Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick: Welcome to The Lord of Spirits podcast. I am Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick, and if you’re listening to us live, you can call in at 855-AF-RADIO, which is 855-237-2346, and we are going to get to your calls in roughly the second half of today’s show. This is our very, very first episode. Today we’re going to be discussing angels and demons as a way to introduce the program to you and lay some foundations and let you know what it’s all about.

Some of you are probably familiar with the work that I’ve done with Ancient Faith Radio, and I’m sure that many of you are familiar with my co-host, Fr. Stephen De Young’s podcast and blog, which are both titled, The Whole Counsel of God. But especially for those of you who are totally new, I thought we’d begin by each telling a little bit about ourselves and especially why we’re doing this new show. Fr. Stephen, why don’t you introduce yourself to our listeners and tell them what you hope to accomplish with this program.

Fr. Stephen De Young: Sure. My name, as you said, is Fr. Stephen De Young, and I’m the pastor at Archangel Gabriel Orthodox Church in Lafayette, Louisiana. Beyond that, my origins are mostly shrouded in mystery. [Laughter] I think the main thing I want to do here is disambiguate the two of us. [Laughter] Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick is one human person, and Fr. Stephen De Young is a different human person. Although my first name is his middle name and we both have a last name starting with a capital D, we are different humans.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Right, so you’re saying your middle name is not “De”? Stephen De Young?

Fr. Stephen: No. It’s actually James.

Fr. Andrew: Oh!

Fr. Stephen: I don’t use it, because apparently that confuses people, as you’ve discovered.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, as I’ve discovered. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: In terms of what we’re here to accomplish, if anyone knows anything about me, you know I’m a Bible guy and I do Bible stuff. I think what I really want to do is do a little part of the work of helping English-speaking American Orthodox Christians kind of appropriate more of the fullness of the Orthodox faith, particularly as it pertains to our spiritual sensibility, our sense of the spiritual world, and the way that can and should infuse our whole lives.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. As I said earlier, I’m Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick, and I work full-time for Ancient Faith Ministries as their Chief Content Officer, a position that I started just five, six weeks ago, actually. I did serve in parish ministry for 13 years, including 11 as a pastor, and one of the fun things that Fr. Stephen and I share is that we have actually both had the same job, although I had it for just two years, and he had it for eight, but we are both the former assistant pastor of St. George Orthodox Cathedral in Charleston, West Virginia. So hello to any of you Charleston people out there who are currently listening to two of your former assistant pastors.

I’m super interested in this show because I think that there’s so much about spiritual life that it’s easy for us, not just to miss, but to have kind of endless struggles with that we don’t necessarily have to have. We’re going to talk about this a lot as we go, and of course not just in this episode, but it’s going to be a perennial issue: the sense that we have that the 3D world that we experience is kind of like all we feel we can access most of the time, but as Christians we want to access something beyond this, and it’s very frustrating when you maybe reach out for God and the saints and you’re like: Where are you? What’s going on? Serving as a pastor for 11 years, this is a perennial issue, and I think any pastors that are out there listening to this, I’m sure you’ve had the same experience, but even just Christians, we all have this difficulty because we’re modern people living in a way of thinking and looking at the world that makes it difficult to access spiritual reality.

So my interest is pastoral. It’s also I like to geek out about this kind of stuff. But I think one of the important disambiguations, to use your term here, Fr. Stephen, to make here at the beginning is that just to define one of the differences between the two of us is that you are an actual biblical scholar, right?—we’ll maybe make you list off the languages that you read at some point—and I’m not. I’m not. It’s not like “and now we have a panel of two experts in biblical scholarship, ready to answer your questions.” That’s not what this show is. If you’ve read Fr. Stephen’s blog, The Whole Counsel of God, you listen to his podcast, you know that he’s studied this stuff very closely and has as lot of in-depth knowledge. He actually has a doctorate. Is it biblical studies or New Testament? I’m trying to remember which.

Fr. Stephen: Biblical studies is my Ph.D.

Fr. Andrew: Biblical studies. He actually has a Ph.D. in this stuff. I super don’t. When we were first talking about this show, I said to Fr. Stephen, “So, like, how are we going to make sure that this show isn’t just you telling about the things you know and me sitting there saying, ‘That’s awesome. Dude, you’re awesome.’ ” And your response was something like, “Well, you’re way more practical than I am.”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, yeah. Well, my original pitch was that you would read newspaper headlines, and then I would explain how that relates to end times prophecy. [Laughter] But you nixed that, and then, yeah. You were more practical and also much more of a professional broadcaster, so without you this would just be the semi-unending ramblings of a crazed nerd.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Right. But I’ll also say I think one of the things you’re going to hear as we go on this show is… I want to be learning. I’ve learned a lot from my friendship with Fr. Stephen, and I’m trying to learn from a lot of other sources as well. Fr. Stephen sends me stuff all the time, and it’s great. Part of that is what we want to accomplish with this, that we’re going to be in a learning process together, and that being an Orthodox Christian isn’t about mastering a specific set of data and now you’ve got it down and you’re catechized and you’re good to go, when you get to the gates of heaven they’re going to check and make sure you can answer all the catechetical questions. Like, that’s not the way that being a Christian actually works!

In the past few years, a lot of things have really opened my eyes to whole parts of Orthodox tradition that are there and that are often staring us in the face, but that we’re often not paying attention to. I’ll just give one example. So you’re probably going to hear us talk a lot about what we’re going to call spiritual geography. Where is paradise, where is the underworld, the mountain of God, Hades—all this kind of stuff. One of the things, one of the teachings that’s actually preserved in the Orthodox Church and has been handed down for many, many centuries but that I—I’ve been an Orthodox Christian for 25 years now—that I never actually paid attention to. So if you’d come up to me and said, “Does the Church teach this?” I would be like, “Uh… I’ve never heard that.”

And one of those things is this teaching that St. John the Forerunner, John the Baptist, went to Hades to preach the coming of Christ. Now, you’re not going to see that in the Bible, but it is a belief that is actually in Orthodox tradition. I actually noticed this for the first time just a few years ago, and the funny thing is it’s actually kind of staring you in the face. It’s referenced in lots of places, especially in our liturgical tradition. So, for instance, a couple weeks ago, on the New Calendar we just celebrated the Beheading of John the Baptist, that feast, and I had noticed that in the apolytikion, which is kind of one of the main hymns for the feast, that it actually mentions that he goes to Hades to preach there. I’d sung it for years, but I’d never just taken notice of that particular phrase. It’s in the apolytikion, so I started looking at other texts, and you know what? It’s in the kontakion, too, the other main hymn for the day. Then I started looking at more and more, especially throughout the Menaion, which is the main set of festal texts for the feast—and it’s everywhere. It’s mentioned over and over that he goes to the underworld to preach to those in Hades.

That’s just one example of something that’s just right there in our tradition and kind of staring you in the face, but unless you’re oriented toward paying attention to it, you’re probably just going to skip over it, not really even know that it’s there. So if someone were to say to me, “If you could say in a nutshell, what is this show about?” it’s about talking about especially those things that are right there in the Bible, right there in the Church services, right there in the Church Fathers but that maybe we’ve never noticed or we didn’t know what to do with it so we just kind of skipped over it, or maybe it was hidden behind a translation issue and we just didn’t know because we didn’t read the original languages. And sometimes these are really kind of important issues. It’s not just obscure little things like: “Oh, that’s neat”; it’s really important kind of issues for your spiritual life.

I don’t know. That’s a much longer way of saying what my motivation is for doing this, but I think it’s important for us to lay this stuff out at the beginning so that people get the idea. This is not a couple of professors teaching a class in demonology or angelology or any of that kind of stuff; that’s not what’s going on. But obviously we’re going to be touching on a lot of those kinds of topics. Is there anything else, though, Father, that you wanted to add in terms of laying out what it is we’re trying to accomplish with this particular show?

Fr. Stephen: Well, just going along with what you were just saying, one of the questions that we will probably end up getting asked relatively frequently is sort of why people haven’t heard this stuff before.

Fr. Andrew: Right.

Fr. Stephen: I get that at least when I go dredging up some Ugaritic legend or something and say, “See, this explains this icon.” [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: And, by the way, Ugaritic is one of the obscure languages that Fr. Stephen knows how to read. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: It’s super helpful if we ever get a time machine and I could go back to, like, 1500 B.C. [Laughter] It’s important to recognize that one of the things, as you just mentioned, once you read something or someone tips you off to these things, you start seeing them in iconography, you start hearing them in the hymns of the Church: they’re everywhere. It’s just we haven’t been taught to think in that way and to think in that direction. So our Orthodox tradition has sort of preserved all of these data-points, have preserved all of this information and all of this context for us. It’s just we haven’t necessarily, as English-speaking Orthodox Christians in the West, sort of fully appropriated how to collect those dots and how it all fits together and what the connective tissue is between these different things, between this biblical passage and this icon and this hymn.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and I think that, as people living in the West, we tend to value education a great deal. So this is one of the places where a godly education, an appropriately spiritually formed education, can really be helpful to us. We’re not talking about academia in all the negative ways that people tend to use that term. It’s not about ripping apart the tradition or destroying what people believe or anything like that, but actually using all kinds of great tools of study that show us, as you said, the connective tissue between things that are right there in our tradition. So the question is not: “Should this be in our tradition?” but “Why is it there, and how does it connect with all this other stuff?”

I think people are going to be delighted and really excited and interested at a lot of the stuff that we’re going to be talking about. In many ways, you’re never going to be able to see the Bible in the same way again. I remember the time you told me that the book of Joshua was about giants. I was like: “Wait, what? What? What? About giants?” I was just really excited to hear that. And that’s one of the books that a lot of people don’t want to read, because they feel like it’s a book about genocide. We’re not going to talk—this is not the giants episode, but there is going to be a giants episode. So, yeah, giants and dragons and all these things are in the Scripture and in our tradition, so the question is what do we do with that and how do we understand what it means, and then how do we best live in that reality. You don’t want to open up boxes that you shouldn’t open, but there’s also just a reality, a spiritual reality, that’s there.

We want to start our discussion today. As I said, this is an episode about laying the foundations for the rest of what this show is going to be. By the way, we’re going to be on twice a month, so the second and fourth Thursdays of the month. It’s not exactly fortnightly, because occasionally there’s going to be five Thursdays in a month, but it’s going to be the second and fourth Thursdays of the month. That’s when you’re going to be able to tune in live, and it will be available as a podcast for those of you who can’t tune in live for whatever reason—your timezone is halfway across the world, or you have something going on.

But I wanted to start with this discussion of the question of materialism. I think in Christian circles we tend to use the word “materialism” as a synonym for greed. That person is very materialistic; they want to buy a lot of stuff, they’re obsessed with their stuff. But that’s not what we mean by “materialism” in what we’re talking about. So if you had to give a nutshell definition of “materialism,” Father, what would you say?

Fr. Stephen: It’s basically the belief that matter and energy and their co-relationships and interactions are all that exists.

Fr. Andrew: Right, so there’s no demons out there, no fairies…

Fr. Stephen: No demons, no God, no…

Fr. Andrew: No God.

Fr. Stephen: No miracles, just…

Fr. Andrew: You don’t have a soul.

Fr. Stephen: Mathematics and science can explain everything. Yeah.

Fr. Andrew: It’s just atoms bouncing off each other and that’s all there is, right? In some ways it’s kind of the ultimate deterministic universe, where everything that you think and feel and do and say was actually determined from the moment of, say, a big bang, which got all the atoms bouncing off of each other, and now they’ve bounced and they’ve made you for this one little blip in time. If that sounds ultimately kind of meaningless—that’s because it is! [Laughter] But we don’t believe that; we’re not materialists. We believe that there’s an immaterial character to reality.

But here’s the thing. Modern Christians, I think, are materialists, and here’s why I would say that. It’s not because most Christians don’t believe that there’s an immaterial element of reality—that they don’t believe they have a soul, that they don’t believe that there’s angels, that they don’t believe that God is real—Christians will say… I mean, I’ve never met a Christian that doesn’t believe in an immaterial reality. Maybe they’re out there; I don’t know. It doesn’t look like Christianity to me, but I would say that modern Christians are materialists not on purpose but by habit, that on a day-to-day basis the way we mostly live our lives is as though the 3D world of the senses is all that there is. The example I often give is one time I ate a lot of pizza and some spicy hot wings. I’m getting to be middle-aged. In fact, Fr. Stephen and I are almost the same age; he is a little older by just a few months, if I remember correctly.

Fr. Stephen: Yep.

Fr. Andrew: You get middle-aged, you eat hot wings and pizza and stuff, and your innards are going to let you know later in the day—maybe immediately—that that was not the best thing to do. So what do we do when we have acid and indigestion? You take antacids, chew up those little pills—I like the mint-flavored ones—and you feel better, and that’s all there is to it. You had a problem, so you took a medicine, and, boom, you’re better, right? There’s nothing wrong with that, but what point along that continuum of experience and response did I include anything having to do with God or the saints?

If the idea of having acid indigestion sounds like it’s too trivial to involve God in, then that means that you are a materialist by habit. And I am. I think everybody listening to this probably is. Now, it’s possible that there’s some very spiritual people who are listening to this who aren’t, and if you are, please pray for us! But I think most of us are materialists by habit.

The other example I give is if someone—I’ve experienced this many times as a pastor—someone gets sick, they go to the hospital. After they’re at the hospital, they call the priest. It’s interesting the order, right? First let’s go get the medicine, and then after that we’ll add some prayer. There’s nothing wrong with the medicine, there’s nothing wrong with going to the hospital, there’s nothing wrong with the doctor. Those are all things God provides. But we tend to think of prayer as kind of a frosting on the cake, or “Make sure you pray.” That’s the way that we function: we’re sort of materialists by habit.

So this presents a problem to us, especially when we’ve experienced something in life where we realize that our material habits actually don’t address our problem, that don’t address my… It’s not just the problems of everyday aches and pains or things to solve in your life, but the problem of being a sinful person in this world and trying to be faithful to Christ. That’s the problem, right? And if you’re a materialist by habit, that makes that problem a lot harder. A lot harder, because you feel like you don’t really have access to God very much. You’re like: “Oh, I pray all the time,” and some people say, “Oh, I feel that God is with me,” but do you know? Do you have a sense he’s actually there?

One of the things you probably notice if you read the Bible enough or if you read other kinds of ancient sources is that a lot of people in those texts are not like that. They have a sense that God is with them and that spirits are there. So there is a difference between us and them, and I think it’s mainly a difference of habit. We’re going to get into that as to what can you do about that, but that’s one of the things that we want to try to address with this show, and this is where kind of more of the practical side of this comes in: how to alter your habits so that you are more human and more in tune with all of reality and not just the 3D world of the senses. Do you have anything you wanted to add to that, Father?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, I think the way it pragmatically works out for most Christians in America and in the West, is you have essentially two incompatible ideas. You have basically an atheist worldview and a Christian worldview that you’re kind of switching back and forth between.

Fr. Andrew: Right, atheist most of the time, Christian… yeah.

Fr. Stephen: And that works. The analogy I use—I guess it’s an analogy—that we sort of have this set of brackets, where we sort of bracket off certain things. Like, the miraculous stuff that happened in the Scriptures, okay, well, I’ve got to believe that that’s real and I believe in God, so we put the brackets around God and the miracles in Scripture. Then depending on what sort of Christian group you’re in, those brackets may be very wide or very narrow, but they’re always sort of there. There’s always a point where you go outside those brackets and where we start becoming sort of naturalists again. If someone—if a Buddhists comes to you and claims there was a miracle, the first thought of most American Christians is not, “Well, this is demonic activity.” The first thought of most American Christians is, “Bull.” Right? “You’re making that up. That never happened.”

Fr. Andrew: Right. Or your elderly aunt comes to you and says, “Your grandmother talked to me last night.” Your dead grandmother. “She came to me.” You’re like: “Uhmm… Well… You know, that’s nice.” Right? We tend to function that way. We don’t give credence to it.

The problem, I think, is that we have this fear that if you start to give credence to it then you become gullible.

Fr. Stephen: Right, which we don’t want to be.

Fr. Andrew: You don’t want to be. You don’t want to be superstitious. That’s not the same. We’re not teaching people how to be superstitious well. [Laughter] That’s not what we’re doing.

Fr. Stephen: Right, but atheists will make hay of that with us. They’ll say, “Hey, I’m just saying the same thing about your miracles that you say about everybody else’s. I’m just saying the same thing about your God that you say about everybody else’s.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. “I just believe in one fewer god than you do.” I’ve heard that a bunch of times.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and they kind of have a point in that, all too often, we are basically looking at most of the world the same way they do, and then being inconsistent in these areas that we’ve got bracketed off.

Fr. Andrew: And you can’t just flip a switch and decide: I’m not going to be a materialist any more! [Laughter] Today I will believe in spirits!

Fr. Stephen: I’m going to court a low-grade controversy by saying the rubber met the road with this recently with a lot of people, even in our Orthodox circles, where, when the pandemic started and people were saying, “Okay, we need to take reasonable precautions; we need to be in obedience to our bishops and the civil government, but we also need prayer, incense…” In Orthodox countries, people are going out with holy water in the streets. A lot of our Christian brothers and sisters in the United States were like: “Okay, guys, this is serious. This is a disease. This is real,” in response. Like: “Yeah, all that stuff’s fun on Sunday morning, but this is a serious situation: people are dying.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, yeah. “Don’t call a priest for this. We need epidemiologists.”

Fr. Stephen: And it’s not that we’re saying your local Orthodox priest is a witch-doctor and “don’t take medicine.” That’s the other opposite extreme, that the world is composed of both the physical world that’s described by science and the spiritual world that we come to experience through Christ. Those two have to be kept together, and the problem is we’re at one extreme; the answer is not to go to the opposite extreme.

Fr. Andrew: That’s one of the reasons why, in the description for this show, I wanted to especially use that phrase, “the union of the seen and the unseen.” We’re not just talking about— This is not just a show about ghosts. [Laughter] It’s not like: “Here’s how to deal with your haunted house,” although I’m sure, I hope we get at least one caller and says that his house is haunted and what do you do about that, because there is something to do, actually.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, and I have done it. I’ve done an exorcism on a house—to tease everyone.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there you go. Right, everybody.

So that’s the problem of materialism, right? In a few minutes we’re going to go for our first break, but before we get to that, let’s just talk for a very few minutes about the title of this podcast, which we talked about. You and I talked about this. We went back and forth for weeks to figure out exactly the right thing. Fortunately I’ve forgotten most of the bad suggestions that we had, but we finally settled on “Lord of Spirits.” “Lord of Spirits,” which one person at Ancient Faith kept calling, “Lord of the Spirits,” and I thought, “Oh, we’ll get a few Lord of the Rings fans. That wouldn’t make me unhappy at all.” [Laughter] But, no, it’s “Lord of Spirits,” although you could say, “Lord of the Spirits.” That works, too. “Lord of Spirits”: that’s not a phrase you see… I don’t think it’s in the Bible, is it? Is it in the Bible?

Fr. Stephen: Well, it depends on your Bible. Are you Ethiopian?

Fr. Andrew: Oh, there you go. Okay, so, yes. Open that up for us a little bit. Where does this phrase, “Lord of Spirits” come from, and why did we pick it?

Fr. Stephen: “Lord of Spirits” is one of several titles that’s ascribed to God in the Enochic literature, which is the various books of Enoch as well as other books like the Apocalypse of Abraham and the Book of Jubilees and a few other texts in the Dead Sea Scrolls. “Lord of Spirits” is mostly used in the second portion of 1 Enoch, or the Book of Enoch, which is called the Book of Parables. The reason it’s used there is that it’s a title for God that describes his relationship with the other spiritual beings whom he created. It’s a way of referring to God in relationship to the heavenly hosts, the divine council, some of these other concepts that we’re going to be talking about a lot, not only in this episode, but in a bunch of episodes, and I’m sure in people’s questions.

The parallel title that you find more commonly in the Hebrew Bible is “Yahweh Sabaoth,” which is usually translated, “Lord Sabaoth.” A lot of people in the Liturgy we transliterate rather than translate “Sabaoth.” Because of the way it looks in English, it’s spelled in English, people think it refers to the sabbath. When I say “people,” I have a recording of Bart Ehrman saying that.

Fr. Andrew: Oh boy! Really?

Fr. Stephen: So his Hebrew isn’t really up to snuff. Yeah.

Fr. Andrew: Yikes. I mean, I don’t read Hebrew, but I know that’s not the same word.

Fr. Stephen: But “Sabaoth,” the “-oth” ending is a feminine ending in Hebrew. “Saba-” means “to be many, to teem, to be many.” So that, in a nominal form in the plural, means like “big groups” or “hosts”: “Lord of hosts.” The King James Old Testament translated that.

Fr. Andrew: Right, so we sing, right in the anaphora of the Divine Liturgy, we sing what in Latin is called the Sanctus: Holy, holy, holy, Lord of Sabaoth, heaven and earth are full of thy glory. So this is one of those things we’re talking about here now: this is one of those things that’s right there, a core piece of our liturgical tradition—I mean, it is right there at the heart of the Divine Liturgy—we call God the Lord Sabaoth, the Lord of hosts. It’s there, and it doesn’t just mean that he’s got a lot of angels available to him—we’re going to be talking about all of that—but he is Lord of hosts.

It’s interesting, and it also comes in if you’ve ever gone to Great Compline, which we especially serve during—at least in our tradition—Great Lent. But it shows up, of course, at other times of the liturgical year. There is a hymn in there called “Lord of hosts”: “O Lord of hosts, be with us, for we have no other help in times of sorrow but thee.” Which in the Byzantine tradition is just a wonderful, big, throaty kind of manly hymn. But what’s interesting is that in Greek it’s: “Kyrie [ton] dynamaeon, Lord of powers,” but it means the same thing. I mean, isn’t that just simply the Septuagint translation of “Lord Sabaoth,” right?

Fr. Stephen: It gets complicated, because the Septuagint does it different ways, but, yes, it’s the same kind of idea: God of the powers. The hymn, the trisagion there, the “Holy, holy, holy, Lord Sabaoth,” is being sung by the angels, and it’s a way of the angels expressing and worshiping him as their God. That’s a way we don’t always think about it, and that’s why there’s a similar phrase also in our memorial prayers, which is actually taken directly from the Book of Jubilees, a different piece of Enochic literature, where the prayer begins, “O God of spirits and of all flesh…”

Fr. Andrew: Right, another piece that probably just rattles by most of us. I’ve prayed it for years as a priest: “O God of spirits and all flesh…” But I never paused and thought, “Wait, who are the spirits that we’re saying he’s the God of, exactly?” Well, this is what we’re talking about. That’s what this is.

All right, well, we’re going to take a break now, but when we come back from the break, we’re going to start talking about the many different ways that the word “gods” is used in the Bible. We want you to call in. We’re going to take calls in the second half of the show. You can call at 855-AF-RADIO; that is 855-237-2346. I have to admit, I’m always tempted to say “855-afraid-io,” but then I think people might put the letter i in there, somewhere where it shouldn’t be. Let’s take a break and we will be right back in just a few minutes.

Fr. Andrew: All right, well, we are back, and before we get back to our discussion about the way the word “gods” is used in the Bible, I just wanted to thank the man whose voice you just heard, and that is our good friend, Stephen Christoforou, who has provided the voiceover work for this podcast. I think he just nailed it. So if you know Steve, tell him he did a fine job. Thank you, Steve; I hope that you’re listening.

Let’s talk about the word “gods” as it’s used in the Bible, because I think that’s going to be one of the ways that people are going to hear stuff that we say on this show, and it’s going to sound weird to them and they’re going to wonder if we’re actually Christians, because we’re saying, “Oh, I believe in lots of gods, actually.” So let’s talk about why, as a Christian, you can and should believe in many gods, if that doesn’t weird you out too much. Let’s begin by talking about how the word “gods” is actually used in the Bible. This is one of the ways that sometimes translation is hiding something from us. So we have an English translation that might use other kinds of words, but lurking underneath is a Hebrew word or a Greek word that is actually saying “gods,” but that doesn’t get translated as “gods” in English. What are some examples of that, Father?

Fr. Stephen: Before we freak everybody out, let me give one more proviso in terms of why we’re freaking everybody out. [Laughter] One might wonder why you might do this to people…

The reality is that there are certain things that are just in the Scriptures, whether we as sort of modern Christians with a materialist bent are comfortable with that or not, and they have a way of speaking. From the Victorian era through until probably the 1950s or so, in America, there was sort of a gentlemen’s agreement that we would all sort of paper over these things in our English translations and not push on them too hard.

Fr. Andrew: Thanks, guys. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: So we could all be comfortable. The problem is that, if we want to continue to do that as Orthodox Christians, we’re setting ourselves up for a problem with future generations, because while I may not want to get into, say, a passage into the Old Testament that talks about human sacrifice, the atheist roommate of my son or daughter, the atheist professor of my son or daughter is going to have no such qualms about bringing up all of these things.

Fr. Andrew: Right, yes: uncomfortable stuff in the Bible.

Fr. Stephen: And when that happens, if we have tried to paper over it and not talked about it and not explained it to our people, not only are they going to fall for whatever narrative they’re told, but we’re not going to have any credibility to come back with a response, because we’ve already proven that we’re trying to keep things from them.

Fr. Andrew: We’re embarrassed by our own central text.

Fr. Stephen: So that’s why we’re going to talk about these kind of things. It’s not because we’re trying to shake anybody up or be firebrands or cause controversy.

Fr. Andrew: No, no! You and I are both dedicated to being solid, normal, mainstream Orthodox Christians, that hopefully the only thing extreme about us is our repentance, and I’m just learning that. These are not… This is not about pitching crackpot theories, folks; it’s not. It’s about looking very closely at our Bible, at our Church Fathers, at our Church services, and saying, “What do they really say, and what are they taking seriously that maybe we’re not?”

One of the examples—and Fr. Stephen has very helpfully provided a lot of the research for this—one of the examples that we have in our notes that I thought is a great place to start—and it’s kind of a shocking passage if you just simply read it and pay a little bit of attention to it. It is from the very beginning of Psalm 82, so get out your Bibles, ladies and gentlemen. Psalm 82, if you’re looking at a King James Bible or another Bible that’s using the Hebrew numbering of the psalms, but it’s Psalm 81 if you’re looking at the Greek Septuagint numbering. I just wanted to read the first couple, really the first verse, just to show that what we’re talking about is not something that we’re making up. Here’s Psalm 81 (82), depending on what version you’re reading; I’m reading it out of the Orthodox Study Bible.

God stood in the assembly of gods.
He judges in the midst of gods, saying…

And then it goes on to say what he says. God stands in the assembly of gods. It doesn’t say, “God stood in the assembly of so-called gods.” It doesn’t say that; it just simply says, “God stood in the assembly of gods.” If you keep reading the psalm, it never says anywhere in it, those beings that he’s standing in the midst of are not gods. So what’s going on there? What’s the deal? I thought we believed in only one God.

Fr. Stephen: Do you want some more examples first, or do you want us to get into that?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right, sure! Let’s roll on with some more. Let’s just leave that question hanging…

Fr. Stephen: Let’s pile them up!

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because it’s everywhere! Right. Give us another one, Fr. Stephen.

Fr. Stephen: Psalm 89 (88 in the Greek numbering), beginning around verse 5:

Let the heavens praise your wonders, O Yahweh,
Your faithfulness in the assembly of the holy ones,
For who in the skies can be compared to Yahweh;
Who among the sons of God is like Yahweh?
A God greatly to be feared in the council of the holy ones,
And awesome above all who are around him.

This is talking about the relationship between God and heavenly sons of God. It says, “Who in the skies,” so that’s kind of hard to make be humans of any kind.

Fr. Andrew: It’s not about people, right. You can’t just read this as being about sort of theosis, because it’s “in the heavens.”

Fr. Stephen: I’ll just keep rolling. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Let me just say, actually, I just noticed the very next verse, after what you read, verse 9. I’m looking at the Orthodox Study Bible:

O Lord God of hosts, who is like you?

So the next line is describing this relationship that we’re discussing. Go on. What’s the next one?

Fr. Stephen: To even add to that, it goes on in verse 10 to talk about God crushing a sea monster and throwing its carcass to the earth.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, we have to do a whole episode on monsters, or on specific monsters, like we could do one on Leviathan, one on Behemoth, yeah, oh yeah.

Fr. Stephen: But so then, Exodus 15:11:

Who is like you, O Yahweh, among the gods? Who is like you, majestic in holiness, awesome in glorious deeds, doing wonders?

This isn’t comparing God, the God of Israel, to imaginary characters. That wouldn’t be a big praise, like: who in the Marvel cinematic universe is like God?

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Right!

Fr. Stephen: I mean, o-kay, but what does that prove? Exodus 18:11, three chapters later:

Now I know that Yahweh is greater than all gods. Because of this affair, they dealt arrogantly with the people.

The “they” is the gods.

Fr. Andrew: The Egyptian gods in this case, right?

Fr. Stephen: Right, and imaginary characters can’t deal arrogantly with people.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and isn’t it later in Exodus where God says that he’s judged the gods of Egypt?

Fr. Stephen: That’s earlier.

Fr. Andrew: Earlier, okay.

Fr. Stephen: That’s what God says he’s doing on Passover night.

Fr. Andrew: He’s judging the gods of Egypt. So is God rendering judgment to made-up characters that the Egyptian pagans are worshiping? The text doesn’t say that. It doesn’t say they’re fake. It doesn’t say that they don’t exist. We will get into in the New Testament later. Most of the stuff we’re reading from the Old, but we’re showing… If you look at the Scriptures, folks, closely, you’ll see that the Scriptures are taking these things very seriously and not saying this is some kind of metaphor or again made-up stories.

One of the problems with the way the modern world tends to look at ancient religion is they’ll say, “Well, they notice that there’s lightning in the sky or they notice that there’s earthquakes or they notice that the Nile floods, so they came up with some kind of explanation for it, and eventually that explanation evolved into believing in some kind of god of lightning or whatever.” No, that’s not the way that the Bible depicts this stuff, and it’s not the way that the people on the ground understood what they were doing. They attest to the fact that they had encounters with these spiritual beings, and the Bible takes them very, very seriously. Again, God standing in the midst of the gods, God judging gods. It’s lots of places. I know we’ve got some more. Okay, let’s talk about a couple more here, because we do want to take some calls.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Deuteronomy 10:17:

For Yahweh, your God, is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great, the mighty, and the awesome God, who is not partial and takes no bribe.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there it is.

Fr. Stephen: Psalm 95:3 is similar.

For Yahweh is a great God, and a great King above all gods.

When we see this language, “God of gods,” it’s not just a superlative. It’s saying that the other gods have the God of Israel as their God.

Fr. Andrew: You could read “Lord of lords” and say, “Okay, that means that God is above all the kings and presidents or whatever of the earth,” but “God of gods” is harder to explain away.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and especially when it’s disambiguated as “the great King above all gods.” It’s not that they don’t exist; it’s that he’s their king. What’s going on here is a couple of things. The first is that the word “god” is just being used to refer to spiritual beings. It’s hard to reflect in English. We usually do that by using a capital letter for God and then a lowercase god or gods for these other beings. But the reason for that—and the Fathers actually, when they talk about the word, the Greek word theos and what it means, they really get into the idea that it’s kind of a verbal idea, even though it’s a noun.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, what do you mean by that?

Fr. Stephen: That the word is something that God does. He is God. It has to do with his god-ing. It has to do with his dominion and his rule and his power.

Fr. Andrew: Huh.

Fr. Stephen: Some examples of this that might help with that in the New Testament, for example: St. Paul refers to the devil as the god of this present age. He’s not saying that he rivals the God of Israel in power or prestige or is a second god. He’s talking about the function he has.

Fr. Andrew: And certainly he’s not saying that he should be worshiped.

Fr. Stephen: Right.

Fr. Andrew: We’re going to talk over and over and over about that issue.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, but St. Paul is saying that he is worshiped in this present age.

Fr. Andrew: Right, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: And so these spiritual beings can be called gods—in English we’d do it with a small g, but they aren’t using capitals in Greek—can be talked about that way, because either, on the one side, God has chosen to share his rule and his dominion with them, and so with angelic beings they are sharing in and reigning with God, and God is exercising his rule and his dominion and his power and his authority through them, graciously sharing it with them; or on the other side, on the more demonic side, because humans in their rebellion and sin have elevated these spiritual beings and have chosen to worship and serve them and become enslaved to them, so they are functioning as gods in that sense.

Fr. Andrew: They become their god.

Fr. Stephen: I think it may even be our next show in a fortnight. We’re going to go deeper into this, but this is a big part of what’s going on when the Fathers talk about theosis and talk about us becoming gods. That’s directly connected to the idea in the New Testament of Christ exercising his rule and authority through the saints in glory, that they rule and reign with him and share in his dominion. But we’ll get more into that.

Fr. Andrew: I just wanted to make another… Because we’re going to be talking, I know, because we’re both nerds in different ways and on different levels for sure, but we’re going to be talking a lot about words and what they mean and how they’re used and how they’re used in lots of different ways. Someone might counter and say, “Doesn’t the word elohim, doesn’t that mean ‘gods’ in Hebrew? Doesn’t elohim just mean the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit? Doesn’t that just mean Yahweh?” Is that the case? Is elohim only used in the Hebrew Bible for Yahweh?

Fr. Stephen: No, in fact, it’s even more flexible than theos. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Wow, right.

Fr. Stephen: Elohim is used to refer to any spiritual being, so it’s used to refer to God, the true God; it’s used to refer to “the gods,” the same word, elohim; and now to really freak people out, I have a couple of examples where it’s even used for deceased humans. The first one, and the one that might freak people out less, in 1 Samuel 28:13.

Fr. Andrew: And this is 1 Kingdoms if you’re looking at a Septuagint Bible.

Fr. Stephen: If you’re in your Orthodox Study Bible. This is when Saul, near the end of his reign as king, in his disobedience goes to consult with the witch or the medium at Endor, not the one with the Ewoks.

Fr. Andrew: Aw, man. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: The city in Palestine. And [he] asks her to summon up the spirit of Samuel. There’s this moment in verse 13 where she’s kind of seemingly a little surprised at how well it worked, because she starts freaking out. Verse 13 says:

The king said to her, “Do not be afraid. What do you see?” And the woman said to Saul, “I see a god coming up out of the earth.”

Then that turns out to be Samuel’s spirit, and he speaks.

Fr. Andrew: Right, so he’s called a god in the Bible.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so the term elohim is used to apply to him. The biblical author is not saying that the Prophet Samuel was another person of the Trinity or that he was a polytheist and the Prophet Samuel now lived on Mount Olympus or something. [Laughter] That’s not what he’s going for. The word is just flexible to include that.

And now the one that will be most controversial, that I kind of warned you about, but we’re going to go there. [Laughter] This is in Exodus 21:1-6, which is in the context of laws governing slavery—so not controversial at all, this passage in the Torah. This particular rule that’s being made in the first six verses of Exodus [21] is for a situation where someone has been in a period of indentured servitude, so they’ve been working for and part of a household for some period of time to pay off a debt. They come to the end of their term of service, but they like the household and the family and they want to stay on. There were strict rules about how long you could keep someone in slavery and all of these things that are outlined in the rest of the chapter. If a person voluntarily says, “I rather like being the tutor or nanny for your children and I want to stay. I feel like I’m part of the family,” there was a provision to do that.

So there is a ritual described here for what you do with that person who has decided they want to stay permanently as part of the household. I’ll read Exodus 21:5-6:

But if the slave plainly says, “I love my master, my wife, and my children; I will not go out free,” then his master shall bring him to the gods, and he shall bring him to the door or the doorpost, and his master shall bore his ear through with an awl, and he shall be his slave forever.”

There’s not a way to get around the fact that he says he will bring him to the gods. In the Hebrew, there’s a definite article, the word “the.” So you can’t say, “Bring him to God.” It’s “the gods.” And St. Jerome translated this just woodenly literally. If you look in the Vulgate, he has dei; it’s just the plural of god: “bring him to the gods.” He just translated it directly from the Hebrew. The Greek is interesting, because the Greek says that you should “bring him before the court of God.”

Fr. Andrew: Right, the Orthodox Study Bible has “the judgment-seat of God.”

Fr. Stephen: It’s not the word “judgment-seat.” It’s where we get the word “criterion,” actually; it’s “criterion,” and it means a law court; it means an actual court.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, so there’s other people there.

Fr. Stephen: Like the court of a king. So it’s talking about the council of God, basically, and people on the council.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, so I want to move on here so we can start taking a couple calls, because Bobby is telling me that we have a lot of people who have called in. Thanks, everybody!

Fr. Stephen: Let me have one little bit before we do that. I don’t want to leave people hanging with “the gods” there! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Sure.

Fr. Stephen: Whom that’s referring to are the departed family members.

Fr. Andrew: Oh yeah, right, because they’re still around in some sense.

Fr. Stephen: You go to the door of your home. God is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He’s not the God of the dead but of the living. So the idea here is not that you summon up the spirits of your dead ancestors or worship them or sacrifice; there’s none of that here. But you take them to the doorpost, which is sort of representative of the household and the family—that’s why that’s what was marked with blood on the Passover—you take them there to do this ritual, because you’re making them a part of the family. So it’s talking about those ancestors as witnesses. It’s more closely related to the “great cloud of witnesses” in Hebrews 11 than to some kind of ancestor-worship or something. But I wanted to get that in so people don’t walk away with a weird idea.

Fr. Andrew: Just to summarize real quick, then, when we’re talking about spirits or gods, setting aside those terms to use to refer to Yahweh—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—there’s kind of three kinds of beings that are described as gods in the Bible. And we’re just talking about the Bible here. We’re not even going to get into some of the more interesting—I don’t want to say more interesting—some of the literature you probably haven’t read too much of, folks, like Enoch or Jubilees, whatever. And there’s three kinds of beings. There’s angels; there’s demons, which are really just angels that are rebelling against God; and there’s dead people, those who have passed on. Those are all referred to as gods in the Scripture.

I want to start taking calls, but before we take the first call, actually, I want to answer a question that came in over email. This comes from Brian, who is actually relatively local to me. He sent me an email earlier today, because he heard we were going to be talking about angels and demons and so forth, and he sent this question. He said:

My grandson, John Cassian (What a great name for a kid!), who is six years old, is going to be listening to your podcast on angels tonight from Scottsdale, Arizona. He is very interested in angels right now and wants to ask if good angels are able to be killed by bad angels. He’s curious about whether they can die or not.

I just wanted to take this one, and the reason here is why: this might be the only question that I can answer! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: We’ll see. I am not to “um, actually” you. Go ahead. Now that I put that tension out there.

Fr. Andrew: Maybe. Right, exactly, because that’s one of the things that’s going to be going on. I’m ready to be corrected. I’m ready to learn. But I’m ready to say that good angels cannot be killed by bad angels, because they don’t have mortal bodies. Am I correct in that? We do have an episode we’re going to be talking about spiritual bodies in the future, but this is not it.

Fr. Stephen: Without going into the whole bodies question—because, yes, that’s a big topic unto itself—it is true that you are correct, obviously, that evil angels cannot kill good angels.

Fr. Andrew: Whew!

Fr. Stephen: However, evil angels can die. We just read from Psalm 82. We didn’t read the verse, but verses 6 and 7.

Fr. Andrew: “I have said you are gods, but you shall die like men.”

Fr. Stephen: Right. “You will die like men.” So the thing we have to keep in mind is that when the Fathers talk about death, St. John of Damascus clearly disambiguates this. There is physical death, and there is spiritual death. Physical death is something that happens to humans where our soul is separated from our body. As you said, angels don’t have mortal bodies, so they can’t die physically in that sense. There’s also, however, spiritual death, which is the spiritual death, which is the separation of the soul or spirit from God. That is the fate that awaits the demonic spirits at the final judgment.

Fr. Andrew: Which, if I’m correct, doesn’t mean non-existence; it’s kind of an eternal dying or an eternal death.

Fr. Stephen: Right, because death doesn’t mean non-existence for us either.

Fr. Andrew: Right! Let’s go to break.

Fr. Andrew: All right. We are now back, and we’re ready to take your calls. There’s somebody who contacted me beforehand who I know had a really interesting question, and that is Stasia in Georgia. Can we get Stasia on the line?

Stasia: Hi, Father. Can you hear me?

Fr. Andrew: I can hear you! It’s working!

Stasia: Wonderful!

Fr. Stephen: Eureka!

Stasia: Wonderful, delightful to be on the show. Glad to hear from you. I had a question about 1 Corinthians 11. I’ve been covering my hair daily for most of the year. I probably started last November to cover my hair about 90% of the time, and I don’t really know why. I see it in icons. That’s the only reason I have right now. But I’m looking at Scripture, and looking at 1 Corinthians 11:10, and my chapter version here says, “A woman has to have a sign of authority on her head because of the angels.”

Fr. Andrew: “Because of the angels.”

Stasia: Can you tell me more about that?

Fr. Andrew: This is one of these things that there is a very long explanation for this, but I know that Fr. Stephen has covered this in some detail, so I’m going to punt this to him and say: Give us the short version, Fr. Stephen, as to what it is. Why does it say in 1 Corinthians 11:10 that a woman should have her head covered “because of the angels”?

Fr. Stephen: This is good that we have our first question like this, because I want to let people know… Some of the questions that I’ve even seen in advance from people who have emailed or have sent them in in other ways are very good questions and very big questions. Some of these are going to end up being an episode unto themselves at some point in the future, because we want to do justice to it. But when we get a question like this, this is an example of one of those really good questions. I’ll try to give you at least a summary answer, and then we will probably come back to this at some point and expand more in full. Also, because that will give me time to prepare this answer because, though I won’t go into it right now, the Greek in that passage is very sexually graphic. It may not look that way in English!

What it is basically referring to is St. Paul, one of the major problems he’s addressing throughout his first epistle to the Corinthians is helping the former-pagan-now-Christians in the Christian community in Corinth to sort of fully separate from their pagan way of life, including pagan modes of worship, which included a lot of ritual sexuality in their worship. St. Paul, in that overarching passage from which you read the verse, is reiterating that there is no place for sexual expression or sexual immorality within the worship of the Christian Church. That seems obvious to us, but it wasn’t obvious to a pagan in Corinth in the first century.

The reason he specifically refers to angels there is that for St. Paul and just about any other first-century Jewish person, the two paradigmatic sins were idolatry and sexual immorality. So the worst thing you could do would be to mix those two things together. The ultimate example of that in the Hebrew Bible, in the Old Testament, is actually what happens at the beginning of Genesis 6, in the first four verses of Genesis 6, that talks about the origin of the giants, that talks about some kind of sexual congress between rebellious angelic beings and human beings, and that was sort of ritual sexual immorality, that produced sort of these horrors on the earth. St. Paul is sort of alluding back to that and saying a woman needs to be not only not making a sexual display in the Christian church but practicing sexual modesty, not only because of the other humans there—we sometimes hear about modesty in that sense: we don’t want to tempt the men in the congregation, and then that gets into all kinds of sexual politics and things—but St. Paul is even throwing it open to… sexual immorality in any kind of ritual sense opens the door to all manner of horrible evils. That’s what St. Paul is alluding to there, that idea, that modesty is important. It’s important that we go the exact opposite direction of any kind of sexual immorality involved in our worship. Our worship needs to be chaste and pure, our worship of the true God.

Fr. Andrew: I know we’re going to get into it in a future discussion, but, if I remember correctly, part of why this is important in this case is that in that time and place, a woman displaying her glorious hair openly was regarded as essentially a thing to do to attract men. Doubly inappropriate for church, but as to why that is considered attractive to men in that time and place we’re going to have to save it for a future episode. It’s going to blow your mind when you hear it, though, folks.

Our next call comes from Gareth, who is in Louisiana. He’s somewhere near you, Fr. Stephen.

Fr. Stephen: Oh, he’s very near me!

Fr. Andrew: Oh! Oh! So you know him, then.

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: So Gareth who’s in Louisiana, he has a question about Mount Hermon.

Gareth: How’s it going, noble sirs? Can you guys hear me all right?

Fr. Andrew: Yes!

Fr. Stephen: Yes, sir.

Gareth: All right, then. Awesome. A little bit of context for my question. Fr. Stephen has a blog post he did a while back about Mt. Tabor and Mt. Hermon. This is the common traditional site for the Transfiguration of Christ. It’s called Mt. Saphon in the Baal cycle, and this is after Baal defeats Yam, who is the Canaanite god of the sea, to become lord of Mt. Saphon or Mt. Hermon. This is also in the Enochic literature, the site of the watchers and the fallen angels’ descent upon earth. 2 Enoch 19 says they broke their promise on the shoulder of Mt. Hermon to defile themselves with human women.

This question kind of refers to I guess any physical geography and the correlation it has to heavenly events and places. But what is it about Mt. Hermon that makes it a recurring physical place for events of such cosmic significance?

Fr. Stephen: Do you want me to go straight for that one?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right, sure! I mean, Mt. Hermon, we’re going to talk about the divine council over and over and over and over again on this show. So what does Mt. Hermon have to do with all of that then. In a nutshell. I know.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yeah, this is one that’s probably going to be a future episode at some point. Mt. Hermon is not only a mountain… And of course throughout the ancient world, gods live in gardens on top of mountains. It’s just a common place. That imagery isn’t just used in Scripture for the garden of Eden or for Mt. Sinai and Mt. Zion, but it’s used, obviously, the one most people would be familiar with would be Mt. Olympus. But in the case of Baal and the divine council of El, that was Mt. Zaphon. Mt. Zaphon is the Semitic word for “north,” so it’s the mountain of the north. And that corresponds to Mt. Hermon which right now is kind of on the border of the Golan Heights, so it’s not a place I would recommend visiting currently.

In addition to being this mountain, which was seen by people from at least the late Neolithic period as being a home of the gods, one of the things that furthered that is there’s also a natural spring in a cave at the base of Mt. Hermon. Natural geographic features were the first shrines for pagans, mostly springs, groves of trees that they could fence in. Those were sort of the first temples. So that cave and that spring were considered sacred to Baal, again, going back into likely the Neolithic period. It got re-branded: later it became a shrine to Pan, the Greek god, and the name was changed to Paneas. Today it’s called Banias; it’s gotten switched from a p-sound to a b-sound.

If you were to go—which, again, I don’t recommend at the present time—to Mt. Hermon, it is dotted with hundreds of pagan shrines, from all of those periods, going back to the Neolithic period all the way up through the Roman period, all over its face, at its peak, altars. And the cave with the spring at the bottom was considered to be an entryway to the underworld. So any kind of chthonic god, any kind of god associated with the underworld, which includes Baal, that would be a place where people would go in order to interface with those spirits.

So, yes, a lot of… There are things with the Transfiguration associated with it, and with Christ and Moses and Elijah being atop it instead of Baal’s council. That is also the place… It was near Banias where Christ told St. Peter that the gates of hell would not prevail against the Church. There were literal gates to Hades that you could point at, at the time that Christ said that, because it was right after they left Caesarea-Philippi, which is right there. This is a theme we’re going to come back to a lot, that all of these sites in the underworld and in the divine realm that are talked about in Scripture and in other cultures all also correspond to actual physical places. The spiritual world, we tend to think of “heaven’s up in the sky somewhere, and the underworld is down below us,” but in actuality they saw the spiritual world as sort of overlapping with the physical world.

Fr. Andrew: Thank you very much for that call, Gareth. Next we have Michael who is in Arkansas, and Michael has a question or a comment about polytheism versus monotheism. Michael, are you there?

Michael: Yes, I am. How are you, Father?

Fr. Andrew: Good. How are you?

Michael: Good, thank God. I have a question for Fr. Stephen De Young. I was told once that there may have been a change at some point in just the way we’re educated about religion, and I remember being taught about monotheism and polytheism, and I wonder if in the ancient world it was taught the same way. How could this maybe contribute to our perceptions when we read “gods” in the Bible?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that’s a good question! I know you asked that to Fr. Stephen, but could I just begin to take a shot at this, if you don’t mind?

Michael: Sure, please do.

Fr. Andrew: Because, I mean, he’s the expert, but I do have a couple things I want to throw in here, if only so we can hear him correct me. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Um, actually… [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: “Um, actually…” Exactly! Everyone, get out your animated gifs for that! We today, Christians today, we are monotheists. That’s the way we talk about it, and we’re not polytheists. So there’s the idea that we worship the one, true God, and those pagans, they worshiped many gods. But that, if you listen to the beginning of what we were talking about tonight, you know that that’s not the image that the Bible depicts. It uses the word “gods” to refer to all kinds of beings and doesn’t see a problem with using that same word to refer to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the one true God. “The one true God,” the phrase that we use, that doesn’t mean that that’s the only being we use the word “god” to refer to, because the Bible doesn’t do that.

This idea of polytheism versus monotheism is actually a relatively later kind of notion in Western intellectual history. The reason why the idea of monotheism was kind of come up with was to kind of group sets of religions together. We’re monotheists and Jews are monotheists and Muslims are monotheists, and over here you have polytheists, these other kinds of religions. But I don’t think anyone in the ancient world would have looked at it that way. I mean, that’s not the way religion works and the way people understood it. The question is really not, “Is there only one God?” which is what monotheism means, that there’s only one god. We see the Bible doesn’t teach only one god. The difference is that there’s only one God that you worship. The other significant difference is that the God whom we worship, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, is a very different kind of divine being from all these other divine beings.

Like we were talking about atheists earlier. “Well, I just believe in one less god than you do.” It’s like, well, no, this God that I believe in and worship is a God that is outside of time and space, is the God who created all things. That is a different kind of being, if we can even speak in those terms, from how pagans understood what their gods were. A pagan god is really a much kind of smaller kind of being, and the reason why is because a pagan god—we’re going to talk about this a lot, I know—a pagan god is a fallen angel. So it is a god in the sense of being a divine spiritual being, but it’s not a god worthy of worship. Now, people do worship them and have worshiped them. So that is what I would say is kind of the difference between this idea that we have monotheism and polytheism. Really the picture that the Bible presents is actually not monotheism but rather monolatry, meaning there’s only one whom we worship. We recognize there are many gods. Now, they’re not equal. They’re not equal. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is not the same kind of thing as Zeus is or Hera. Not at all, but the main question is how we behave towards them, and we’re to worship only Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Fr. Stephen, do you have any way you wanted to correct that or add [to] that or magnify that or whatever?

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Not really correct it. I’ll fill in blanks. I don’t have to “Um, actually” you yet.

Fr. Andrew: Great!

Fr. Stephen: It wasn’t… The term “monotheism” was created at the end of the 16th and beginning of the 17th century.

Fr. Andrew: Which in Orthodox time is like last week. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yes, it doesn’t even count for Orthodox people. And it’s not that it couldn’t. Monos and theos are both Greek words. And you do find polytheos used as a term by the Fathers to refer to pagans. But not monotheos. When they talk about the fact that we have one God whom we worship, like in the discussions about the Trinity and saying that they weren’t tritheists, the term they used was monarchia, that there’s one arche, one first principle. That’s how they chose to express themselves.

So monotheism gets invented, and it basically, this whole taxonomy was invented so we could have this evolutionary view of religion. It was created mostly by 19th century liberal German scholars who, not coincidentally, at the end of their taxonomy, discovered that 19th century German liberal Protestantism was the pinnacle of all human religion. Like it had evolved to them! [Laughter] So they posit: See, polytheism is this sort of primitive thing, and then you kind of outgrow that to monotheism. And they did this whole Hegel thesis-antithesis thing where you have monotheism and you have polytheism, and then the synthesis of that is the Trinity or something.

As silly as that sounds, or as silly as I’m making it sound, if you or one of your children goes and takes an Old Testament course, just about anywhere—at a secular university or even most big Christian universities—they will be taught that Israel started out polytheist and evolved into monotheists. And they will quote some of the passages we’ve just quoted and say, “Oh, see, these are leftovers from back when they were polytheists,” and try to set up this sort of taxonomy where it just sort of evolved; religion just evolved. That, of course, takes the idea that God revealed himself to humans out of the picture, which is why we would want to have that theory, if we’re atheists.

So it’s important that we not only say, “Look, these categories aren’t ancient and aren’t original,” but that we say, “That whole taxonomy doesn’t work.” A couple of things real quick that refute it are, number one, it depends on the people who put together the Hebrew Bible being both incredibly sophisticated editors and writers of deep theological truths and being complete imbeciles. [Laughter] Because while they were doing all the editing and while they were changing all this stuff to make it look like they were always monotheists, they just missed all these passages. Oops.

Fr. Andrew: Whoops, exactly.

Fr. Stephen: Whoops, we left all this polytheistic stuff in there. Our bad! So that’s a problem. And then the other thing to me that really blows it out of the water is that the plural form of “gods,” talking about “gods” in the plural, is actually more common in the Dead Sea Scrolls than it is in the Old Testament. And the Dead Sea Scrolls are written right before and during the time of Christ. They clearly hadn’t evolved in their language; they were still talking about a plurality of gods.

One last note on this question—hopefully that’s thorough enough—one last note on this question, because I think it’s important. What we mean when we say that there is one true God, what it means to be a true God, because I think what we hear as modern American Christians, when you hear “true God” is: “Oh, he’s the one that exists, and the other ones are fake.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Right, exactly.

Fr. Stephen: That the other ones are made up. But remember what we were saying earlier in our discussion. The idea of being god is the idea of exercising authority and dominion and reign. So God is the one true God. He is the one who truly holds all authority and power and dominion over the entire creation. Anyone else who has any authority or power or dominion has received it from above, has received it from him, or they don’t have it.

Fr. Andrew: It’s derivative.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and that’s why we reiterate that in the Creed, that Christ is true God. It’s not just that he’s god, that he’s divine, but that he is true God. He exercises the same authority.

Fr. Andrew: All right. So, Michael, does that answer your question.

Michael: Yeah, that was excellent. I feel a bit misled by our education system, so I appreciate you both clearing that up for me.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, well, we’re probably going to do a whole lot of debunking! [Laughter] Thank you for that, Michael. We’ve got another good angelic name next: Raphael, who has a question or a comment about guardian angels. Raphael, are you there on the line?

Raphael: Yeah, I hope so. Can you hear me?

Fr. Andrew: Welcome, Raphael.

Raphael: Right on. Thank you, Fathers. First of all, congratulations on the episode. I am blown away so far.

Fr. Andrew: Yes! And we’re just sort of stumbling through this, too. I’m learning how to do this. So thank you for bearing with us.

Raphael: Oh, absolutely. No, this is fantastic. I actually have tons of notes already on questions I could ask, but what I was really curious about, since we’re talking about angels and demons, is: How can I deepen my relationship with my guardian angel? That’s something I’ve struggled with through the past seven, eight years. I’m curious as to what you’ve got to say.

Fr. Andrew: That is a good and a very… That’s a great question and I think really important, because, if you look at the baptismal service, we ask God in the course of that baptismal service to assign a guardian angel to that person. We don’t say that because we just want to say it; we believe that that happens. We don’t ask God for things that we don’t think are going to happen, especially in services like baptism. Angels are assigned to us to guard us, to help us.

So how do you interact more with your angel? Well, number one, a lot of prayer books, for instance, will have a prayer in there called “The Prayer to Your Guardian Angel.” If you don’t have it in your prayer book, then you could probably find an Orthodox prayer to the angel online somewhere; I’m sure that you can find something. That’s something that I would incorporate into your prayer every day. That’s something that actually I don’t know why I started doing this—not that long ago, I’m kind of ashamed to admit, within just the past couple of years—as I’m going to sleep, first of course we pray to our Lord Jesus Christ to preserve us and to save us, because we could die in our sleep, but also the next thing that I do then is I specifically say, “O guardian of my soul and body, protect me from all assaults of the evil one this night.” And then I also add, because I’m a husband and a father, “Protect my wife and my children,” and I name them in that prayer as I’m going to sleep.

Because [when] you go to sleep, that’s kind of a vulnerable position to be in, and you want the guards up and doing their task in the night while you’re asleep, and that is one of the things that we know that the angels do. That’s not all that they’re about for sure—we’re going to be talking a lot more on this show about what angels are about and what they do—but one of the things that they do, of course, is to guard us, that they keep us from harm, not just physical harm, but also spiritual harm, because there is a war going on. There is a war going on, it is a spiritual reality, and we’re participating in it. We’re either participating in the works of God and becoming more like him, or we’re participating in the works of the devil and becoming more like him.

One of the biggest “aha” moments in my conversations with Fr. Stephen was when he said, “You know there’s basically a thing that’s the opposite of theosis.” I said, “What is that, demonosis?” And he’s like, “Well, I don’t know that there’s a word for it specifically, but there is.” You participate in what God is doing and you become like him, but if you participate in what the dark powers are doing, you become like them. So you’re always headed in one direction or the other; you don’t get to stand still. How do we participate in the reality of our angels? Prayer is the biggest thing, but also just have that sense, I think especially when you go to sleep is a good one, but also when you wake up in the morning to say, “Help me today. Be with me.” We’re not talking about some kind of flim-flammy “I hope angels are watching over you.” That’s okay to say that, but that’s kind of not all that they’re really about. These are God’s armies, his created beings; they’re his government in a very real sense, and part of our task is to become like that. The Lord says that the sons of the resurrection—this is in Luke’s gospel—sons of the resurrection become like sons of God and equal to the angels. We take on their roles; we do the things that they do. So, yeah, your guardian angel, your patron saint, the one you’re named after, the one who’s assigned to your parish, the saint who is assigned to your parish, is very concerned with the place that your church is in.

The beginning is just to acknowledge that. They’re just here. My church is just named after— Here in Emmaus, our church is named after the Apostle Paul. It’s not just named after the Apostle Paul. He is here, and this place is important to him because we asked God to assign him here, so we believe that that happened. My studio I assigned to St. Raphael of Brooklyn. I don’t know if you’re named after him.

Raphael: My patron! I am.

Fr. Andrew: There you go! Right, so he is here with me right now, and he’s there with you. He’s doing that. I think those are the key things. Add that to your regular prayer, and understand that they are part of your life. They’re not just there as a kind of spiritual technology, like, “Oh, hey, I need some protection, so I hope the angel shows up.” But that they’re there. They’re assigned to you, to your place, whatever. Fr. Stephen, did you have anything to add to that?

Fr. Stephen: Just a couple quick nuances there, one that you brought out there at the end, that it’s not just the Frank Peretti version of guardian angels fighting off the bad guys.

Fr. Andrew: Anybody out there read Frank Peretti? There was a novel series called—oh, man, now I’m blanking—This Present Darkness and Piercing the Darkness. I read those when I was a kid, and it scared me to death, like there was a demon under my bed and that kind of thing. Oh, man! This is the worst. I bet we’re going to get a lot of Frank Peretti calls over the course of the show. Anyway, sorry, Father; go ahead.

Fr. Stephen: But this role as angels proper, as messengers, that they bring our prayers before God and are part of that communication. The spiritual warfare factor is important, yes, but they’re bringing our prayers to God, and potentially, although this isn’t something we initiate, they can bring messages from God to us. That doesn’t mean you summon them up or ask them questions or channel them or any of that sort of New Age angel-channeling stuff.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, don’t do that.

Fr. Stephen: But, yeah. Then the rest of what Fr. Andrew said.

Fr. Andrew: Thank you. Well, thank you very much for that call, Raphael.

Raphael: Thank you.

Fr. Andrew: It’s good to have you on. And thank you to everybody who called and to everyone who joined us in the chat room today, to those who emailed us, and even, God bless you, spammers who showed up on our Facebook event and posted all those ridiculous links that had nothing to do with our show. [Laughter] Thank you, everyone, for participating, and thank you for bearing with us on this our inaugural episode of The Lord of Spirits podcast. God willing, we’re going to have a lot more episodes after this.

That’s our show for today. Thank you for listening. 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.

Fr. Stephen: Join us for our live broadcasts on the second and fourth Thursdays of the month at 7 Eastern, 4 p.m. Pacific, and don’t forget to like our Lord of Spirits podcast Facebook page while you’re at it, leave a recommendation, and invite your friends.

Fr. Andrew: And if you leave a review on Apple Podcasts, Facebook, or wherever you get your podcasts, then that raises the visibility of this show and gets more people connected.

Fr. Stephen: And finally finally, be sure to go to ancientfaith.com/support and help make sure we and lots of other Ancient Faith podcasts stay on the air.

Fr. Andrew: Thank you and God bless you.