he uses is phileo.

Fr. Andrew: There you go. That’s the thing I was remembering.

Fr. Stephen: And he doesn’t mean the Father himself is your friend. [Laughter] He means he loves you: the love of God, in its full-orbed sense. But even more tellingly, when he talks about the disciple whom Jesus loved, that’s all through the gospel, that we believe is referring to St. John himself, he alternates the verb.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so he’s not saying that at one point Jesus loved him with unconditional love, and then at another point he’s like: “Well, we’re just friends, John.” [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Right. Or, alternatively, that there’s two different disciples: one whom he loved with the full-orbed love of God, and one whom he was just pals with. But you’d have to say that, if those are technical terms for St. John. If those are two different things, you’d have to say one of those options. And so it’s based on that. It’s based on that.

And another objection that we heard about this after we talked about it— And this isn’t… I want to be clear. I understand I am ruining a lot of really beloved material for people when I do this, so I realize why people want me to be wrong and want to hold onto it. [Laughter] I understand it!

Aidan: Well, and then from a lay perspective, there’s just an element of not wanting to read something in that isn’t there, of course, but when you’re used to reading the Bible in English and you haven’t been to seminary but you’ve studied Scripture, and then the Greek is revealed to you, it seems… Your logic, which can be obviously wrong, leads you to: Why would he just go from one to the other in the same little exchange? And you start to pass this… Even if you don’t have the answer, you start asking the question of why would he do that. Otherwise, just use one or the other across that conversation, if that makes sense.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and so it turns out when you look at St. John’s style, that’s just part of his style, just like in English sometimes you don’t want to repeat the same word over and over and over again, so you’ll use synonyms. But, yeah, and a lot of times people make really good points on really bad bases. [Laughter] You can preach a really good sermon where you make a really good point—I’ve heard this, and I’ve heard them do that—preaching on a text that does not at all say what they say it says. There’s some other text that says that that they should have used. But so I’m not trying to take away the good points that C.S. Lewis or anyone else made by doing this. I’m just trying to clarify that one text.

But yeah, the other objection we got was about… It says at the end that St. Peter was grieved because the third time he asked him, “Do you love me?” And some people point at that and say, “Well, see, and in English it does read like that: the third time he asked him this, that’s what grieved him.” But the way Greek syntax works is… With Greek… In English, you tell what part of speech a word is and how it’s functioning in a sentence by the word order. So our sentences are almost always, unless it’s a question, subject, verb, direct object, and then whatever else complicates it. But in Greek the form of the word tells you, so you can put it in any order you want. And so the words get ordered in order to convey certain meaning. So if St. John had wanted to point to the difference in verb in that sentence, he would have phrased it in Greek that: Peter was grieved because the third time “Do you love me?” he asked him. The “asked” would have been at the end, so he was grieved because of what was asked—and that’s not how it’s phrased. It was phrased: he was grieved because he asked him the third time, and then is the quote of what he asked.

Fr. Andrew: Like he keeps asking!

Fr. Stephen: Right.

Aidan: Which is interesting, because it almost does drive at the same point that’s made by the distinction that’s made by the two words. The thrust is the same, that in the end he asks three times, obviously implying: Do you really? And so you don’t really need to die on that hill anyway.

Fr. Andrew: Right, exactly. He asked him the same question three times, but used different words slightly to ask him the same question.

Aidan: I don’t want to take up too much time, but I also want to make sure you’re also saying this is the way that Paul uses these words, that’s not necessarily meaning these words would have those different meanings in different contexts in the Greek lexicon.

Fr. Stephen: Right.

Fr. Andrew: Although it’s St. John in this case. It’s in St. John’s gospel, not St. Paul.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, he’s talking about the other example, I think, of St. Paul.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, excuse me.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so if St. Matthew refers to “the dead,” you can’t just take for granted that he means the same thing as St. Paul. You’d have to go through St. Matthew’s gospel and see how he uses those terms.

Aidan: Because it’s a pattern of his language specifically.

Fr. Stephen: Right.

Aidan: Okay. Thank you very much!

Fr. Andrew: All right! I love language stuff. [Laughter] So thanks for calling, Aidan. Next we have Gabriel calling from New York. Gabriel, are you there?

Gabriel: Ah, yes, Fathers. Can you hear me?

Fr. Andrew: Yes, we hear you! Welcome, Gabriel, to The Lord of Spirits podcast. What is your question, comment, or complaint?

Gabriel: Okay. It is so crazy to be on the show right now; I’m such a huge fan boy.

Fr. Andrew: It’s going to be okay.

Gabriel: [Laughter] Okay, thank you. So my question is about the order and hierarchy of demons. I’ve heard that demons are chaotic and disorderly and often fight each other, but from my understanding they also all share one common goal, which is to torment and destroy as many humans as they possibly can. So why, then, do they fight against each other? And if they don’t, do they have any sort of hierarchy or allegiance with each other? Do they collaborate? I understand demons are deceitful, so they’d probably try to hide their works and nature from us as much as possible, but is there anything we do know about this?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and there is of course that whole issue where there’s accusation made against Christ that he’s casting out demons by Beelzebub, and he makes the comment, “How can I be working for Beelzebub? Can a house divided against itself stand?” which suggests that they’re working sort of together.

So here’s my take on this, and it’s my understanding: that on the one hand, there are not, like, ranks of them the way that you see angels laid out in terms of specific roles. There’s not this kind of order the way that… like, for instance, the way St. Dionysios lays it out, or even the kind of list that St. Paul uses when he talks about the unseen powers and stuff. And so there’s that. But on the other hand, as you said, they do have this common goal, which is that they want to drag us into hell with them.

And certainly there are places in Scripture and in other related literature that talk about certain demons being a chief or a leader among them, which could mean a couple of things, like it could mean some level of cooperation, but it could also mean: this is a really big one. And then those things could be related. But, yeah, I do think—I think part of your conclusion that they’re liars is one of the problems with this, that there’s not like ranks of hellions all lining up and obeying orders from a captain. And would that even be necessary, if that makes any sense? So, yeah, that’s my kind of hot take on that. Fr. Stephen, do you want to add anything to that or subtract?

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Well, yeah… Part of the key is you look at St. Dionysios the Areopagite: the reason that there are ranks of angels is that we’re talking about degrees and varieties of participation in the divine energies, in the works of God. That’s what puts them in their order. The language that’s used for that is sort of how close they are to his throne, but of course that’s analogical language, because his throne isn’t like a physical chair! [Laughter] But that’s an analogy; that’s the degree to which they’re participating in God’s works and his creation. So demons, by definition, are not doing that.

Gabriel: Mm, yes.

Fr. Stephen: So the sense in which there is order among the heavenly hosts and among the saints who join the heavenly host is a sense of order that cannot apply in any way to demons, definitionally. But we also have to remember that… I mean, we don’t know proportions, but I’ll just go ahead and say most of the things we’re calling demons were vast cosmic intelligences. So they’re not like dumb. [Laughter] They’re not. And so, for example—and I know we’ve mentioned this, but they’re perfectly capable of playing the long game, for example. Like, they can do a lot more damage and destruction playing a long game over time with a culture and perpetuating evil in that culture than just throwing things into abject chaos and murder.

Gabriel: So they could have like a scheme going on for hundreds of years? Is that possible?

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: You see that in pagan cultures, going on for centuries, where they have a people enslaved to sin, enslaved to themselves through idolatrous worship, through immorality.

Fr. Andrew: To create maximum possible evil, essentially. Does that make some sense, Gabriel?

Gabriel: Yes, that makes a lot of sense. Thank you so much!

Fr. Andrew: All right. Cool!

Gabriel: I just want to say your show is so amazing, it is so helpful, and I really can’t thank you enough for this resource. It’s amazing. All my friends watch it now. Thank you so much, Fathers.

Fr. Andrew: Thank God! Thank you, and pray for us, please. All right, well, we have another call, and this is someone calling from Baton Rouge, the red stick itself, there in Louisiana. I believe we have Hayes on the line. Hayes, are you there?

Hayes: Yes, sir, I’m here.

Fr. Andrew: All right, well, welcome to The Lord of Spirits podcast. What’s on your mind?

Hayes: Yes, Fathers, I actually recently got engaged, so my question is of course regarding marriage. And my question is I’ve heard that the Church teaches that we remain married in heaven, but I’m not 100% sure if that’s true. And if that is true, how does that square with Matthew 22, when Christ was talking to the Sadducees about the woman who was married to the seven brothers, and also just more generally, kind of the spiritual realities of marriage—two becoming one flesh. I’ve heard that my entire life, but I don’t really know what that means on a spiritual level.

Fr. Andrew: Hm. So I want to answer the second part first, and then, Fr. Stephen, I’m going to bump the other one over to you, although I do know some things about that. So what does it mean that the two become one flesh? Obviously, that should not be taken in an utterly literal fashion, except for in the sense that it should! I mean, there is a literal one-fleshness that occurs, and that’s where marriage is oriented towards child-rearing, towards the creation of children by God through the couple. So there’s that, but also there is… There should be this growing intimacy over time. I’ve been married now for—oh, boy, 18 and a half years by now, which means that I’m not an expert at marriage, but I am now at the stage of my marriage where I realize I’m not an expert. [Laughter]

And the thing that I often like to tell people—I served in pastoral ministry for 13 years, and the thing that I would often tell people, especially within the first year or two, typically, there are problems that start to arise. And people will come to their pastor and will say, “Father, we’re fighting all the time! This is terrible!” and whatever. And I actually knew one priest who had a couple come to him with exactly that, and he said, “Oh, this is wonderful!” [Laughter] And their response was: “What!?” And he said, “Oh, well, you know, the whole point of marriage is to reveal your sins so that you can repent of them—so it’s working!”—which is totally true.

The purpose of marriage from the point of view of the Church, besides being for the procreation and raising of children, is so that the husband and wife can help each other to the kingdom of heaven. Some of the way that we do that is that we’re a mirror to the other for the other’s sins, like I learned all kinds of things about how sinful I am by being married to my wife, and all kinds of opportunities to repent. And so that’s what’s going on. The growing together in intimacy comes as a result of both people repenting before God and working on that together.

And so, often, people will say, “We’ve started having problems” or whatever, and they’ll look at their wedding pictures and say, “Oh, we were so happy on that day. What went wrong?” And I’ll say: Look. On the day that you got married, you did not have a good marriage. You had a wedding, and it was a great wedding, but you did not have a good marriage, because you were totally new at this and you had no idea what you’re doing. You’re brand new; this is day one. Why would you think you’re good at this on day one? It’s the beginning of something: you’re learning a skill. Marriage is a skill.

That’s what it means that the spiritual element of becoming one flesh, it’s about two people working on their repentance together. So that’s the key there. And before I kick the rest over to Fr. Stephen, I want to at least say this as a framing thing for the way that I think about this question of “will we be married in heaven” is that even in the modern period, there are different opinions about this. I know that Fr. John Meyendorff, for instance, taught this, and so from him it became… a lot of people within the American Orthodox context learned that from him, and so they repeat it.

But then there’s others that will say, “No, that’s not what that means.” The way that that position reconciles itself with Matthew 22, that section of Matthew 22, is to say that when Christ says, “In the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven,” they take it to mean that there’s not going to be any weddings in heaven, not that there won’t be marriage in heaven; that’s the way that they kind of work that out, but that’s not the only position on this. So now, having said that, I will kick it over to Fr. Stephen.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so first I want to say that, contrary to what Father has just said, my wife and I have had no problems. We’re America’s sweethearts. So, you know.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Oh! You are. I mean, not all of us can meet on World of Warcraft.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, exactly. In answering this question, we have to kind of think a little deeper, I think. We need to think about what we mean by marriage. So when that question gets asked to Christ, what’s going on is these are Sadducees asking him, who don’t believe in the resurrection. So this is being asked not in good faith; this is being asked as a “gotcha” question. And the way that they phrase it is “whose wife will she be, because all had her,” so it’s “whose possession will she be, which of them will have her as their possession in the kingdom.” So Christ’s response is sort of immediately responding to that, but, expanding beyond that… One of the ways in which we think about and talk about marriage, and then how would or could they apply in the life of the world to come—so again, we’re not talking about heaven; we’re talking about the world after Christ returns. This is going to become important in a minute.

So one way we think about marriage is sort of this exclusivity, that this person has this intimate relationship and particularly a physical intimate relationship only with this one other person and no one else. Well, if in the world to come we’re not reproducing and that’s not a factor, and so we’re not talking about physical relations aimed at reproduction of the species, then that factor kind of drops out; it’s just pointless to say, “Well, who is this woman going to be having children with?” Well, nobody’s going to be having children. “What woman is this man going to be making children with?” Well, nobody.

But on the other hand—and I think this is my best reading of Meyendorff, which seems obvious if you think about it—when we talk about marriage a lot of the time, if we think about a couple that’s been married for 60 years—they got married in their 20s and now they’re in their 80s; they’ve been married for 60 years—and we talk about their marriage, what are we talking about? We’re usually not talking about their physical exclusivity, because at that point there’s not a lot of physical element, at least the part that would be exclusive—family show. And what we’re talking about is an emotional intimacy, a spiritual intimacy, that they’ve developed over 60 years of shared experiences and love.

So if someone is going to say marriage doesn’t exist in heaven, are they saying, so in the world to come, when they’re raised from the dead in eternal life, all that they’ve shared together is going to go poof—is going to vanish, they’re going to forget each other, they’re going to forget that love, they’re going to forget their children and their grandchildren and the love they have for them—I mean, obviously not. Those are the things from this world that are going to last forever. So that marriage, if that’s what we’re talking about, is that intimacy and that love that they share, that’s going to become eternal; that’s going to exist in the life of the world to come.

And we have to be careful here. The reason I’m stressing “life of the world to come” is that there’s a lot of Gnosticism that wiggles its way in here, especially when addressing this question, because it’s a short step from “marriage isn’t going to exist,” given the way I just mentioned we tend to talk about marriage, to “we’re not going to be embodied, like biological sex is going to disappear and everybody’s going to be androgynous or something”—all of which you find… I mean, straight out of the Gospel of Thomas, and even some Orthodox writers slip into this on occasion. And we have to be wary of that, that we’re talking about the life of the world to come, which is everything good in this world, meaning everything that is the work of God in this world, made eternal and sin-expunged.

Fr. Andrew: Does that make sense to you?

Hayes: Ah, yes, sir. Thank you very much. Thank you, Fathers.

Fr. Andrew: Awesome. And congratulations on your engagement!

Hayes: Thank you, Fathers.

Fr. Andrew: God grant you many years.

Fr. Stephen: Call us back in 60 years and tell me if I’m right.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] How old will we be, 106, something like that?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah! I’ll still be doing the show; I don’t know about you.

Fr. Andrew: You may have to get someone else by then. [Laughter] All right, well, we’re going to get to more of your calls, but first we’re going to take a short break, and we will be right back.

Fr. Andrew: You got to hear a little excerpt from Fr. Stephen’s book, which, you know, Fr. Stephen never wants to hear himself on anything, so we know he ran out of the room while that was—

Fr. Stephen: I did, literally.

Fr. Andrew: He did! Yeah, Fr. Stephen never listens to any of his own podcasts. I used to do that actually a little bit more often, but now I don’t. It’s funny, now that I do this professionally, I don’t have time to listen to most of them. I do occasionally listen to some, but not most of them. I just trust the producers; I love you guys.

So all right, we’re back to your calls, and we have Derek who has called in from the great state of Alaska. So, Derek, welcome to The Lord of Spirits podcast.

Derek: How’s it going? And it’s Arkansas, not Alaska.

Fr. Andrew: Oh! I see AK on the call board, so it should be AR.

Fr. Stephen: Those are slightly different states.

Fr. Andrew: Slightly different states, okay. Well, I was just… You know, Arkansas is the only—I don’t know why this is the case, but it’s the only US state east of the Mississippi that—and it is east of the Mississippi, right?—that I’ve never been to; I’ve been to all the rest. Okay, well, Derek from Arkansas, excuse me: welcome to The Lord of Spirits podcast.

Derek: I came from Arizona, to make it more confusing. But anyway, I guess I can build off a previous question. I have a wife. We have two kids; we have a third in the oven. And I’ve been—ever since our first one, I’ve been paying attention to the culture more broadly speaking, and I’ve been noticing trends like… stuff like “my truth” has become the most prevailing idea out there, and it’s kind of spread like wildfire. And even the leading theory on how the universe has been created, when we’re speaking materialistically, is from some quantum vacuum that’s unlimited potential, full of energy and chaotic, and you can never even pin it down until there’s an observer. So it seems like the world’s in this very chaotic realm, where there’s no overarching truth any more.

And I guess, if I can pretty much simplify this, I’m wondering if there’s any way that this has happened in the history, if there something that can reconcile this from an Orthodox point of view. My wife and I are about eight months into the Orthodox Church; we’re official catechumens, and, yeah, we’ve been enjoying the journey and have found a lot of peace and clarity. So I’m just wondering, for maybe my children—I’m trying to explain to them—if I can have anything I could point to and say, “This has happened before. Here’s a good example. Think of it like this.”

Fr. Andrew: That’s a good question. I have thoughts, but I’m going to let you go first, Fr. Stephen, this time.

Fr. Stephen: So are you talking about specifically the idea of truth being completely relative?

Derek: Yeah, it gets pretty granular, where people can… I don’t mean to get political, but even pronouns basically you have millions; you can’t even technically say you have two genders any more anyways. Yeah, so I’m just wondering if anything like this has happened, where it’s gotten so, you know, factions just multiplying and everything getting a little out of control.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. Well, most of human history has been mostly out of control. [Laughter] And control can also be bad. And so the pendulum has tended to swing… So we now, because we’re modern people, are sort of very reflective. So we take things like this and we codify them; we come at them philosophically, and so you have post-structuralists writing long books about how you can’t convey meaning in language.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I love that.

Fr. Stephen: But we come at that approach, and so we articulate things. So you’ll have people who want to argue everything is really chaos and so everyone is sort of free to impose their own meaning on it; or everything is chaos and so we need very strong people to come and impose meaning on it for everyone, in a theoretical way. [Laughter] But, though they didn’t theorize about it, this has happened throughout human history, just more non-reflectively. I mean, the Assyrians, when they went out and cut a bloody swath across the Ancient Near East, conquering and destroying cities, were basically imposing their story and their order and their version of the truth on the world, through violence. They didn’t have Nietzsche sitting there describing it, or Foucault theorizing about it, but they did it. And the Romans did it: they made a desolation and called it peace, as [Tacitus] says.

So this kind of thing has been happening, and so, I mean, you see this in—a great place to go is early Christianity. We already talked about the Roman Empire and the book of Revelation, but Caesar had a truth—about himself, about Rome, about the gods, about culture, about how society was structured. He had a truth about humanity, that humanity comes in gradations, and so slavery is perfectly wonderful, because there are some people who are just born unfit to be free; they’re fit only to be slaves; there are peasants lower than that, and then people at the top of the society are there because they’re just a better sort of people, and the emperor is just such a great person that he’s pretty much a god.

So he had this truth that he was conveying, and one of the first things that Christianity does, if you look at it from the perspective of ideology, is say, “No. That is not what’s true; this is what’s true. That is not what humanity is; this is what humanity is. That is not what God is; this is who God is. That is not how the world and society should be structured; this is how it should be structured, in the pattern of God’s rule over the cosmos.” And so Christians have really been in the same position all the way through Christian history; it’s just in a lot of eras—which are the eras that we might be tempted to look at as “the good eras”—actually aren’t the good eras, because those are the places where we started to take it for granted. And the places where we haven’t been resisting the world are not the places where the world has been in pretty good shape; it’s just been the places where we’ve stopped resisting.

So there should always be—St. Peter tells us this: Christians should never be at home, in any nation, in any time, in any place—until Christ returns: then we’ll be at home in the world to come. Until then, we should not be at home; until then, there should be this disjunction between what the world says is true and what we know is true. And so I think that’s the only way we can approach it with the next generation, is, “Yes, I know. The internet and this person and that person and this politician and that politician and this news channel and that news channel are all telling you this is the truth or that is the truth or this other thing is the truth, but actually Christ is the Truth. And then we shape our lives by living around that truth, not one of those other truths.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. You know, what I would add to that is: I know that the word “relativism” is used a lot to describe our current situation, but I don’t—I have never met an actual real relativist. Everyone believes that certain things are true, even if it’s something like “Please don’t hit me.” Like, no one thinks that that is good. So everyone, deep down, believes in some kind of truth, and usually it’s not just one little thing; usually there’s a whole arrangement of what truth they believe in. And one of the things that Father just said was, talking about the narratives and stories that we’re being told as you go, and he mentions the Assyrians, for instance, saying, “This is what’s actually true,” and I think that that is one of the most important ways to understand our current moment. Part of it is that, living in the information age, we are bombarded with stories of various kinds that contradict each other all the time, possibly at a high that humanity has never really seen before.

I’ll give you a good example. So I used to actually run a Facebook group dedicated to my town, and I ran it actually for about ten years until I was just, like, done with it, as these things tend to go. [Laughter] But whenever someone would post about some minor crime happening—which, I mean, crime is always bad, but a kid’s bike getting stolen or a car getting broken into or whatever—almost always then people would respond with, “Oh man! What is our town coming to? It used to be so wonderful, and now all this crime is happening everywhere!” And I actually knew some of the local police, and I talked with one of them, and I said, “Hey, you know, people are talking about this kind of thing all the time. Is our crime rate actually up?” And he said, “Well, actually, it’s down. Actually, it’s down. We’re having a long period of relatively low crime.”

And I said, “Well, it seems to me then that’s what’s actually happening is because we have access to every bad thing happening everywhere now, we have a very different impression of the way reality actually is, and it’s because we are now receiving more accounts, more stories, more tales, more narratives than human beings have in the past—at the same time, though, there’s always been some level of competition going on. There’s always been some level of people saying, “No, this is the truth; this is what actually happened.” I mean, one of the things we’ve done over and over again on this podcast is to show how Scripture itself is correcting pagan accounts of what’s going on spiritually, what’s going on historically, all this kind of thing.

So I think on a personal, familial, parental—you said you guys have children—on that level, or for people who are pastors, that the key thing is to learn what the story of the Scriptures, the story of Christianity truly is and to learn to tell it well and to keep telling it and to, especially if you have children, make sure that they’re in that story and that that’s what’s going on. It’s not about shielding them from the world, but it is about shaping them with what really is actually true. And when you shape them with that—I’ve seen this with my own kids—when you shape them with that, and they encounter some messed-up, broken version, distortion or whatever, they can see that for what it is.

A good example, for instance: you began by talking about pronouns, and you said, “I don’t want to get political.” And I’m a little bit of a scholar of the English language, and I’m like: “Well, it’s not a political thing at all! This is linguistic!” [Laughter] How many genders are there? Well, linguistically, there’s at least three: you’ve got masculine, feminine, and neutral. But that’s language; that’s not human beings. English doesn’t happen to have—or has very little—grammatical gender left. We refer to ships as “she,” interestingly enough, but we don’t—like the French we don’t refer to tables as “she”: we don’t think of tables as having gender. But this is one of the things I think that’s—this is an example.

What is the story of what it means to be a human being? Well, it doesn’t include being able to find… I mean, “sex” is the traditional word to refer to male and female amongst human beings, not “gender.” Now we use “gender” to mean that, and I totally understand that language changes, although, like I tell people, “I know that language changes; that doesn’t mean I have to like it.” [Laughter] But, nonetheless,  what is that all about, this sort of gender-bending thing going on? It’s about telling a story that isn’t true. That’s what it is; it’s about telling a story that isn’t true.

But I’ve seen this in people that I’ve worked with directly. Someone who, for instance, starts to say—someone who’s clearly female who starts to say, “Well, I’m a boy”—one person that I know of that that’s the case, they actually in their life never had any clear sense of “this is what a woman is; this is what a man is” in their own home. So in other words, they never actually learned the story of what it means to be a man and what it means to be a woman. So of course they’re going to be confused about that! And so we have to be better story-tellers, frankly, and we have to understand what the story is better, frankly.

And we get so many narratives and so many stories from so many directions all the time. I think one of the best things we can do is just turn some of it off. My job—I work on the internet, and, frankly, I just get sick of the internet sometimes—actually, on a daily basis a little bit. So I’ve reduced some of my social media engagement just for the sake of my own sanity. I’m going on a rant now, but I encourage people: Read to your children. This has become less of a thing now. Read good stories to your children. Read yourself; spend time reading. Engagement with good stories is part of the way that we engage with the story, that all good stories are ultimately referencing.

So like I said, I don’t believe in relativism; I don’t think it’s really a thing for most people. It’s exhausting to actually try to hold that as a belief, and it’s almost impossible. Everyone believes something. They believe that something is true, even if it’s just “I don’t want to suffer.” But the problem is that there’s a confusion and a feeling of… a kind of fracturing, a personal fracturing that occurs when we are constantly bombarding ourselves with all of these different ways of understanding and seeing the world. And there are good stories and bad stories, and I don’t just mean in terms of quality: there are good stories and there are evil stories. There are stories that are telling the wrong story, so we need to become discerning to see how that works.

But, you know, Fr. Stephen’s right. The whole swath of history is about stories clashing into each other, and one of the great claims of Christianity is to say, “No, wait. This is the true story. This is the real one.” And that can be uncomfortable to encounter, but the way that we convey and communicate that story—which is what evangelism is—has to communicate it in such a way that people can receive it, so it’s not just like a competing claim, like, “Oh, we have the true religion.” It’s like: “Okay, well, that’s great you have the true religion, but are you actually communicating Christ to people?” Just saying, “I’m right” is not communicating Christ.

I don’t know. That’s maybe more than you were looking for, but it’s an important question. And how do we convey the Gospel to people in this very contested experience that we’re having, which may not well be that different from previous generations. I mean, certainly the apostles—the apostles were living in a very multi-religious, multi-cultural society. How many different kinds of religions did they bump into? A lot! I mean, we use the word “paganism,” but that really refers to hundreds if not thousands of different kinds of religion. And they were dealing with that, and they were dealing with all the different sects of Judaism; they were dealing with that. And then, of course, heresy begins to rise within Christianity, so you’ve got that going on.

That’s not to say, “Quit whining, because we’ve always been going through this!” [Laughter] But rather to say, “Let’s draw some courage from their experience, because we are there, too.” We’re not in a period of Christendom; we’re definitely not there. We’re in a period more like the apostles’, in my opinion. So, rant over.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, but that’s just, like, your opinion, man. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Thank you.

Fr. Stephen: I was worried for a minute there you were going to go full Henry Higgins, but you pulled back. You pulled back from the brink. It was good.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] This is not ‘Nam; there are rules! So was that helpful to you, Derek from Arkansas—which I looked up on a map and is in fact west of the Mississippi? [Laughter]

Derek: Yeah, I guess what I can just pull from that is that it appears that human understanding connects the best to a story, and I’ve become an aspiring author myself; I’ve got a couple things written out already. But that would almost even show why, when Christ gives us the most profound teachings, they’re in the form of a parable. So it seems to me that we must see ourselves within a story, and we’re aligned with the story of humankind, the best story that we’re ever going to give, or ever receive, I should say, and we should try to stay aligned with that, and that’s the importance of the faith. I think, if I could summarize.

Fr. Andrew: You got it, Derek, absolutely.

Derek: Cool. Thank you guys. And two times over, I listen to you guys. I’m a contractor now, so I’ve got eight hours every day.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Well, good for you! Thanks for listening and thanks for calling in today. All right, well, next we have Jeff, who is calling from the great state of Washington—at least that’s what it says on the call board. Are you really in Washington, Jeff?

Jeff: I am not in Washington, Father. Fathers, bless!

Fr. Andrew: God bless you.

Jeff: I was in the service, so I moved all over the place.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, your telephone number is from Washington!

Jeff: But I live in North Carolina.

Fr. Andrew: Oh! All right, the Old North State!

Fr. Stephen: You have an old-school VPN.

Jeff: Indeed.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, before we get into your question, though, Jeff, I have to ask you: Vinegar or the red-based sauce?

Jeff: I think I prefer the vinegar. I’m not a native North Carolinian, obviously, with my phone number, but I definitely love the vinegar. My sister moved here before I did, and she introduced me to it, and it was kind of novel to me at first, but I really, really started to like it.

Fr. Andrew: God bless you!

Jeff: And my sister’s mother-in-law, who is a native North Carolinian, makes a homemade vinegar sauce, and it’s to die for.

Fr. Andrew: Then you have achieved the proper barbecue. God bless you! [Laughter] All right, you answered well. What is on your mind, Jeff?

Jeff: Well, I am excited to ask this question, because it gives Fr. Stephen the chance to talk about giants, hopefully. And we all get excited when he talks about them.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah!

Jeff: So my question is, in 1 Peter 3, St. Peter says that Christ descended into Hades and preached to the spirits in prison who were disobedient in the time of Noah. And I am wondering—I’ve seen multiple interpretations of who the spirits are, and I’ve seen that they are the sons of God who fell in Genesis 6, and I’ve seen that they are the disembodied human souls in the prison of Hades—and I am wondering which one is the correct interpretation or is it some other option?

Fr. Andrew: Take it away, Fr. Stephen!

Fr. Stephen: Okay.

Fr. Andrew: Okay! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: No, this is a key passage on this in terms of the patristic interpretation of this, because probably the Church Father who’s most famous for switching to the Sethite interpretation of Genesis 6:1-4, meaning the interpretation that the sons of God and daughters of men are referring to the lines of Seth and Cain, respectively, is St. Augustine. And so he’s really—there were a couple before that; he’s not the first one, but he’s sort of the pivotal one. And when St. Augustine comes to that text in St. Peter’s epistle, he admits he doesn’t know what to do with it, because he basically interprets it as Christ going and preaching to spirits in Hades, but St. Augustine just openly admits, “I don’t know why the ones from Noah’s time would get another chance as opposed to other souls in Hades.” He says he’s got nothing. And to me, that makes the point that this passage is really— I mean, if St. Augustine doesn’t know what to do, that means this is a big problem for that point of view.

So part of the issue is that people have understood the proclamation that Christ is making there in the sense of the Gospel, and the Gospel in the sense of an invitation. And that’s not what the Gospel is. [Laughter]

Jeff: Interesting.

Fr. Stephen: The Gospel is the report of Christ’s victory. And that, then, inspires one to say—that ends with Christ is returning to judge the living and the dead, to judge every man according to his works. And when you hear that, you say, “What must I do to be saved when that happens?” But so it’s not an invitation. So the fact that Christ proclaimed his victory at his descent into Hades, in Hades, does not mean he was inviting anyone to repent and believe. That’s not what the Gospel is. That’s sort of what we’ve got in our modern heads.

So there is a directly parallel piece in the book of Enoch—so check your bingo cards; I brought up the book of Enoch [Laughter]—where a big chunk of the first part of the book of Enoch is he sort of goes on this—and this is common in apocalyptic literature—he’s taken on this tour by angelic guides of the earth and the heavens and the underworld. And when he’s in the underworld, he sees the place where the Watchers are imprisoned, where the rebellious angels who were involved in Genesis 6:1-4, where they are imprisoned. And they ask Enoch, “Hey, man, can you go talk to God for us if you’re heading up that way, and see if you can get us some mercy?” Now, they don’t repent; they just say, “Hey, can you get God to ease up on the punishment?” kind of idea. And so Enoch says, “Well, sure,” because he’s a good guy. And so when he’s in the heavens, he asks; he sort of prays and tries to intercede for them and say, “Hey, is there any way you can show mercy on them?” And God basically says, “No.” [Laughter] And then he sends Enoch back to them, to proclaim to them their doom.

Jeff: Oh!

Fr. Stephen: Not only is there not mercy for you here, but the final judgment is coming for you.

Jeff: Oh.

Fr. Stephen: And so if you look at the language—and I don’t have time right now to argue that 1 and 2 Peter are by the same author; that’s a very controverted thing in biblical studies, but, like I said, I don’t have time to go into all that right now—it’s coming up on The Whole Counsel of God, though, so you can listen to it there eventually. But 2 Peter is even clearer about the angels who sinned; it’s very clear that this is what St. Peter is referring to, and so he’s sort of paralleling that story about Enoch, but it’s actually Christ who does it, that one of the things he does during his descent into Hades, as he’s bringing the Fathers up out of Sheol, up out of Hades, is he proclaims to those rebellious angelic spirits their doom, which is proclaiming to them the Gospel, his victory, that they’ve been defeated.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, as I like to say, the Gospel is not good news for everyone. [Laughter] It’s bad news for some. It is, because it’s being proclaimed at them. Sorry; that’s my little witty thing I wanted to add to this.

Jeff: Good. That answers my question.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so it’s what we’re doing when we read the Gospel facing north, the Gospel of Christ’s resurrection facing north. We’re repeating that.

Jeff: Right, and I remember in one of the other episodes, on that topic, in traditional western liturgy—I’m a former Roman Catholic—I can confirm that they do read the Gospel on the left side of the altar, and if you’re facing east, to the left is north, and that’s why they do it. So even in the western liturgy it’s the same thing.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, the traditional Latin western liturgy, they do it all the time, not just… Yeah.

Jeff: Oh, the Gospel during the liturgy is read from the left side facing north.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly.

Jeff: Brilliant!

Fr. Andrew: All right, well, thanks for calling, Jeff, from the great state of North Carolina.

Jeff: Thank you, Fathers!

Fr. Andrew: You’re welcome. So up next we have Emilian, and if I’m not mistaken, Emilian is calling all the way from Romania. Is that true?

Emilian: Yes, it is, Fathers. Thanks for taking my call.

Fr. Andrew: Well, welcome, Emilian, to The Lord of Spirits podcast, and thanks for staying up really late. I’m sure it must be about, what, four or five in the morning there—or maybe two or three in the morning. All right, well, what is on your mind, Emilian?

Emilian: So this is somehow related to the last series of articles on the Old Testament Christology. I really enjoyed them, and after I listened to them, I started reading two of the recommended books, namely The Bodies of God and the World of Ancient Israel and The Glory of the Invisible God by Andrei Orlov. And so these authors emphasized this idea of the glory of God, not as something immaterial, like God’s plan or honor, but as a kind of manifestation of God’s, something like maybe his body or the manifestation of his body, which has to be shielded from the people. So God’s glory is shrouded inside a cloud or inside a darkness.

And I also remembered that there are many passages in the Old Testament where I think we can say that the Father might be present, and he is clouded by this darkness, so that people would not be in his direct presence. And I know that this idea of the glory, the word “glory” comes from the Hebrew kabod, I think it is, and I know it means also weight or mask, and at some point in a commentary on his blog, Fr. Stephen said that when Moses asked to see God’s glory, he was asking to see the Father in his essence, which he could not do and live. So basically I am asking what exactly is God’s glory, if it is particular to a certain Person of the Holy Trinity, or it’s a general manifestation of God’s, or what exactly is it?

Fr. Andrew: That’s a really interesting question. I mean, I know what glory is, humanly speaking, in terms of—for instance, the Greek word, doxa, which refers to reputation and opinion and various kinds of things like that: it’s the things that people say about someone or about something else; but I think that this is something much deeper. Father, he referenced a blog post you made. What’s going on? What is the glory of God?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so part of the difficulty with this is that the English word, “glory,” and even the Greek word, doxa, is used to translate two different Hebrew words, which are slightly different, and so that can sometimes make it confusing. So there’s the Hebrew word that you brought up, kabod, which refers to, as you said, weight: sort of weight or mass or heaviness, literally, that has that kind of essential quality to it, and that’s what Sommer and Orlov are referring to when they’re talking about the glory being this kind of bodily, substantive thing.

But there’s also another Hebrew word, shekhinah, which is also translated as “glory,” and that’s more what is referred to [things] like the theophanic glory cloud that we’ve talked about, where the glory of God fills the tabernacle and there’s sort of this flaming cloud, that kind of idea of glory. Or the glory of Christ that shone like the sun on the mount of transfiguration, on Mount Tabor. And so those aren’t unrelated concepts, but they’re not identical things.

So that type of glory—the glory of Mount Tabor—is precisely seen by humans who don’t die, that St. Peter and St. John both talk about having seen his glory at that moment. So that’s one thing. And then Moses, as you mentioned, when he asked to see God’s glory, and we’ve referred to that again, because that’s in the same chapter where it says that he spoke to him face to face, spoke to God face to face and then he says, “I want to see your glory,” and God says, “No, if you see me, you’ll die.” And that’s where it’s kabod; that’s where it’s this other idea.

So I think in both cases, this is something that doesn’t apply to just one Person of the Trinity. So on the one side with the shekhinah, if we’re talking about that kind of glory, this is the glory that Christ says in St. John’s gospel he shared with the Father before the world began. And it’s that glory that he temporarily and humbling himself in the Incarnation does not display; it gets displayed momentarily at Mount Tabor, but then fully at the Ascension. But also, if we’re talking about God’s essence, of who he is—we profess that the Holy Trinity is one in essence, and so there is a sense in which that does not refer just to the Father but also to Christ and to the Holy Spirit. There is one glory of the divine nature in both senses, and, yeah, I think that—does that answer? Is that what you were looking for or was there something more?

Emilian: I think it is. Can I come with a short follow-up?

Fr. Andrew: Sure! I mean, you’re calling all the way from Romania, so this is your chance. [Laughter]

Emilian: Well, we know that God appeared above the ark of the covenant on the Day of Atonement, and his eyes had to be covered by the clouds of incense; otherwise the high priest would die. So in this case would he see the Father?

Fr. Stephen: I actually understand that to be Christ, but that’s a longer argument. But I could lay it out a little bit here. I don’t know how much of Sommer you’ve read, but in the Ancient Near East, gods were seen to have multiple bodies; I mean, that’s just what idols were. But gods had a liturgical body is how it’s referred to by scholars, meaning that the god had a hypostasis that was manifest ritually within worship. So there is, with the cherubim that were in the holy of holies—this was the throne of God. And the God seated upon that throne became visible on the Day of Atonement, but also became visible to Isaiah, when he receives his call, and Ezekiel. And so this is not the only time, but my understanding is that in those prophetic visions, that they are seeing Christ, but also that in worship what we’re told in the New Testament is that Christ is in our midst when we worship, whenever two or three are gathered. So when we’re gathered liturgically, it is Christ who is in our midst. And so I take that understanding back to the Day of Atonement.

Now, I’m not saying… If someone disagrees with me and can make another argument, but that’s the way I understand it. I’m not saying this as in: No, this is the only way it could be; but this is my opinion, based on those things I just said, is that it was Christ who appeared.

Fr. Andrew: Does that make sense, Emilian?

Emilian: Yes, yes.

Fr. Andrew: All right. Well, thank you very much for calling. It’s good to have you. All right, well, we’re going to take another quick break and we’ll be right back with your calls. Give us a ring!

Fr. Andrew: Welcome back, everyone!

Fr. Stephen: We really need to put in an Inception “bwaahm” in that commercial, because that is a commercial for a book that you’re arguing is not a commercial—in a commercial.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] It’s true! I didn’t make it a commercial, though; that was done to it by somebody else! But it’s true. Thank you for that, everybody. Well, welcome to the third half of our all-Q&A episode. Let’s get right to our calls. We’ve got Brian calling—well, at least his phone is from Texas. Where are you, Brian?

Brian: I’m in Texas; I’m here in Austin.

Fr. Andrew: All right. I’m told that Austin is the part of Texas that’s not Texas, though.

Brian: Yes, that’s very true.

Fr. Stephen: Is it still weird?

Brian: Yeah, it’s weird, right. There are t-shirts about “keep Austin weird,” so, yeah. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Okay.

Fr. Andrew: I have cousins from Austin, who are from Ohio, which—that’s weird: that Ohioans would move to Texas. But again, it’s Austin, so… I don’t know.

Brian: Yeah, well, it happens to be one of the cities that’s the fastest-growing in the country, so people are coming from all over.

Fr. Andrew: Well, if you bump into them, tell them I said hi.

Brian: Okay, I will do that.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] What’s on your mind, Brian?

Brian: Yeah, I’ve got a two-part question for you, Fathers, and I just want to say thank you for the great work that you do. You’re both a blessing to all your listeners. So this two-part question, the second part might actually blend into the first. But you’re probably aware that over the last several years there’s been this increased public conversation concerning what the government’s calling unidentified aerial phenomena, which is really UFOs as we would traditionally know them. And of course, that conversation has sparked the possibility that intelligent extra-terrestrial life may be out there, or even ultra-terrestrial life living in secret here on the planet. And of course the Bible is silent on all of these issues, of course, and it’s also silent on how to build a combustion engine, but we know combustion engines exist!

The [secularists] seem to view this as a positive thing, and they look upon this as being the return of the extra-terrestrials who created mankind. This blends very much into the Ancient Near East kind of Anunnaki and so on, and of course they kind of see this as the coming of a new messiah. And of course they argue that Christianity would crumble under such a revelation if true extra-terrestrials were discovered. And you’re probably aware—the Church has dealt with this in the very distant past, through the conversation of the plurality of worlds and the possibility of a planet-hopping Jesus who incarnates on every single planet in the universe, which really ended underneath Thomas Paine, who said that was ridiculous.

So in the modern Church, this is rarely addressed other than the Catholics, and the pope and many of his priests have said that they’re ready to evangelize the aliens when they come, including baptizing them and welcoming them as fellow imagers. So I’m curious—and I know you may have to speculate, but how does the Orthodox Church view the possibility of intelligent extra-terrestrial life, and how would it respond to this kind of revelation if it was revealed?

And of course, the second part is: Do you believe Sasquatch is related to the giants, either pre- or post-flood, and if so, are they chimeras?

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Wow! That’s a huge set-up on UFOs, and: “Oh, by the way, is Sasquatch a nephilim?”

Brian: Yeah, well, I’ve loved your shows on the giants, and they’re just so on-track with reality that I just had to ask you that question.

Fr. Andrew: Giant questions are always welcome. It’s a rule. [Laughter] I’ll say—okay, the first thing I’ll say, since you asked explicitly, “What is the Orthodox Church’s view on UFOs?” the Orthodox Church qua Orthodox Church has not—not that… I mean, correct me if I’m wrong, Fr. Stephen, but has not put forth any statements at all about the possibility of the way we would normally think of extra-terrestrial intelligent beings. It’s funny. Is there extra-terrestrial intelligent life? I’m like: Yeah, we talk about vast cosmic intelligences all the time on this show! But the idea of little green men or essentially something that’s sort of analogous to mankind that’s from some other place, I’m not aware of the Church, as the Church, saying anything about that. Is there anything like that, Father?

Fr. Stephen: Not that I know of.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there’s just individual people saying things.

Fr. Stephen: If there is anything, it would just be some individual, local church, which would only speak for themselves. There’s nothing across the board from the Orthodox Church on it.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right. I mean, it’s funny: the idea that we’re visited by beings that are not human but are intelligent—like, that’s in the Bible. We understand that in terms of the engagement of mankind with spiritual beings such as angels and demons and dead people on some occasions. This is totally a thing. One of the problems is, if you encounter something that you don’t know what it is and it seems intelligent, to immediately classify it in terms of—I mean, I love Star Trek, and Fr. Stephen also loves Star Trek—in terms of the way that Star Trek encounters these alien life forms… That’s making a whole big set of assumptions about what it is that someone is encountering.

I’ll be honest. When someone says, “Oh, if we really encounter this, it’s just going to blow theology wide open” or whatever, I think that’s garbage.

Brian: I do, too.

Fr. Andrew: I think it’s just garbage, because, number one, you’re arguing from a hypothetical. To me, that’s like: What if God could make a rock so big that he couldn’t lift it? There’s a sort of definitional issue there. I could [hypothesize]: “What if we discovered that there was more than one Holy Trinity, that there were six Holy Trinities? That would kill theology, wouldn’t it?” Okay, I can say stuff like that, but Christianity is about dealing with what has actually been revealed to us. So there’s that as a kind of problem.

But again, it’s not like Christianity doesn’t have ways about thinking about encountering intelligent life that is not human. We absolutely do. This is not some crazy weird idea that we can’t handle. I don’t know. Father, I’m kind of ranting, rambling now; what do you have to say about all that stuff?

Fr. Stephen: Well, now, if you were a real Star Trek fan, you would have played “A Final Unity,” and you would know that the reason all of the races are so similar is that they all come from the same progenitor race that was seeded throughout the cosmos.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, I remember! Yeah, I remember that episode.

Fr. Stephen: That’s not an episode; it’s a video game, with the whole cast of TNG.

Fr. Andrew: But there is also an episode of, I think it’s Next Generation, that does that…

Fr. Stephen: References back to it?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah!

Fr. Stephen: Okay.

Fr. Andrew: But if you were a real Star Trek fan, you would remember that, Father.

Fr. Stephen: Oh, yeah, okay.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] They find little bits—

Fr. Stephen: No true Scotsman…

Fr. Andrew: They find little bits of DNA. They find bits of a message within DNA that’s seeded all over the galaxy, and the Klingons think it’s plans for a weapon, and it comes together and it turns out it’s like a hologram message or whatever from the progenitor race.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, but that was contradicted by another episode in which Worf devolved into a lizard—

Fr. Andrew: He did; it’s true.

Fr. Stephen: —and the humans devolved into apes. But anyway, Star Trek aside… [Laughter] In actuality, if we found a race of beings on another planet, who had a language we could translate, that would be the ultimate proof that Christianity is true.

Brian: That’s right, it would!

Fr. Stephen: Here’s why: because that would mean that human consciousness is in some way a universal. That would mean that human nature is a universal, because another being that’s unrelated, like us and a bat, say—bat-consciousness and human-consciousness is nothing alike; that’s why we can’t communicate with bats. So if an alien race showed up that had a consciousness with the same shape as human consciousness, that would mean human nature is in some way a universal, and only Christianity has that as a base teaching, because that’s how the Incarnation works, which means, yes, if such a race arrived, we should evangelize them.

Brian: Yeah, okay. Yeah, that makes total sense.

Fr. Andrew: There you go. Okay, so Sasquatch, I hope— I was going to say, Brian, I hope you listened to our Halloween episode, because we actually talked about Sasquatches a little bit on that.

Fr. Stephen: It depends on if we’re talking about Sasquatch qua Pacific Northwest cryptid, in which case he would be a hominid species, or if we’re talking about Sasquatch qua Pacific Northwest yeti archetype, where he’s sort of the old man of the woods, which then would partake of that giant kind of idea.

Brian: Yeah. Well, do you think it’s possible? I mean, do the fallen lesser gods of the divine council have the ability to manipulate living entities and use the material of God’s creation to develop their own things?

Fr. Stephen: Well, it wouldn’t be a DNA thing. It would be: this is a creature.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it would be like Nebuchadnezzar, which we didn’t get to—we should do a Nebuchadnezzar episode—we didn’t get to that, but if you think about Nebuchadnezzar, he becomes bestial because of his sin, and then he repents and is restored and so forth. So, I mean, that is totally a thing, but, yeah, it’s not like an alteration of nature. But human beings can be remarkably plastic in terms of their ability to alter themselves. I mean, it’s definitely some kind of possibility in one way or another. Yeah. Is that all you were looking for, Brian?

Brian: Yeah, that’s all, and you said you were looking for open questions on anything that’s weird, so those are the two questions from weird Austin! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Good for you! You are our first UFO question, by the way.

Brian: Oh, really? Okay.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, yeah, you’re the first one to ask a UFO question.

Brian: Well, I think within society, in American society, it’s probably going to be a continuing conversation for another decade.

Fr. Andrew: I’m sure. Well, thank you very much for calling, Brian.

Brian: Thank you.

Fr. Andrew: All right, well, we’ve got another caller from the other side of the Atlantic. Stace from Ireland, are you there? Stace?

Stace: Yes. Greetings, Fathers.

Fr. Andrew: All right. Welcome. We’re happy to have you on The Lord of Spirits podcast. And again, thanks for staying up really late. It’s what—1:30 in the morning over there?

Stace: Oh, well, not too bad, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: Not too bad. [Laughter] If you don’t mind me asking, where in Ireland are you located?

Stace: Up in Belfast.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, oh, you’re an Ulsterman, then?

Stace: Yeah, from Russia originally, actually. A lot of traveling back and forth, you know.

Fr. Andrew: All right, well, you don’t… Well, that thick Russian accent that you’ve got there… [Laughter]

Stace: Yah, but I can put it on, yes?

Fr. Andrew: Oh, nice! Very good! [Laughter] All right, well, what is on your mind?

Stace: First I just want to say thanks so much for doing the wonderful show and sharing your wisdom with us. You definitely helped bring me back to the faith, so thanks very much for that. So I’ve been reading through Exodus lately, and just before Moses leads the Israelites out of Egypt and during the plagues, it’s repeatedly mentioned that Yahweh hardened Pharaoh’s heart. So sometimes it’s passive; it says, “Pharaoh’s heart was hardened,” but it’s implied that Yahweh causes it; and then other times it’s more active, so it actually says that Yahweh hardened Pharaoh’s heart. And then also a couple of times it says that Pharaoh hardened his own heart.

So I looked around before and I found all sorts of very different answers to this. So some say that God created psychological laws, and then from that he let Pharaoh through pride and through his sins just let his heart be hardened. And then others say there was a hyperbolic way of saying the same thing, that is to punish Pharaoh. So what’s the sort of traditional understanding of this? Is it to show Yahweh’s full power to the Egyptians, that he keeps actively hardening his heart? It seems like if he didn’t actively harden it, then at some point maybe Pharaoh would have let the Israelites go earlier, like one of the mages tell him, “Look at Egypt; it’s destroyed. You should just let them go.” And then it says Yahweh hardened his heart, and he didn’t. So, yeah, could you maybe explain that?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s a good question. So if you were to do… If you look at all these accounts from Exodus, there’s actually three different ways that this is talked about. So on the one hand it says, “Pharaoh’s heart was hardened,” so it’s like you said, sort of this passive voice; it just sort of describes it happening. And it also says that Pharaoh hardened his own heart, so like Exodus 8:15, “Pharaoh, he hardened his heart.” But then it also says that the Lord hardened his heart, and you get God himself saying, “I will harden Pharaoh’s heart.” So all of that stuff is in play throughout the whole Exodus account.

I think one of the problems is if we try to pick one of those and use it to kind of eliminate the other two. So if you were going to do a Calvinist reading of it, you would basically say, “Well, God had hardened Pharaoh’s heart, and that’s what all of this really means.” If you were going to take a more sort of—the opposite view and say, “Well, this is all Pharaoh’s own doing,” etc., and I guess maybe the other would be sort of neutral. But there’s clearly, just from the text of Scripture, it’s clear that Pharaoh is doing something, and it’s clear also that God is doing something. So, I don’t know, that’s at least what I’m seeing from the text itself, so, Fr. Stephen, what would you say about this stuff from Exodus?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so there’s a couple of things, and there is sort of a transition from Pharaoh hardening his own heart to God doing it over the course of the narrative. And so the first place we have to start is with the question of: What is God doing? So if we come at it from the perspective of God is trying to get Pharaoh to let Israel go—that’s what he’s doing—then, yeah, it kind of looks like he’s playing games or something, because Pharaoh would have done that. But I would submit that that’s not what God is trying to do, because, first of all, if that’s what he wanted to do, he wouldn’t have to do the plagues; he could have just struck Pharaoh dead. [Laughter] There’s lots of other ways for him to get Israel physically out of Egypt—so there’s something else that he’s doing.

And before the tenth plague, he tells us what he’s doing, and that he’s executing judgment against the gods of Egypt.

Brian: So is this like a punishment, then, sort of taking away Pharaoh’s reason for sins, and that’s…

Fr. Stephen: Well, Pharaoh is one of the gods of Egypt. They see him as, well… We can’t go too far on this, because you get into which pharaoh and all this stuff, but they saw him as one of the bodies of one of the gods, depending on when exactly historically you think this took place, maybe Horus, maybe someone else. But so he’s one of the gods of Egypt. And justice, biblically, is not punishment for crimes. Justice is restoring the correct order, the correct good order of the creation, when it has been thrown out of whack. And so we have a century and a half of the oppression of the people of Israel; we have the murder of the infant boys of Israel by this pharaoh; we have all manner of these things that have happened—so the scales are out of whack. Pharaoh has exalted himself by humiliating and punishing and oppressing and exploiting the Israelites, God’s people.

And so God is going to set that right; he’s going to put things right in Egypt. So if you’re an Israelite who’s been being oppressed and victimized, that’s good news; if you’re an Egyptian, and especially if you’re Pharaoh, that’s really bad news. And part and parcel of that with the gods is God showing that those gods, whom they’ve been worshiping and following and really been enslaved to, are not who they should be following.

And the plagues are targeted—we may do an episode on this at some point. The plagues are pretty well targeted at the Egyptian gods. And all of them are targeted at Pharaoh, because Pharaoh’s job— The Egyptian word for what I’m calling “justice”—it’s mishpat in Hebrew; it’s ma’at in Egyptian—was this idea that everything was in its proper place and functioning properly—they had the same concept of justice—but that was the pharaoh’s job. The pharaoh was basically a priest-king whose job was to interact with the gods and rule over humans and make sure everything stayed in the right place and functioned properly.

And each one of the plagues is things going out of whack. He can’t put it back in order. Even his magicians—it’s part of what’s going on in the text: Jannes and Jambres, his magicians—they could make things worse—it’s like: “Oh, look, we can turn water into blood, too; we can’t turn the blood back to water, but we can make more blood!”

Stace: And there seems to be a limit as well to what they can do compared to Yahweh.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, yeah, they can do a couple of things, but they’re just making it worse. “Hey, we could make some more frogs… like we need them.” So, yeah, they can create more chaos, but they can’t put things back in order.

And so at a certain point, yes, Pharaoh would have relented, but, notice: Pharaoh never repents. As soon as he finally does let the Israelites go, he changes his mind and chases them down to kill them all for embarrassing him. So he never repents. This isn’t God keeping him from repenting. This is just God making sure his whole plan plays out to redress the injustice that has been committed against his people and by extension against him; to make this display that the gods of Egypt are phonies—not that they don’t exist, but that they aren’t rightly worshiped as gods. And to make that display not only to the Egyptians—to the Egyptians, to the Israelites—and, when they get to Canaan, Rahab’s heard about it! The other nations have heard about it. And so he’s making sure that all plays out, because he knows Pharaoh isn’t going to repent. He might have let them go after the sixth plague, but he would have chased them down and tried to kill them just like he did after the tenth plague.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s interesting. I’m looking at Exodus 14 right now, and in verse four, this is God speaking; he says, “I will harden Pharaoh’s heart, and he will pursue them.” And then this is the part that really struck me: “And I will get glory over Pharaoh and all his hosts, and the Egyptians shall know that I am the Lord.” So it’s just like you were saying, Father: it’s playing out—it’s God instituting his justice. And it’s kind of showing: “Okay, my glory, the glory of God, is supposed to be over Pharaoh and all his hosts; Pharaoh has been exalting himself.” And the Egyptians need to know, as he says, “That I am the Lord.” That Pharaoh is not the Lord.

Fr. Stephen: Well, that’s… To hone in on that—slight “Um, actually.” That’s “They will know that I am Yahweh.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, Yahweh. It’s in all caps there.

Fr. Stephen: Meaning “I am he who causes things to be,” as we talked about.

Fr. Andrew: Sorry. I came to a correct conclusion, but made the wrong argument to get there. Just like we did earlier with the whole agape and phileo things, so, yeah!

Stace: So would you say, though, at the point where Yahweh’s actively hardening his heart, he’s sort of overriding his free will at that point, or…?

Fr. Stephen: Um, well, this gets into the question of what free will is, which is a whole big can of worms.

Stace: And we’re back into metaphysics.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. I’ll try to get into this as briefly as I can. We’ll probably do an episode on this at some point. But the modern understanding of free will, which is “I can choose between contrary opposites; I can have Coke or Pepsi,” is not the way free will was understood biblically or by the Church Fathers. So will is a function of nature. Will is sort of a force that drives you in the direction of your nature. So Aristotle, for example, talks about trees having wills. A tree has a will, and that will—it’s not making choices, but that will is sort of the internal biological force that causes it to grow and move toward the perfection of its nature.

Stace: Right, the teleology he talks about.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so biblically, God overriding someone’s free will would be like stopping them from doing something that they otherwise… that was in their nature to do, like stunting their… So this wouldn’t really be overriding his free will; it would be…

Stace: Like clouding his judgment more?

Fr. Stephen: Right, more of that kind of idea, until the process is complete, because, like I said, he never repents. So this isn’t that: “Oh, he really would have repented. He really would have become a worshiper of Yahweh the God of Israel and all this, but God didn’t let him,” which is the way Calvinists want to use—sorry, Calvinists—want to use this as a way—

Stace: With the whole predestination thing going on.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so they try to make this an issue of salvation, but that’s never in the picture here in Pharaoh. This is about him taking one particular action and God clouding his judgment so that he waits to take it to a later point.

Stace: Right, and with that as well it’s mentioned that he hardens his own heart to show that that’s his intention anyway, and God’s sort of not…

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. Right. And so there’s lots of places where God will intervene. I mean, Joseph’s brothers were contemplating killing him—God didn’t let that happen. That’s not like overriding their free will, or at least we wouldn’t say that in a negative sense, that God had events take place so that Joseph would live.

Stace: Okay, now. I think that answers it. Thanks very much!

Fr. Andrew: Well, thanks very much for calling. So we’ve got Steve now, calling from California. So, Steve, welcome to Lord of Spirits podcast!

Steve: Hi, Fathers! It’s a pleasure to speak with you.

Fr. Andrew: Likewise. What’s your question or comment?

Steve: Well, I struggle with the notion of correlating God’s absolute knowledge of the future with human free moral agency. I understand your argument that God transcends time—he’s not bound by time—but for him to know the future would require that I also transcend time. It seems like it is a block model of the universe, where each moment exists in eternity, like the Hindu version, and I don’t know how to… With Brian from Austin, you talked about logical absurdities, that God is free and powerful to do anything except commit a logical absurdity, which I agree with it. But it seems like absolute foreknowledge of what I’m going to do in the future is a logical absurdity, because I do not… I exist only in time. I understand God does not, but how would he know my future as an actuality if I exist at this moment in time? A block model of the universe means that all moments exist at once.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, I think I understand what you’re asking. So there’s a whole host of things we could say here, but I think one thing that I would say is—and this is a saying that I love, which is: There is no tale without a teller. And how that’s applicable to this is to say that from the point of view of human beings who are alive in this life, it seems that time moves in a linear fashion, that there’s a past, a present, a future; and I don’t know what’s going to happen in the future, and I only have memories of the past, and I am present in the present. But then if you take it out—if you try, then, to see it from God’s point of view, which is what your question’s kind of predicated upon, to say that all points exist already, that’s essentially to say, “Okay, I’m imagining the way God sees or experiences all of this, and this is what that must be like.”

The problem with that is that’s a tale that human beings are not the teller of! [Laughter] As we like to say, we don’t know what it’s like to be a bat. We definitely don’t know what it’s like to be an angel, and we certainly don’t know what it’s like to be God. So it’s setting up a logical model in the mind that then becomes contradictory especially because we don’t actually have the ability to see things from that point of view. We can only imagine what that point of view must be like, but the problem is that our imagination doesn’t line up with the actual view.

And I mentioned—I began by saying that part of the problem is that it’s human beings in this life experiencing things in this way, because human beings who have moved beyond this life—so, for instance, the saints—they have a different perspective. Now, they still don’t have the same perspective that God does, because they’re not God, but they have a perspective that we do not have, because we’re in this life and they have shifted in what my dogmatics professor would say: that they have moved into an angelic time zone, although even then they don’t know what it’s like to be that kind of creature, although it’s something a little bit more like that.

So that’s part of the problem: is that it’s setting up definitions that by their nature are contradictory and by their nature require us to imagine things that we don’t actually have the ability to see. So it’s like the mantis shrimp we talked about—I don’t know, it’s been like a year ago, hasn’t it now?—that sees all these colors that we cannot even imagine. We can sort of detect that they are able to do that by scientific means, but we still don’t even have the ability to see that. We can just imagine it in a really precise way, I suppose, but we can’t actually see that.

That is at least one way that I would understand the problem with the question that you’re asking and why it seems unsolvable from our point of view. Fr. Stephen, do you want to “Um, actually” me or add or subtract or whatever?

Fr. Stephen: No, I think that’s basically right. So we have to… See, part of the whole… Man, I wonder if people are like—if Thomas Nagel is monetizing this somehow—

Fr. Andrew: He should!

Fr. Stephen: —and people are downloading the “What Is It Like to be a Bat?” and he’s got this huge spurt from US Orthodox folks. [Laughter] But, see, when we think about what it’s like to be a bat, what we’re doing is we’re projecting: What would it be like if my consciousness was in a bat body, like if a wizard turned me into a bat? [Laughter] Because we can only understand things from our human perspective. And so when we try to think of: Well, what would it mean to be outside of time? What would that be like? Our frame of reference is we tend to, when we try to think outside time, because it’s more difficult, we tend to think about it the way we think about space. So we think about: “Well, I’m here in the church office in Lafayette, Louisiana. I don’t know what’s going on in London on a particular street right now. I have no idea.” But we would say, “Well, God does.” And so we tend to think of it kind of that way. “Well, God is in heaven outside of time, but he knows what’s happening at all the different moments.” Or “God is in heaven, and he knows what’s happening in all the different places on earth.”

But if we think about that a little more with space, that’s not what we actually believe about God, because we believe that God doesn’t just know what’s going on everywhere, but we say that God is not spatially located. So it’s not that God is here in the office with me but he does know what’s going on in London—he is in London just as much as he’s here in this office, just as much as he’s everywhere else in creation. And so, timewise, we end up with the same thing, but that’s even harder for us to conceive of. We, being finite humans, have to process reality through certain categories that are embedded in our consciousness, in the shape of our consciousness, and time and space are two of those. Those are two categories that are embedded in our consciousness, and we can’t make sense of the world apart from them, but that doesn’t mean that they’re absolute in the universe; that just means they’re embedded in our consciousness and we can’t think outside of those categories. We can guess and imagine and analogize, but that’s different [from] really understanding.

And so even talking about God having a consciousness is like a weird analogy that breaks down. Saying, “What is it like to be God?”—I don’t know that there is a thing that it’s like to be God, at least analogous to what it’s like to be a human or a bat.

Steve: Yeah, it’s a category occupied by one.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yeah! And so God does whatever that would be… Again, we’re approaching this apophatically, via negativa, where we say we can’t have any idea what it’s like from God’s perspective, but we can make negative statements: that his knowledge, what’s knowledge for him, which is going to be different [from] knowledge for us, is not going to be contained within those categories; it’s not going to be restricted by those categories. So if I as a human knew for certain what you were going to do tomorrow, then there would be no free will, because that’s how human knowledge works. If I had human, scientific, certain knowledge of what you were going to tomorrow, there would be no free will, because that’s how human knowledge works.

So when I say that’s not how divine knowledge works, I mean that’s not how divine knowledge works, because God is not existing today and knowing the past and the future any more than he’s existing in Lafayette and knows what’s going on in London and Tokyo.

Fr. Andrew: Does that make sense, Steve?

Steve: Well, he participates in time in order to relate to us. The Bible is full of references of God being jealous and angry and even surprised, which would be a falsehood if he already knew it. God is portrayed in the psalms as being a musician. Music is melody with time. Without time, music makes no sense; it’s just a noise. I take great comfort from the fact that two plus two equals four, and two plus two equals four in every corner of the universe, and it speaks of God’s faithfulness to me. It speaks to the fact that God is a God of order.

Fr. Andrew: I was going to say that I think that the place you’re getting hung up, Steve, is that even though the Bible depicts God in particular ways and, for instance, you talked about God with music and so forth—God is not bound by these things; he’s boundless. So even though he’s a God of order, he’s not a God constrained by order. This is simply the language that we’re able to receive. So God is not—he’s not contained in a space. So that’s the thing: he’s beyond all of that. It’s not going to work out in any logical way. We have to accept that our human minds are not capable of containing exactly how God operates. Does that make sense?

Steve: Yeah. That’s something I’ve struggled with for probably 20 years. I’m a believer. I believe that God is an omniscient being, but my statement about time is not a comment on God; it’s a comment on me. How can my future be known as an actuality if I have not yet been there? To me it seems like a logical absurdity. It’s like saying, “Could Jesus microwave a burrito so hot that even he couldn’t eat it?”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s because you’re saying—you’re using the word “known”: known by whom? By God. We don’t know what it means for God to know things. That’s the problem.

Fr. Stephen: Well, and God is present at every moment in time in the same way he’s present at every point in space. So there is not a past and a future for God. So technically God doesn’t know the future and he doesn’t know the past, because for God there is no future and past.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s not going to… It can’t work out humanly, logically. So that’s kind of where it goes.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, it’s not something we’ll ever understand and wrap our heads around. The answer is there’s no answer, unfortunately.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I hope on some level that that’s helpful for you, Steve. So thank you very much for calling. All right, well, we’re going to move on to our next caller. We’ve got Peter who is calling—another one from California. Peter, welcome to The Lord of Spirits podcast.

Peter: Hello, Fathers. So my question really stems from your episodes on spiritual geography, specifically if you guys can further explain the differences or maybe no differences between Hades, Sheol, and Hell, because I realize that… It seems to me in our English language that we use these words interchangeably many times, but as I understood it, Hades and Sheol, which are the same place but just different names in different languages, that’s the place where one went when they died, prior to Christ’s resurrection, and you’re dead: you’re just dead there. You’re not being punished or anything like that, and that is where Christ descended to upon his crucifixion, and liberated everyone. And that Hell is a different place, or even a condition, in which one is suffering in the presence of God as punishment after their final judgment.

Fr. Andrew: All right, hey, this is one that I know!

Fr. Stephen: Somebody’s trying to save 50 bucks; that’s what’s happening here.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I’m excited, because this is a good English question! So, okay, Peter, you started out by saying that people tend to use “Hades,” “Hell,” and “Sheol” interchangeably, and I’m going to begin by saying that’s because they actually are interchangeable. And one of the things about English is that we have a lot of words that came into English from different languages, and sometimes the words do really mean the same thing. Now, sometimes we tend to use them differently or whatever, and I have heard people use, for instance, “Hades” and “Hell” to try to distinguish them from each other.

But here’s the thing: all three of those words—so “Hades” comes from Greek, “Hell” comes from our Germanic inheritance, and “Sheol” is a Semitic word—all three of these refer to the place of the dead, the underworld, and all three of these words also refer to deities that have control of those places, or it may also be said—we could say that being dead is being in the control of that deity. So in Greek mythology “Hades” is the name of the god of the underworld, and it’s also the underworld. In Germanic mythology which includes Norse, “Hell” is the underworld, and it’s also the goddess—interestingly in Norse mythology it’s a “she” who is the lady of the underworld. And it goes on and on, and almost every single culture that has a word for the underworld, usually that same word or sometimes a closely related word is the name of the deity that controls the place, so it’s got both.

Now, I think in terms of the way that English usage tends to be, “Hell” is a word that is more commonly known in English than the other two, and so then there’s these images of fire and so on and so forth. And so then some Orthodox like to say, “Well, we don’t believe in Hell; we believe in Hades,” and they’re trying to make a distinction between the two, but it doesn’t work, because the basic concepts are essentially the same across all these cultures. And all these words had a history in paganism in addition to their use in Scripture and in Christian theology. All of these words have that history, so it’s a common concept.

But it’s interesting if you look at what it says in the book of Revelation. It actually says that the underworld gets cast into the lake of fire. So there’s this notion that the place of the dead then gets placed in this other place, so to speak, which is specifically described in fiery terms. So I think on one level you’re on the right track, that there is a distinction between those two experiences; there’s a distinction between the experience of death before the end, and then there’s the experience of what happens with that place and all those associated with it after the end, after the resurrection. But it just doesn’t work out to say that the first is Hades and the second is Hell, because Germanic peoples have been using the word “Hell” to refer to that underworld pretty much as long as that word has existed. And the reason why we have it in English is simply because when the Bible was translated into English, they used the existing Germanic term that is native to English for that. I mean, the word “Hell” shows up in Beowulf to refer specifically to the underworld, not necessarily a place of the damned after the resurrection, if that makes sense.

So in terms of the English words, that’s kind of where those things flowed out. Father, I don’t know if you wanted to add anything on top of that, maybe to expand on the whole lake of fire thing or whatever.

Fr. Stephen: Well, I do want to point out, as we were saying, way back toward the beginning of the show, that words derive their meaning from usage, not their etymology. So I personally think it sometimes is useful for us as Orthodox people to use “Hades” instead of “Hell,” because to most Americans “Hell” does not mean the Anglo-Saxon underworld. “Hell” to most people now means post-medieval, post-Dante…

Fr. Andrew: “You’re going to Hell.”

Fr. Stephen: ...devils poking people with pitchforks kind of thing.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which is just kind of a misconception of what these concepts even are.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so sometimes changing up the word can help to indicate that there’s a different concept at play.

Fr. Andrew: I’d agree with that.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, but essentially the words are commensurate, like Fr. Andrew said.  A lot of times what you’ll find is that individual authors, Orthodox and otherwise—there’s a realm of the dead before Christ’s harrowing of Hades; there’s realms of the dead after that, what are called the intermediate state; and then there is eternal condemnation after the Last Judgment. And sometimes different terms will be assigned to those different places or realities by certain authors, in order to distinguish them from each other. So individual authors will use them as technical terms to refer to one or the other of those, but on a pure linguistic basis, like the verbs for “love” in Greek, they’re roughly synonyms.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. So is that helpful for you, Peter?

Peter: I think so. So have we really been needing to refer to… Because I guess I agree more with what Fr. Stephen— Or I’m coming more from what Fr. Stephen was saying, like imagining Hell as being a place of fire and brimstone and all that. Should we really be referring to that more as the lake of fire than Hell? We should be introducing that more into our language?

Fr. Stephen: I tend to, when I’m talking about after the Last Judgment, I tend to refer to “eternal condemnation,” because the lake of fire is one image that you get in St. Matthew’s gospel and Revelation that they’re picking up from the book of Enoch. (There’s another mark on your bingo card.) But there’s also outer darkness, a place of weeping and gnashing of teeth—there are other images—Gehenna—there are other images of that same reality in the New Testament. So I use and tend to use “eternal condemnation,” and then refer to those various images that are given of what that is, all of which are just trying to say: This is really bad; do not want—repent! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I like to use, especially when we’re talking about the place of the dead prior to all these things, I like to use “the place of the dead,” and I also like to talk about “the underworld,” especially because those are terms that are not bandied around as much, and so when you use language that people are not as familiar with, then it gives you the opportunity to define it for them, whereas if you just thrown in… I mean, I don’t tend to use the word “Hell” very often, but when someone says to me, “Well, Hell is better than Hades,” or “Hades is better than Hell,” I’m like: “Well…”

The problem with turning them into different technical terms like that is that people then go back and look at the Bible and other texts, and then they want to apply them as technical terms when they may not have been being used in those texts in that way, especially when you’re talking about translations. Like in many cases, many English Bibles throughout history, when they see the Greek word “Hades,” they translate it with the English word “Hell,” because the Greek word, “Hades,” had not yet made it into English as the English word, “Hades.” It’s just because they had this pre-existing concept. Yes, it’s true; they’re not thinking of the Anglo-Saxon underworld, more’s the pity, because the Anglo-Saxon underworld was much more similar to the Greek underworld in terms of the concept there. And then “Sheol” gets translated often as “the grave” I think it is in the King James Bible. Is that right? “The grave”?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, but sometimes “Hell” also, and so it can get confusing for a modern reader.

Fr. Andrew: Sometimes “Hell,” yeah. So I think that the key thing is to understand is that there is a state of the dead prior to Christ, there’s other states of the dead after Christ’s harrowing of Hell/Hades/Sheol, and then there’s the… after the resurrection. So you’ve got these different types of stages, and then the important thing, especially when you’re talking about our teaching, is to just describe what those look like based on the Scriptures and what the Church Fathers say about it.

And if you have to—if you are picking words from this inheritance of words that we have, then define them very, very clearly as you, because, as you said, there’s confusion on this point. A lot of people have this idea there’s heaven and there’s hell, and that you go to one or the other after you die, and hell has those demons sticking pitchforks in your butt and heaven has angels playing harps on clouds. I mean, all of this is false! [Laughter] So, yeah, we have to have a little bit more robust understanding of what’s going on after all of this. Does that make sense?

Peter: All right. Yes, it does. Great. Thank you very much. God bless you.

Fr. Andrew: You’re welcome. Thank you very much for calling. Okay, well, we’ve got one final caller for our Q&A episode, and that is Dina, who is calling also from California. Dina, welcome.

Dina: Hi, Fathers. Thanks for having me.

Fr. Andrew: You’re welcome. What’s on your mind?

Dina: Well, to piggy-back off of the last caller, actually, I have some questions about the afterlife. So a couple months ago, my father passed away kind of suddenly. He had cancer, but he died of a heart attack shortly before he was going to come and live with us. We’ve been Orthodox for a decade or so, and my dad was kind of a nominal non-believer, a lot of things… But so I didn’t really… I was kind of preparing for caring for my family, caring for my father, and I didn’t spend a lot of time praying—or, not praying, but caring for his salvation. So it’s been kind of a complicated loss for me. My priest was telling me, “Pray the Jesus Prayer,” so I’ve been doing that kind of all the time, every time I think about it, and pray for him, and that in some ways it was very comforting for me and it kind of gave me a way to care for him now.

So all this to say—I do have questions, I promise—on the morning of my son’s birthday last week, I had a dream, and it sort of reminded me a little bit of what we believe happens after we pass: our soul is separate from our body, and it was kind of like my dad was sort of re-animating in a way, like he was kind of coming back to a body. It started with just his head, and he was kind of wiggling his face around, getting it to kind of move again and everything, and his body eventually came back. And then I was able to—he called my name, and I embraced him, and it was the most wonderful and peace-filled, and just wonderful dream. And I woke up still feeling his warmth and his presence.

Now, I’m not saying that’s a theologically sound dream. It could be the mind’s way of coping. But my questions—and these are two-parted questions—the first question is: What happens when a non-believer passes away, and a believer then prays for that person? Can they come to know God after death through prayer? So that’s the first question.

The second question: Is it common for loved ones who have passed on to manifest in some way to those who are left behind and have it not be like a demonic experience? Does that make sense?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Yeah, these are good questions. You know, to the first one, the one thing I have many times said to people who have this concern— I mean, in my own family I have people who were explicitly atheist: my grandfather was an atheist, and as far as we know remained one until he died. That you never know exactly what is going on in someone’s heart especially in their last hours and days. And of course in the modern period, for many people, those last hours and days are spent in sleep from the point of view of the rest of us; we don’t know what’s going on.

I’ve had multiple experiences in pastoral ministry that indicate to me that there are other things going on besides what’s simply observable. Someone might say, “Oh, well, they never confessed faith in Christ before they finally went to sleep, and then they died later.” And I’ve known a lot of Christians that then became hopeless over their loved ones as a result of that, of seeing that.

But, for instance, there are many times over the years that I went and prayed over someone who was dying, at home or in the hospital, and in many cases they had hung on for a long time, and then the family finally called in the priest, and I went in and prayed—and many times then, within an hour, or in one case literally as I was walking out of the room, that they finally died, which is an indication that the prayer that we did together had an effect, that God heard the prayer and something happened. I mean, I can’t say for certain exactly what happened, but it became so…

Like in my first parish, I served as an assistant pastor, actually a job that Fr. Stephen later had. We both had the same job, but not at the same time. There was a period in which I think in the space of a week, three or four people that that exact same thing happened in very short order, that I prayed the final prayer of the departure of the soul from the body and then the person died within an hour or less. And it became so known throughout the parish that there was one point where the senior pastor actually joked at a parish council meeting, “Now, look, unless you guys vote the way that I want you to, I’m sending Fr. Andrew to your house to pray over you.” [Laughter] Fr. Olaf who was my boss: a wonderful, wonderful priest!

So there’s definitely something going on there that is not visible to most people. We don’t know. We don’t know exactly what’s happening inside someone’s heart before the end. And then also, connected with what you asked about, our prayer for them, I mean, it’s the same thing. You can’t repent once you’re parted from your body, but other people can repent for your benefit, that that is why we pray for our departed. We pray that God would have mercy on them. We do the things to draw close to Christ and to advance in holiness, and we do it specifically remembering our loved ones, not because we think that that sort of cancels out however they happened to live their life or we think that we can shoulder all of it for them or whatever, but simply this is what the body of Christ does, and we do have an effect on each other’s salvation.

So we don’t know exactly the fate of anybody that we know until the end comes, but we do live in hope for them. And I do pray for my atheist grandfather. I pray for a lot of departed in my family, the state of their soul I have no idea—but I do pray for them. And so, yeah, this is absolutely a thing, and it’s a good, good thing that we do. And I think there’s reason to be comforted over it. Again, we don’t know for certain, but we do know this is what we’re supposed to do. So the advice that your priest gave you, to pray the Jesus Prayer, is definitely very, very good advice, and to pray it for your father: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on my dad.” So, yeah.

And with regards to your second question, do people sometimes communicate with their relatives? I mean, it is a thing. It is a thing. If God wills it… I don’t know if it happened in your particular case, but it certainly is a thing. So I don’t know. Fr. Stephen, I know you have thoughts about all of this stuff.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, part of this whole issue is clouded because, even as Orthodox Christians, we’re not really in an Orthodox environment most of the time, and so we default to… I mean, especially in the US, American culture is deeply steeped in Puritan Protestantism, so we tend to think of salvation in this sort of transactional way, that there’s this thing you have to do, and if you do it—we may disagree about what exactly it is, but whatever it is, you have to do it while you’re alive. And then, having done it—whether it’s praying a prayer or being baptized or whatever particular thing, making some kind of commitment—if you haven’t done it, then that’s it; if you have done it, then you’re good. And… that’s not how salvation works.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Right.

Fr. Stephen: At all. And we also don’t have the Roman Catholic view of: “Well, if you die with an unrepented mortal sin, like not going to church one Sunday, then, too bad: nothing you can do.” We don’t have that either.

So for us as Orthodox Christians, all of us are on a continuum. A continuum sort of runs from “beast” to “God” in terms of theosis in the one direction and demonization in the other—and all of us are somewhere. And, as Fr. Andrew said, we don’t know where any other person is; a lot of times, we’re not attentive to where we are ourselves, let alone being able to figure out where someone else is.

But repentance, then, is not about being sorry or feeling bad or changing your intellectual beliefs; repentance is about being transformed and healed, and that transformation and healing comes through the action of God within the human heart, with which we cooperate. So this is why, as Fr. Andrew said, God works through means. God can do anything he wants directly any time he wants, but, out of his love for us, he chooses to work through us. He chooses to bring salvation to people by us sharing the Gospel with them. He chooses to show his love and mercy to people by [our] showing love and kindness and mercy to them. And he chooses to save people through our prayers. We end every service with: “Through the prayers of our holy Fathers, have mercy on us and save us.”

So God is very much capable of saving your father through your prayers and the prayers of your family. And so part of saying that prayer is offering those prayers to God—not that he needs them and he can’t do it without them; not that you’re going to change his mind and get him to do something he otherwise wouldn’t, but you get to be a part of that. Out of his love for you, he’s given you the ability to be a part of that. So that’s how I tend to think about it.

In terms of seeing a departed loved one, that literally happens all the time, just people don’t want to talk about it, because everybody will think they’re crazy, but it happens all the time. And the way to judge what is going on there is by the fruits it produces. If it sows fear and confusion and sets you back in your own repentance or causes you to be less vigilant… Like, if you had had that experience and you said, “Oh, see, my dad is okay. I don’t need to pray for him; I don’t need to do anything,” I would say, “Uh-oh. Whoa.” Right? [Laughter] But if it’s an experience that brings peace and love and the joy of Christ, then it’s something to be thankful for.

Dina: Okay. Yeah.

Fr. Andrew: Is that helpful, Dina?

Dina: Yeah, that is. Thank you so much, both of you.

Fr. Andrew: You’re welcome. Memory eternal for your father.

Dina: Thank you.

Fr. Andrew: God bless you. Well, thank you and thank all of our callers tonight. It’s been a lot of fun talking to everybody.

Fr. Stephen: No thanks to Tom Hanks for not calling in!

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, hello!

Fr. Stephen: Pssh.

Fr. Andrew: I mean, we had all these callers from California, but not—not Tom Hanks.

Fr. Stephen: Pssh! [Sigh]

Fr. Andrew: I don’t know. Maybe next time. [Laughter] Anyway, that is our show for today. Thank you, everyone, much for listening; thank you for calling, everybody. If you didn’t get a chance to call in during the live broadcast, we’d love to hear from you either via email at lordofspirits@ancientfaith.com; or you can message us at our Lord of Spirits podcast Facebook page. We can’t respond to everything, but all of it does get read.

Fr. Stephen: And join us for our live broadcasts on the second and fourth Thursdays of the month at 7:00 p.m. Eastern, 4:00 p.m. Pacific. And Pep Streebeck and Jack Vincennes are the same character.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] So if you are on Facebook, you can like our page, join our discussion group, leave reviews [and] ratings everywhere; most importantly, please, share this show with a friend whom you know is going to love it and is going to take it into space in a capsule driven by Jeff Bezos.

Fr. Stephen: And finally, be sure to go to ancientfaith.com/support and help make sure we and lots of other AFR podcasters stay on the air. David Strathairn is playing Dabney Coleman’s part.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Thank you very much, everyone. Good night, God bless you, and we’ll be back in a couple of weeks.