Voice of Steve: "He will be a staff for the righteous, with which for them to stand and not to fall.

And he will be the light of the nations and the hope of those whose hearts are troubled.

All who dwell on the earth will fall down and worship him,

and they will praise and bless and celebrate with song the Lord of Spirits" (1 Enoch 48:4-5).

The modern world doesn't acknowledge but is nevertheless haunted by spirits, angels, demons, and saints.

In our time, many yearn to break free of the prison of a flat, secular materialism, to see and to know reality as it truly is.

What is this spiritual reality like? How do we engage with it well? How do we permeate everyday life with spiritual presence?

Orthodox Christian priests Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick and Fr. Stephen De Young host this live call-in show focused on enchantment in creation, the union of the seen and unseen as made by God and experienced by mankind throughout history.

Welcome to The Lord of Spirits.

Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick: Good evening, giants-killers— Man, I can't believe I messed up my phrase there. I don't know.

Giant-killers, dragon-slayers, uh, bat-people: You're listening to The Lord of Spirits podcast. My co-host—

Fr. Stephen De Young: As long as you don't hinder Jinder, you can do those other things to those people

Fr. Andrew: Duly noted. My co-host, Fr. Stephen De Young, editor-in-chief of the Ettenmoors, is with me straight from the swamp in Lafayette, Louisiana, and I'm Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick in Emmaus, Pennsylvania, three square miles of glory, perched precariously atop the arcane tower of podcasting, hovering dozens of stories above a disused gateway to the underworld, former crematorium.

And we're live. And if you are listening to us live, you can call us at 855-237-2346 and you can talk to us. This is not an all Q&A episode tonight. We're actually covering some, you know, some pre-planned content. We'll get to your calls in just a minute, at the beginning of our second half.

And Mike "Need Flan" DeGan will be taking your calls.

Fr. Stephen: So what happened to Trudi? They're giving us the trainees now?

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Trudi's been promoted! Trudi's, like, in charge. She's in charge of the...

Fr. Stephen: All the more reason we should have her as the A-lister of this on our squad here.

Fr. Andrew: I know. I think Trudi got a life. She doesn't want to be with us at nights anymore, you know. So that's where it is. You gonna be okay?

Fr. Stephen: I don't know. It's depressing. We've just finished kind of breaking her in, in terms of our—

Fr. Andrew: Right?

Fr. Stephen: —wacky morning show antics, you know, and now...

Fr. Andrew: I feel a little abandoned. Is this the first time you've had feelings on the radio, Fr. Stephen?

Fr. Stephen: It's not— It's not feelings. It's not feelings.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, okay, just checking.

Fr. Stephen: You know, it's just kind of, you know...

Fr. Andrew: It's all right.

Fr. Stephen: Now we got to, you know, break in this Mike Deadpan guy or Bedpan or whatever his name is.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah. I know. I know.

Fr. Stephen: Are we safe? Is this like an unpromotable guy?

Fr. Andrew: I mean, he's—

Fr. Stephen: Is he going nowhere in life, so we can safely assume we'll have him for the rest of this show's run?

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] It could be. I mean, of course, you know, how long is this show really going to run, you know?

Fr. Stephen: Who knows? This could be the last episode right now!

Fr. Andrew: It could be. It absolutely could be. Before we begin—

Fr. Stephen: It'd be weird given what you're about to talk about, but it could be.

Fr. Andrew: Possible last episode! In case you people haven't heard, the Lord of Spirits conference is going to be back for its second manifestation this October 2 – 5, 2025, at the "Antiochene" Village in Ligonier, Pennsylvania, featuring none other than our very own Reverend Dr. Swamp Ogre himself; the very Reverend Dr. Joseph Lucas of Miami; Richard "Rowdy Roddy" Rohlin; and your humble servant.

You can get your tickets at ancientfaith.com/events, and I recommend everybody get those tickets quickly because I think there's only like 40 rooms or so left at the Antiochian Village, which means that close to 60% are currently taken.

Now, we will have commuter tickets for people who don't get rooms at the village, but there is a max, and we did hit it last year. So, yeah, get your tickets. This could well be the very last time. And we're super not kidding about that. It probably will be the last conference we do, last Lord of Spirits conference.

Fr. Stephen: It very well— Yeah, because my demands to do each one continue to escalate. So, eventually we'll just be at the tipping point.

Fr. Andrew: Right, we just don't have the budget. Yeah, we don't have a budget for, like, another two-story cake that, you know, a group of Finnish fusiliers pop out of.

Fr. Stephen: Right.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: The second private jet for my dogs.

Fr. Andrew: Right. I mean, they're heathen dogs. You can't baptize them! They're forever pagans.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. Yeah, yeah. That's why they need their own separate jet, to maintain a—

Fr. Andrew: I understand. I understand. Yeah, don't want to contaminate them.

Fr. Stephen: Right.

Fr. Andrew: So, everybody, remember our episode that we did—I think this was in— Was this in year two or year three? I'm trying to remember now. It was fairly—

Fr. Stephen: Time is a flat circle, man. I don't know.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, moderately early on. It was called "The Priest Shall Make Atonement." That was the one with the goats.

So, we're talking about atonement again tonight, but we're picking back up with our series on apocrypha, and we're looking specifically at the text called The Apocalypse of Abraham.

So, Father, I assume this is about how Abraham is causing the end of the world, because isn't that what "apocalypse" means?

Fr. Stephen: Well, that depends. [Laughter] If someone in the past sees and knows about the end of the world, is there some implied causation there?

Fr. Andrew: Mmm.

Fr. Stephen: No, it's about how Abraham became a zombie.

Fr. Andrew: [Singing to the tune of "Father Abraham"] Zombie Abraham, had— Wait. I don't know how— I have to work out the lyrics for that as we go on. As you were!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. I feel like— See, that song is a good example of one where I feel like… They had kind of a catchy hook, right? "Father Abraham had many sons, many sons had Father Abraham," and then they kind of didn't know where to go with it. They're like, well, I'm one of them, so are you, and then you get to the, "So let's just praise the Lord." Like, they clearly ran out of steam, right?

Fr. Andrew: Yes. I mean, once you throw out that chiastic beginning, what do you do after that? You've arrived.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, let's just praise the Lord, guys. You know?

It's sort of like when the lead singer runs out of lyrics, so he just sort of goes over and poses next to the guitar player during his solo, and it's like: Check this guy out! [Laughter] It's the children's praise song equivalent, I feel.

Yeah, but the Apocalypse of Abraham, which is probably everybody's second favorite piece of Slavonic-preserved apocrypha.

Fr. Andrew: Right?

Fr. Stephen: After 2 Enoch.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, yeah. [Laughter] We'll do Enoch actual—

Fr. Stephen: I think that's safe, right? Like, yeah, someday we'll get to 2 Enoch. Someday we'll do 1 Enoch.

Fr. Andrew: That's right.

Fr. Stephen: Although, do we even need to do 1 Enoch in this series, since it's all we talk about all the time?

Fr. Andrew: I've heard that as well.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, that's what I've been told.

But so, yeah, the Apocalypse of Abraham is a piece of Enochic literature, even though it's not the Apocalypse of Enoch.

And so, the Enochic literature— We've talked about other things that are part of the Enochic literature, like we did our episode on the Book of Jubilees, which is Enochic literature, even though, again, it's not one of the numbered books of Enoch, and Enoch is not even especially prominent in it, right? It's written from the perspective of Moses on Mount Sinai.

And so, when we talk about Enochic literature, we're not really talking about just stuff about Enoch. We're talking about—and yes, I will continue to pronounce it "Enoch." I don't care what people think. I like Land of the Lost: what can I say?

But the Enochic literature—we're talking about literature in the Second Temple period that deals with a certain set of themes, certain topics and themes that don't necessarily involve Enoch himself.

So, the "Enoch" in Enochic literature is really referring to the Book of 1 Enoch, not the person of Enoch.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: So the Book of 1 Enoch is a piece of Second Temple Jewish literature. It's apocalyptic. It deals with particular themes related to the giants—and Azazel, really, are probably the two primary things, right?

And so, the Book of Jubilees has a bunch of material dealing with the giants and Noah and the flood. That's why it tends to get categorized as Enochic literature.

In the case of the Apocalypse of Abraham, it's going to be because of Azazel showing up. And there's a—I don't know if it made it into the YouTube thumbnail, but in the advertisements for tonight's episode, we had a lovely woodcut of Azazel.

Fr. Andrew: Yes. Yeah, I know you never look, but yes, our YouTube thumbnail not only has that woodcut, but it also says, "apocalyptic goat demon."

Fr. Stephen: Oh, well, there you go!

Fr. Andrew: Yeah! You're welcome.

Fr. Stephen: And that woodcut, I think, is pretty metal. That's all I'm saying.

Fr. Andrew: It is.

Fr. Stephen: So, but yeah. So, it's Azazel and his appearance and his prominence in the Apocalypse of Abraham, and the fact that it is a piece of apocalyptic literature that causes the Apocalypse of Abraham to be classified as Enochic literature, even though—and I know people are going to get less excited—the Apocalypse of Abraham does not really deal expressly with giants.

Fr. Andrew: Aw.

Fr. Stephen: I'm just letting that sink in for everybody. Now that the disappointment has washed over you all… [Laughter] There is other interesting stuff, though, about the Apocalypse of Abraham.

So, this is, like most of the Second Temple Jewish literature, the Second Temple texts that we've talked about on the show and in this series, one that was not preserved within Judaism.

So Rabbinic Judaism did not keep copies of the Apocalypse of Abraham.

You ask a rabbi about the Apocalypse of Abraham, they're probably not going to know what you're talking about unless they studied this in particular, right?

And so it wasn't preserved in Jewish circles. It was preserved in Christian circles, but unlike some of the texts we've talked about, like the Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs, where we've got manuscripts in Christian monasteries like on Mount Athos and Mar Saba Monastery, this one was not necessarily preserved in Orthodox Christian circles.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it only ends up— Well, we'll talk about them, but with a particular heretical group

in the Balkans.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. And so the copies we have of it are in Slavonic, and they're medieval Slavonic manuscripts.

They're medieval Slavonic manuscripts that were being used by this heretical sect that we're going to talk a little bit more about in a minute here.

So, that said, if the only copies we have are medieval and in Slavonic, why would anybody think that this is actually a Jewish text, let alone a Second Temple Jewish text, right? Wouldn't this more likely be a subtext come up with by this sect?

How do we know it's not? Well, there's a couple ways we know it's not.

So one of the things is just the genre and the type of literature it is and the way it reads. There are a number of touch points with other Second Temple Jewish literature, but a big giveaway is that there are a bunch of Semitic names—like Azazel, but not limited to that—Semitic names that come from a Semitic language that are translated directly into Slavonic.

So what do I mean by that? Well, okay. So if you think about the Old Testament, most of the names we know for Old Testament figures, and even a lot of New Testament figures, come to us from the Latin name.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which is definitely Latin from Greek from Hebrew, so it's gone through a few hops.

Fr. Stephen: So, we talk about Moses, not about Moishe, right?

Fr. Andrew: Right.

Fr. Stephen: And we talk about Elijah, right? Unless you're around Greeks, right? Then you talk about Elias, but even that is from El-yas, which is from Eli-yahu, right?

So, it's gone through, and every time it goes through these names, it gets transformed. And then it gets transformed more, like the name Louis, or Louis, is actually from Elijah.

Fr. Andrew: Wait, really?

Fr. Stephen: Yes!

Fr. Andrew: Isn't it Ludovicus, ultimately, Ludovicus?

Fr. Stephen: It's just gone through a couple more from El-ias.

Fr. Andrew: If you say so.

Fr. Stephen: A couple more transformations.

Or James from Jacob.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, I mean, let's not even talk about James! [Laughter] A long and winding road there.

Fr. Stephen: But, so there's these transformations, and so you can tell.

And you may have had, you know, if you've been at an Orthodox church for matins or vespers or something, where they're doing the things for an Old Testament saint, and they're using the Greek translations, you probably didn't know who they were talking about.

But, you know, there's this stuff about Elias and Elisseus, you know, which in English are more commonly known as Elijah and Elisha, right?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, Elisseus.

Fr. Stephen: But that's going back a step.

But, so, in this case, you have names, like Azazel—Jehoel is another one we're going to talk about and some others—that have just gone straight from a Semitic language into Slavonic.

They haven't passed through Greek, because we know what happens to those names when they go through Greek, because we have Greek translations of the Old Testament, for example, and other texts we have that are, like of the Church Fathers or, of course, the Bible itself in Slavonic, right?

We can see how things go from Greek to Slavonic, and these names go direct from a Semitic language.

So that Semitic language is probably Aramaic, some dialect of Aramaic. That's hard to demonstrate, right? Like, to prove, because we have this gap.

So we could tell from these features of the text, yeah, this was probably written in some dialect of Aramaic, but we don't have any Aramaic manuscripts. We don't have any textual evidence to trace. We don't know exactly where the text came from that ended up in the Balkans in the Middle Ages.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, this is characteristic of a lot of these kinds of texts, that they only exist in a translation, you know?

Fr. Stephen: Right.

Fr. Andrew: We just don't have the older version. I mean, most texts from the ancient world did not survive. We only have a minority of them, a little minority, probably.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. So we can't trace that, and that means we also can't trace where it came from, like: Did it come up through Syria? There's some Aramaic traditions in Georgia; like: Did it come through there? Where exactly...? You know, the whole history of the text is kind of untraceable at this point.

But in terms of when we would date— So that means we've got to take a lot of relative features of the text and that kind of thing to try and figure out how far back this would date from.

And so, while it conforms to a lot of tropes and things in other Second Temple Jewish literature, especially other Enochic literature from the Second Temple period, there are no explicitly Christian references.

So what I mean by that is— like, we did an episode where we talked about the Ascension of Isaiah, and in the Ascension of Isaiah, there were a couple chapters added that were kind of really on the nose.

Fr. Andrew: Obviously Christian, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Right, where it was sort of like: "This was fulfilled when Jesus did this and this and this!" [Laughter] Right?

Fr. Andrew: Right, right, right. Really, you know, Christians kind of improving on the text, which sounds crazy to us now, but was completely a normal thing back in the day.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, yeah. There's nothing like that in this text, not even— There's not even anything that we could really tell for sure came from the heretical sect that was using it, in the sense that, right, oh, this is explicitly one of the doctrines they taught, being laid out here. There's not that really either.

Fr. Andrew: Which strongly suggests that it was pretty well preserved from its original status.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And so, based on some things, and at a certain point here, later in this first half, when we're talking about the contents, we'll get into a little deeper on why, but it's generally dated to somewhere toward the end of the first century AD, probably around 80, AD 80, so shortly after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, from a non-Christian Jewish writer.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which— that destruction was in the year 70, for those who don't remember.

Fr. Stephen: Right, yeah. It's one of those things I take for granted, but that's because I've spent too much time studying the New Testament. [Laughter] But, yeah.

So, we've been mentioning this heretical Balkan sect. Whom we're talking about are the Bogomils.

Fr. Andrew: I know. It has the best name. Or, I prefer the pronunciation Bogomil.

Fr. Stephen: Well, see, I say Bōgomil because it's like, you bought a meal, and now you get one free.

Fr. Andrew: Oh. Mm. Yeah. Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: And you know how much I like to get things free, being Dutch.

Fr. Andrew: I do.

Fr. Stephen: So, yeah. The Bogomils had a pretty good run of it, as a heretical sect. [Laughter] They were around for about 500 years.

Fr. Andrew: And they were roughly, like, in—the region called Macedonia. Now we're going to get a bunch of calls. Macedonia!

Fr. Stephen: Oh, yeah. You're angering the Greeks.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: But also, a lot of the former Yugoslavia, so: Bosnia, Herzegovina...

Fr. Andrew: Right, exactly. Like, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: ...Croatia, parts of Serbia...

Fr. Andrew: I mean, it was basically— I think at the time, it was basically Bulgarian Empire, that region, essentially? Bulgarian Empire?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. So, but that area, and they were around for about 500 years. When we get into their beliefs, you'll see why they're kind of hard to stamp out.

So, they come into being somewhere around 950, AD 950, and generally in part of the region referred to as Macedonia, but we're not totally sure. We're not even absolutely sure who the founder was.

There are a couple of figures who were sort of regarded as saints, sort of, equivalent by the Bogomils, because they did miracles and stuff, who were associated with the beginning of the sect, but it's not totally clear if either of them, or both, or neither, were the actual historical founders of it, or whether they were just early famous adherents of it, who did things.

And then it was finally stamped out in 1463, which you may notice is like 10 years after the fall of Constantinople, because, yes, that's when the Turks reached Bosnia.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and they just kind of got rid of a number of groups that they were not on board with.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, and the Turks just killed them all. So, that was...

Fr. Andrew: Those that were left, I mean, I don't think there were a lot left at that point, if I recall.

Fr. Stephen: Well, no. As the Turks moved through, they had been— I mean, they'd been persecuted by the Christian Church, too, but the Turks were just slaughtering them as they went. They had no use for them, and we'll see why here as we talk about their beliefs a little bit.

But because they're extinct, that's part of the reason why we don't— We have texts like this, like the Apocalypse of Abraham that were preserved, but the Apocalypse of Abraham wasn't written by them; we just know they used it.

So it's not like we have a lot of firsthand, like: "Oh, here's our Bogomil insider perspective on Bogomil history." We don't have that, really, right? What we do have about them is all written by non-Bogomils, talking about them, and then we have some texts that were used by them, but not necessarily written by them, so we have to kind of conjecture how they made use of them.

But the Bogomils represented pretty much bog-standard Gnosticism. Like, if you're at all familiar with Gnosticism in the 2nd and 3rd and 4th centuries AD, this is just a 10th- to 15th-century sort of re-flowering of the same kind of ideas.

That being, you know, premise number one, the material creation was created by the devil or by an evil god. They seem to have refined their Marcionism a little bit, so that it's not just a straight dualism of good god, evil god, or the Old Testament god being the evil god, but they still had the material creation being created by the devil, whereas the spiritual world that was created by the actual God is sort of holy and pure.

And so, based on that, you get all of the anti-material, anti-worldly kind of Gnostic theological stuff that you would expect.

And one of those things, which is part of what makes this hard, and what made it hard to get rid of them for a while, is that they rejected any idea of an institutional church, so they didn't have any kind of ordination.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. I mean, a lot of their deal is— It's funny. Like, they reject institutional church, they reject civil authorities, they, you know, they reject sacraments. It's interesting. I mean, this is kind of a— I'm not going to say that they're exactly the same...

Fr. Stephen: Just say Anabaptists.

Fr. Andrew: ...as Protestants, or certain kinds of...

Fr. Stephen: Well, not all Protestants.

Fr. Andrew: Radical Reformation, Anabaptists.

But there's— It's interesting. There's a certain list of things that they're on board with that are the same as this, you know? And this is this feeling that keeps cropping up over Church history. You know, established churches always have some group like this that kind of reacts against them and comes out from them.

Fr. Stephen: And so you have these figures, like I referred to those two—one of them is named Peter, and I can't remember the name of the other one—but they're just sort of charismatic figures who are part of the sect.

They don't have any official… They don't have bishops, they don't have priests, they don't have ministers or pastors or any kind of clergy. They don't have any kind of sacraments. It's very much sort of a spirituality and a set of mystical—mainly mystical practices that people were participating in.

So they face persecution, you know, in Orthodox and Roman Catholic countries for being sort of both political dissidents and religious dissidents and heretics.

But the Turks, when they came in and took over, their rule number one is: You're now going to submit to Turkish rule. And so people like the Bogomils who said, "No, we submit to no human," that wasn't popular with the Turks in the 15th century.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah, and it wasn't like some of the weird Russian sects that could just run off into the wilderness and no one— And people were like: "No, we're not going to chase you over seven time zones, go ahead."

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. So, you know, they took Constantinople, but the Orthodox, including the patriarch, you could use the patriarch to help govern your Christian subjects. Your Christian subjects will generally submit to the civil authorities, so that's a different case.

The Bogomils on the other end are like: "No! We're not going to listen to you." And there's no leadership for them to co-opt. So that left one sort of solution to that problem, and that's why they got wiped out.

Now, that said... So the Apocalypse of Abraham is a text that was used by this essentially Gnostic sect.

But—now, this is kind of a footnote, and I know I never do those, but this is kind of a footnote.

But St. Epiphanius of Salamis, whom I know we've mentioned before on the show.

Fr. Andrew: Author of the Bread Box.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, the Panarion.

Fr. Andrew: Patron saint of the second edition of Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy, which was released on his feast day.

Fr. Stephen: Well, there we go.

Fr. Andrew: Yes! Not on purpose; it just worked out that way. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Do you fancy yourself a refuter of heresies, Fr. Andrew?

Fr. Andrew: Um, I don't know. I'm way nicer than St. Epiphanius. I mean, go read his stuff, people. I mean, he just doesn't hold back.

Fr. Stephen: Or do you fancy yourself in general? Or are you just fancy?

Fr. Andrew: I do like fancy coffees.

Fr. Stephen: There you go. You're a fancy lad, I think.

Fr. Andrew: I wasn't going to go that far.

Fr. Stephen: Okay. [Laughter] So we'll have to find out and see. What we need to do is ask your dad and see if he's got a picture of you dressed like Blue Boy somewhere at home.

Fr. Andrew: Oh! Thank God that doesn't exist. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: But St. Epiphanius in the Panarion was— He did refute a series of heresies, including a bunch of forms of Gnosticism from the original era of Gnosticism. And in there, he describes a Gnostic text called the Apocalypse of Abraham.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Same name, but probably not the same text as what we're talking about.

Fr. Stephen: But as far as we can tell, not the same text because...

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because the way he describes it does not describe this text. It's something else.

Fr. Stephen: Right. So yeah. So, he describes, oh, they have this text and da-da-da-da-da, and the da-da-da-da-da and the Slavonic text we have do not match at all.

And as we said, there seems to be good evidence that this was translated directly into Slavonic from some Semitic language, and what St. Epiphanius would have been looking at would have been in Greek, so you can hypothesize: Well, was there some Greek version of this? Is it a whole other text? Is it related to this?

Frankly, we don't know. I mean, we have no evidence; we don't know. All we know for sure is that the text St. Epiphanius describes that he was looking at, and the text we have in Slavonic are clearly not the same text.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: There's no way to determine if there's some kind of relationship between the two, other than the title.

But this happens a lot. Remember when we talked about the Assumption of Moses? We talked about how when you start digging around in the Church Fathers, they refer to a Testament of Moses and an Assumption of Moses, and it's not clear if they're the same book.

I mean, this happens a lot, because you see ancient authors referring to the title of a book, and then we find a book somewhere with the same or a similar title. It's easy to just assume: "Oh, this must be the exact same book," but often it's not clear. This is a common occurrence that the relationship between the two is actually not so clear.

So, all that said, about where we got this text— And it is important that we point out that it's preserved by the Bogomils, that it's preserved by this heretical sect, because when we're looking at the teaching of this, there's a difference with the—

When we talked about the Testament of Abraham, for example, that's been preserved at Mount Athos and Marsaba Monastery and is among the Dead Sea Scrolls, that means the fact that Christian monks were copying this over and over and over again for century after century after century to preserve it was…

Obviously, it's not scripture—they weren't reading from it liturgically—but that was sort of an endorsement of the contents. They thought: There's something valuable here that we need to preserve in terms of the interpretation and understanding of the Scriptures that's presented here.

So this was not preserved in that way. So we are not looking at the Apocalypse of Abraham from the perspective of: Oh, here's a summary of early Christian tradition about anything, okay?

But, through this heretical sect having preserved it, we have this text that gives us a window back to around AD 80 to a Jewish writer and how he looked at things and how he thought about things, the world and events in the world and the Scriptures.

It gives us a window back in time to that point, and that's why we're talking about it and how we're going to use it tonight as we talk about it, is: Here's how people were thinking around the time the New Testament's being written. Here's how some Jewish people were thinking around the time the New Testament was being written.

Fr. Andrew: Because, reminder: we're talking in the first century especially, but in the century or two before, and probably, I don't know, maybe even more than that, it's really "Judaisms." There's a lot of different views, a lot of different groups. There's no Pope of Judaism saying, "This is what everybody has to do." So this represents a Judaism or at least one person, you know, with their views.

Fr. Stephen: Right. Now, some Jewish people thought— And remember, all the authors of the New Testament are Second Temple Jews, and Christianity is a Judaism in the first century AD. It is one of the forms of Judaism.

Fr. Andrew: It's the Judaism.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so we'll see, there are some, you can see some connections in thought between the original author of this, Jewish author of this text in the first century, and some of the New Testament authors, we'll see as we go, and how they were thinking about things.

The Bogomils just did us the favor of preserving the text, right, without reference to them and their weird doctrines.

So the text actually begins sort of in Abraham's youth.

There are a lot of stories in Jewish tradition about Abraham's youth, because when you're reading through Genesis, you get the story of the Tower of Babel, and then you get the story of Abraham with no time marker whatsoever.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. How much time has passed? How old is he?

Fr. Stephen: If any— Is this even after the Tower of Babel?

Fr. Andrew: Is he living during the time of the Tower of Babel? It kind of suggests that, sort of, by virtue of the proximity, but...

Fr. Stephen: There are Jewish traditions to that effect, right? And so that fact that we're just kind of dropped in on Abraham, and that when we're dropped in on him, God has chosen him for this whole thing: He's living in Ur, living among the pagans of the biggest city of the world during the Sumerian Renaissance, and God just—boom—has already picked him.

And so you get a lot of traditions developing about, well, why had God picked him out of all the people in the world at the time? And what had happened earlier in his life, and how did his life relate to the Tower of Babel and what was going on there?

It raises all of these questions, and those questions generated a variety of traditions that aren't— They can't totally be merged with each other. They're separate strands, and so one of these strands gets preserved here.

And probably the big distinguishing feature of that at the beginning of the Apocalypse of Abraham is Abraham's father, Terah, who is presented as an idol-maker by trade.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which— In Genesis, it's pretty clear that he's an idolater, in that he's a pagan, but this is kind of taking it several steps further than that.

Fr. Stephen: Right. Well, it's fairly clear in Genesis. There's the them stopping in Haran, which if you know about the moon god, makes sense, but also, there's a reference in Joshua, when Joshua is giving his sort of final speech.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, yeah, that's right.

Fr. Stephen: He talks about how Abraham's family were idolaters, beyond it.

But, yeah, there's a difference between being an idolater and being a professional idol-maker! [Laughter] That's sort of next level.

And so, as an idol-maker, there's this sort of dispute that breaks out between him and Abraham, his son, who's being kind of a smart-alecky kid.

That's where Terah is trying to teach him about the making of idols, and is explaining to him how when you make an idol, that idol sort of embodies one of these spiritual powers or forces in the world, like the storm, or like, you know, take your pick, god of whatever, right?

And how we've talked about idolatry on the show, that it's now embodied in this idol, and so it can be manipulated, worshipped, etc., etc., etc. And he's trying to teach this to his son, Abraham.

Abraham, however, sort of rejoinders that, well, all of those powers you list are opposed to one another.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which is, you know, basically a kind of good first-century philosophical argument, because one of the big concerns is, well, there has to be something above everything, or something that starts everything.

Fr. Stephen: Right. None of them could be ultimate, because they all have some opposite, right? You've got this god who brings a plentiful harvest; you've got this other god who brings famine. You've got, you know, this god who people look to to be healed of maladies; you have this other god, like Resheph, that, you know, brings plague.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. So, I mean, not only does it present that kind of philosophical side, but also this participates in the standard biblical polemic against paganism, which is these guys are a bunch of small, weak spirits that can't deliver.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And in the stories that are constructed— around which pagan worship is constructed, these gods are all opposed to each other, and fighting, and at odds with each other. So a pagan can't really deny that, even beyond just the philosophical side. Like, yeah, you know, you even look at, like, Persephone and Demeter, you have this opposition between Demeter and Hades. Like, yeah, there's always opposing forces.

So there must be some other god who is actually the first principle, who is above, and who made all of these others.

And again, notice this is more the biblical version of "monotheism." [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Right, that there are multiple gods, but then one most high God, who, unlike the pagan most high gods, is the actual creator God of everything and is omnipotent.

Fr. Stephen: Right. Who is the God of gods, whom all those powers serve and worship, as we're reminded over and over again in the liturgy every week.

And so God sort of resolves this dispute between father and son by sending fire from heaven that roasts and kills Terah and blows up his idol shop and destroys everything, thus proving that Abraham was right. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Tough break for Dad.

Fr. Stephen: So it doesn't totally conform to the biblical story of Abraham, but, you know—

Fr. Andrew: Basically compatible, yeah. [Laughter]

You'd think that if that really happened, it would have been mentioned, though, in the Bible. I don't know, but—

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. I mean, it seems like a key event.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Like, it would only kind of.

Fr. Stephen: It's him dying at Haran.

Fr. Andrew: Right. I mean, do you think—? Okay, I have a question; I have a question.

So do you think that stuff like this is, on some level, self-consciously fiction? You know, like, okay, I know it didn't turn out this way, but for the sake of our story, I'm going to write it this way to kind of make my point about idolatry.

Fr. Stephen: Well, see, the problem is—

Fr. Andrew: I know I'm asking you to speculate, but...

Fr. Stephen: —that's a very modern question.

Fr. Andrew: Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: You're told a story. "Did that really happen?"

Fr. Andrew: Sure.

Fr. Stephen: Right? Like… So I don't think, especially when you're talking about something that's ancient history at the time it's being told—

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, thousands of years before.

Fr. Stephen: Right? You're trying to communicate something with that story. Is every word of it "literally true"? Like, there's not even a way to ask that question in most ancient languages.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so I think it probably just comes down to, like, what are their expectations for these different kinds of texts?

And this text is not trying to be anything other than what it is, which is a certain kind of commentary on the Bible in some level.

Fr. Stephen: Right. Which, it's a certain type of question.

And I know when I say this, there's people out there who, like, find it hard to believe. "Well, how could they not have asked that question?" Well, there's lots of questions you don't ask when you hear a story.

Like, every year I read the parable of the Good Samaritan. Nobody ever interrupts me and asks, "What was his name?" [Laughter] Right? I mean, that's a perfectly valid question!

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, sure, sure, sure.

Fr. Stephen: But, right, if someone actually did interrupt me and ask that, that would be a sign that they didn't understand what was happening with me telling this story.

Or, "Where was this?" You know, like… [Laughter]

And those are questions about facticity, right?

So, yeah, these were understood to sort of function in this way.

So this is communicating to you something about idolatry, something about paganism, something about the difference between Abraham and the other people in the world during Abraham's life.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, even his dad.

Fr. Stephen: Including his own family, yeah.

So, it's communicating those things, and asking those other questions, at that time, would have just been taken to be missing the point. They would have looked at you: "Do you really not get what we're talking about here?" Like...

Yeah. And, of course, there's no way to ask a question like: "Well, what if you had a time machine?" Or, "What if you had a video camera?" Because there were neither of those ideas in existence.

And even the word "real"... Like, did that really happen? What do you mean, "real"?

Like: "Would a video camera have picked it up and would it have looked exactly this way?" Like: "Are those the exact words that that person said, no more, no less?" Again, those questions aren't really getting it, not understanding how writing and storytelling and communication happened in the ancient world.

And that's why I'm pretty— I would put forward that that's why people with these various traditions weren't concerned with the fact that they kind of contradict each other.

So someone could tell this story about Terah and someone else could talk about them trying to throw Abraham into a brick furnace while they were building the tower of Babel because he wouldn't worship idols.

And I don't think if you ask someone who is familiar with both of those traditional stories— I think if you said, "Do those contradict each other?" they would have said no.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because they're not trying to do...

Fr. Stephen: They're communicating the same thing about the relationship between Abraham and his idolatrous society, even though we would say, "Well, no, one of those must be true and one of those must be false."

At least! They could both be false, but they can't both be true. Insert any modern person talking about the four gospels. "Was there one angel or two angels? One of these is a lie!" So, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: 50% of Legion and this guy, 50%.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. [Laughter] So that's just a miss.

Again, I know it's hard for us as modern people to not think like modern people, not ask the questions we ask, because those are the questions we've been brought up and taught to ask, but you have to accept—

One of the basic steps of humility in general is accepting the fact that other people, even other people who live in the world you do at the same time and in relatively the same place, see things very differently than you do.

And that doesn't mean that you're right and they're all wrong. Like, that's just a basic aspect of humility, let alone people who live in radically different times and places and cultures, who are going to see things differently than you,

and you asserting, "Well, no, mine is right, and, you know, they're all wrong is not"—it's arrogant. We'll just leave it at that.

So, after that Terah-rising moment...

Fr. Andrew: Nice.

Fr. Stephen: Oh, you didn't even get how— That's a digging in the crates reference; you didn't get the half of it.

Fr. Andrew: That's okay.

Fr. Stephen: Someone out there did. I'm confident now.

After that one reference I made that somebody got, like, to Idiot Box, like, I'm convinced now no reference I can make is too obscure; someone out there gets every one of them. Not the same person, but...

Fr. Andrew: If you ever meet somebody who's getting all of them, that'd be...

Fr. Stephen: I'll be deeply disturbed, and take it as a challenge.

So, after that, there's kind of a smash cut, so we move into another thing. There's sort of three pieces to the Apocalypse of Abraham. That's sort of piece one.

Piece two has to do with Abraham being brought to Mount Horeb to make a sacrifice—not Isaac, in this case. So this is not telling the story of Abraham's potential sacrifice of Isaac; this is a different sacrifice.

And this sacrifice looks suspiciously like the Day of Atonement.

Fr. Andrew: Hmm!

Fr. Stephen: There are goats involved.

Now, again, you may be going: "Well, wait a second. The Day of Atonement doesn't exist until Leviticus 16. Abraham is back in Genesis. Why would he be doing a Day of Atonement thing?" Well, we'll get to that.

But this is another one of those, you know… Is this asserting a literal time? Is this asserting that Abraham practiced the Day of Atonement, like, really, as a historical fact?

I mean, the answer to that is basically no, but also that's a misunderstanding of what the text is doing.

So there are goats involved, right?

But, so, Abraham in this has sort of a guide who's helping him.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which is… I mean, this is pretty standard for apocalypses. There's always a—

Fr. Stephen: A guide.

Fr. Andrew: Psychopomp.

Fr. Stephen: But in this case, the psychopomp is also a priest who is helping him, and is also an angelic being of some type.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, with an interesting name.

Fr. Stephen: With a very suspicious name, that being Yahoel.

Fr. Andrew: Which means Yahweh God.

Fr. Stephen: Right. That's the name of this being.

So that's odd, right? Unless you consider— So, for example, in the Torah, when we see the Angel of the Lord introduced, who's going to lead Israel, and who ends up leading Israel through the exodus, through the wilderness, through the conquest, and then leaves at the beginning of the book of Judges, what God says will identify the Angel of the Lord is that God will place his name in him.

So here we have this angelic being who bears the name of God, Yahweh, Hashem: the name is placed upon him.

And so this is an instance in the Apocalypse of Abraham, and from its author in the first century AD, of what we've talked about before on the show, this idea of a second power in heaven, that there is a being who is visible, who interacts with people, who has a bodily form, who is Yahweh, but who is distinguished from Yahweh, the God of Israel, who cannot be seen and have you live afterwards.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. And, I mean, within a Christian context, see John chapter 1, identifying this figure as Jesus of Nazareth, but in this text, which is not a Christian text, you're not going to get that.

Fr. Stephen: Right. You don't get that second part. And the fact that you don't get that is, again, like I said, this is why we know— There are direct Christian elements where somebody's come in and kind of said, "Aha! and that is..." you know.

But so he's dressed like a Levitical priest when he shows up, in white with a golden sash. So the idea is that this being also has some kind of heavenly priesthood. And so this heavenly priest is now going to sort of walk Abraham through how to do this ritual sacrifice.

And, to make this sort of even more direct, Azazel, who's sort of mentioned in the Day of Atonement ritual—the one goat is for Yahweh; the other goat is for Azazel—Azazel also shows up in person.

So Yahweh, the God of Israel, shows up in person in the person of Jehoel, and Azazel shows up in person, first as this sort of giant ugly raven thing.

And that raven form isn't just, because, like, ravens are black and they're cool, man, and it's goth!

It's a reference to, remember—and we've talked about this on the show before we were talking about covenants—when Abraham did the covenant ritual, and he cut the animals in half and split them in half; while he was waiting for God to arrive he had to shoo the birds away—

Fr. Andrew: Right, so they're kind of getting in the way of—

Fr. Stephen: —from the the carcasses. So they were trying to sort of disrupt.

So the reason he appears as a raven is Azazel's here to kind of just try and disrupt this sacrificial ritual. Later on he transforms into his dragon form.

Fr. Andrew: Is this his final form?

Fr. Stephen: Uh, I don't know. I mean, I think no; I think this is actually his original form, the dragon.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, it's interesting because— especially interesting because usually Azazel is just referred to as being out there somewhere, and here he is, ready to rumble.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and you see him in in 1 Enoch scheming with the other rebel angels and stuff, but he's not manifesting like this.

But so he manifests in this dragon form which, as we're going to see a little later in the text of the Apocalypse of Abraham, is presenting him as the serpent that shows up in Genesis: the dragon.

So this is dragon being used the same way it's used in the in the book of Revelation, to refer to that primordial being, the devil.

So this atonement sacrificial ritual that Abraham is doing here is sort of... This section is apocalyptic also in that it's sort of presenting: Okay, here's sort of the spiritual reality that's going on with the idea of atonement—

Fr. Andrew: Okay.

Fr. Stephen: —because your average Israelite or Judahite or Judean who went to the Day of Atonement ritual didn't see a dragon fighting an angelic being or anything! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: What!?

Fr. Stephen: Visually.

It would have increased attendance!

Fr. Andrew: I guess it would! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: But they didn't actually directly see that, but Abraham is sort of directly seeing that.

Fr. Andrew: Right, like this is what's really going on.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah.

Fr. Andrew: Which, I mean, this is like— I mean this is like the Apocalypse of John: it's sort of showing you what's really going on, you know, from this higher— on this higher level right in terms of what are ordinary people on the ground doing but here's what's really going on in the heavens in connection with what they're doing.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so we're going to pull back the veil. So this is sort of the the cosmic stuff that's going on while a human priest is standing there sacrificing goats, or a goat, and sending another one away.

But then sort of through this sort of cosmic atonement ritual, Azazel gets defeated and bound and punished, and Yahoel sort of emerges victorious.

So the idea here is that underlying the reality of sacrifice is a kind of spiritual warfare.

And this then gets into why this is associated with Abraham, even though there's this sort of temporal problem of like: well, wait a minute: the Day of Atonement isn't instituted until Leviticus 16!

That's not only post-Exodus; that's post-Sinai! Centuries from Abraham. And we're not going to argue about how many, but centuries from Abraham.

But so part of what happens— This is a form of argumentation in in the kind of texts that are making arguments, but also just a way of narratively presenting things in narrative texts of the Second Temple period: if you associate something with a figure from Genesis who sort of precedes the Torah, you're presenting whatever you're presenting as being sort of more ultimate than the Torah.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, and this this feeds into—or I should say draws on—the sense that, I don't know, almost every ancient culture has,

which is that something that's before something else is greater, and everything else is— you know, like the earlier thing: later things are derived from it, and so therefore it has to be greater, just like, for instance, people will say that all of philosophy is just footnotes to Plato.

They'll say stuff like that, the idea that Plato is the ultimate, the greatest philosopher, whatever, which is why, then, you know, when Jesus talks about the Messiah being David's lord and yet also his son, he blows their minds by saying that, because they're like: "Well, if he's David's son then isn't David greater?"

Fr. Stephen: Right, that's sort of a paradox, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: Because there's a standard way of thinking, which is that earlier things are greater, and everything else is, you know: comes later, it's lesser, derivative, etc.

Fr. Stephen: And that's why there's this fascination in Second Temple literature with the figure of Enoch.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Right, because he's sort of before all of this: he's before the flood even! He's sort of the the the first truly ur-righteous man, right? [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so righteous that he ascends into heaven.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and so whatever he sees, whatever he knew, whatever he had to teach would be sort of more ultimate than anything that came later, more primordial, more of the deep wisdom than the later things.

And so associating this with Abraham is a way of saying, like: "This is sort of the the really real reality that lies behind the ritual described in Leviticus."

And you even find essentially— Like, this is essentially the argument that St. Paul is doing, or a type of this argument that St. Paul is doing, in Galatians and Romans, when he sort of goes back before the Torah to Abraham to talk about faithfulness and the promises to Abraham.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, this is a greater, more ancient law.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, like this— and this is before this is, and so what comes later doesn't sort of get rid of that right. It adds to that, it brings more of that, but it doesn't sort of void that or get rid of that.

Yeah, and so that's kind of the idea here behind— even though, again, if you ask the question, "Did this literally happen?" that doesn't work, but that's what the text is trying to do.

So then the last part of the Apocalypse of Abraham is sort of the apocalypse proper in that this is where Abraham sort of goes on this spiritual journey through the cosmos with Yahoel as his guide, as the psychopomp,

which is sort of your typical apocalyptic literature thing: spiritual being as a guide, human is taken up into the heavenly places, from that perspective he sees all kinds of truths that underlie the events on earth in the past and the present and the future.

So interestingly, in terms of the identity of Yahoel again, when they first ascend up into the heavens, they go sort of past the four living creatures, the four cherubim—

because that's what cherubim means is living creatures; cheruvim means beasts—from Daniel and Ezekiel, and Revelation for that matter, even though Revelation hadn't been written yet when the Apocalypse of Abraham was,

but we talked about how in Ezekiel those were the four main constellations in Babylonian astrology, so the idea is that was like the four quadrants of the heavens were represented by those four creatures,

and so if God is enthroned on top of them he's above the sun, moon, and stars; he's above the heavenly host. And when Abraham and Yahoel ascend up above them, Yahoel is placed above them the same way God is in Ezekiel.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which is another second power in heaven indication going on there.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so that's another element there that that points to that, and so that points to above it. And so then Yahoel takes Abraham on this tour of the cosmos, and then after they've toured the cosmos, Abraham finds out that:

"Oh, wait, that wasn't the actual cosmos; that was the— that that God had made, had created a prototype or blueprint or proof of concept for the cosmos before he created the cosmos from it.

And Yahoel had actually taken Abraham on a tour of that model, of the blueprint.

So Abraham had been shown things the way they were supposed to be seems to be the idea of the original: the way things were as God created them, not necessarily the way they actually were or turned out.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, you can you can see where— although it doesn't have to be this way, but you can see where Gnostics like the Bogomils would be into this idea, like they would say, "Oh, well, see: that's that's sort of the the real, the true cosmos, and we just— we're down here; we're left in this kind of lesser—

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, lame copy.

Fr. Andrew: —not real— Yeah. Yeah, exactly, but it's— that's not the only way—

Fr. Stephen: Because Gnostics, remember, have terminal Plato-brain. "This is a shadow; this is not real."

Yeah. And so you can see how it could be interpreted that way, but it doesn't have to be interpreted that way.

Fr. Andrew: No, no.

So… And then Abraham sort of gets a— after getting a tour of sort of physical cosmos or "cosmos" in terms of space, he kind of gets a tour of time and history, so he sees Adam and Eve being expelled from paradise.

And the language and everything that's used, first of all, very obviously intended to connect the expulsion of humanity from paradise to the exile of Judah to Babylon. And both of those events are characterized, are connected here and are characterized as being handed over to Azazel.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because Azazel is that demon that's on the outside of the place where God dwells with his people.

Fr. Stephen: Right. It's sort of the rest of the world where God isn't is still under the power of Azazel Fr. Andrew: Right, the scary thing out in the woods.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, the black goat of the woods with a thousand young? No, that's Shub-Niggurath. There's a little Lovecraft, a lot of things…

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I can't read that stuff!

Fr. Stephen: I don't know, man. Having a having a creature called "the black goat of the woods with a thousand young" is—

Fr. Andrew: I mean, that is pretty cool.

Fr. Stephen: —nicely creepy in and of itself.

Fr. Andrew: And, you know— and my literary hero J.R.R. Tolkien apparently was into or at least did read Lovecraft.

Fr. Stephen: Oh, it's very clear. It's very clear when you read that Lewis had, too, like when you read the Space Trilogy.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, sure, sure. I mean, the Watcher in the Water is probably, you know, on some level, a Lovecraftian beast.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. But so— And this connection, by the way, is one of the— between the exile and the expulsion from paradise is something you find everywhere in Second Temple Jewish texts, drawing those two things together, but here it has that wrinkle

And this being handed over to Azazel, being expelled into the realm controlled by Azazel: here's another connection to the New Testament. Think about how St. Paul, on two different occasions, talks about somebody being excommunicated from the Church as being handed over to Satan.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean this is basically the idea of anathema, which is: Look, you have to stand outside where it's cold and scary and there's demons until you're ready to repent and come back.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And so, yeah, so you can see— Again, this is written after St. Paul lived: this person isn't cribbing from St. Paul; St. Paul's not cribbing from them.

We're talking about just: how did Jewish people think in the first century about these things. There are certain common motifs and way of thinking about ways of thinking about these things.

And then the Apocalypse of Abraham talks about Cain being possessed by Azazel. He's the first person whom that happens to but not the last.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which— I mean, this connects with that idea that in Genesis 4, that "crouching at your door" thing, where, you know— which is a demonic force right that's going to take him over, you know.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so— and when Azazel takes somebody over, he uses that person to attack the righteous. So Cain kills Abel, but all through history there are these people under the control of Azazel who try to attack God's people and destroy them and attack the righteous and destroy them.

And this is related to what we saw in the earlier section. So you've got Azazel there in his dragon form and you've got Yahoel there, but the actions going on in the world are taking place— the sacrifice itself is being done by Abraham: there's a human who's doing the thing, and the spiritual warfare is kind of happening around him.

So the same kind of thing is happening with Cain except it goes the other way, so it's depicting what happens in Genesis 4 where God speaks to Cain, but then sin is crouching at his door, as if, much like with Abraham, there's God there, right: Yahoel.

There's God there on the one side and Azazel on the other, and Cain chooses to be possessed by Azazel and bring Azazel's works into the world by killing his brother.

So this section, as we're going through history, sort of culminates in a description of the destruction of the second Temple, and this is why we're pretty sure it was after AD 70 that this was written,

because right after it describes the destruction of the second Temple, it goes on to describe these sort of 12 steps or 12 eras or 12 things that unfold before the end of time, before the end of days, and those 12 things are like super cryptic and mysterious—not like book of Revelation or Daniel cryptic; like Nostradamus cryptic.

Fr. Andrew: Right! Open to massive different kinds of interpretation cryptic.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, yes, like wildly different.

And so someone could say, "Well, how do you know that the destruction of the second Temple wasn't also being predicted?" Well, it's described in very on-the-nose, straightforward terms, and it's the last thing described in those kind of terms before we get cryptic, which pretty strongly implies that that was— for the original writer of this, that was history already.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: That was the past already because of how he writes about it. There's no vagaries at all about the destruction of the second Temple, but then as soon as you get past the destruction of the second Temple, everything gets really vague and weird and symbolic and very open to interpretation.

So it's pretty firm that this was written shortly after, by a non-Christian Jewish writer, because—

And then when you get to the end of the 12 things, you start getting things— they're still described symbolically and stuff, but it's stuff we're more familiar with,

like he has the idea of the final trumpet there, which you also see in St. Paul in 2 Thessalonians, and then after the final trumpet the Messiah comes and destroys Azazel and destroys his enemies, and then the last judgment happens and the resurrection.

So we go back to sort of the familiar end-of-the-world things within in first-century Judaism and early Christianity that we're used to at the end of that, and so there's just these 12 things in between there that are weird and mysterious.

Notice also, though, that— So we had this image of Abraham doing this sacrifice that brought about the defeat of Azazel, and now that same event is described as not Yahoel but the Messiah defeating Azazel, and that happening at the end of the world.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so there's a sense in which the sacrifice of Abraham, as the Day of Atonement, is kind of doing everything—all of that salvific stuff, everywhere in history, all at the same time.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, it's sort of this cosmic event more than a claimed historical event and points to some kind of cosmic atonement that we're going to talk about some more in the second half.

So the last thing to really comment about in the text of the Apocalypse of Abraham itself before we move to that second half is: within the cryptic parts there is this cryptic description right of a man who comes, and that's all the description we're given of him is that he is a man.

No one stood up and interrupted and said, "What's his name?" [Laughter] So it's just a man.

And so here's the description in the cryptic part: A man comes. Some of the followers of Azazel and people from the pagan nations and some of the sons of Abraham worship this man, but then some other sons of Abraham beat this man. And then after the man recovers from his beating, all those folks begin to worship him again.

And when he sees this—when Abraham sees this, Abraham gets told by God through Yahoel that the man is going to be one of Abraham's descendants, that that person is going to relieve the persecution of the Jewish people, and that he will be stood up on the last day. And "stood up" there in the Slavonic maybe covering up a word for like resurrection—like rising, be raised—on the last day.

Fr. Andrew: Huh. Yeah. So if there's anything maybe that we might possibly think of as: "Oh! Here's the Christian bit!" this might be it, maybe.

Fr. Stephen: Right, because that kind of sounds like Jesus, right?

Fr. Andrew: Right, right, but it should be pointed out that nothing in there isn't found in some way in the Old Testament already.

Fr. Stephen: Well, yes, but also, if this was coming from a Christian you wouldn't have him recovering from a beating; you'd have him get killed, brought back to life.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly, exactly.

Fr. Stephen: Right? Which we don't have. So there's no death and resurrection here, until he's raised up on the last day.

And what he does seems to be in relation primarily to the pagan nations—

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, rather than to Israel.

Fr. Stephen: —not Israel itself, right.

And so what seems to be going on here is that this is actually a reference to Jesus, that by the time it's being written it's a historical reference to Jesus, because we're about 50 years after the fact.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and by this point Jesus is very, very, very well-known and the Church is beginning to expand considerably.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And so this is representing a non-Christian Jewish perspective on nascent Gentile Christianity.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so there's this sense of: Okay, all these Gentiles are coming to worship Israel's God can we make some—

Fr. Stephen: That's good for Jewish people, right?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that's good. That's good.

Fr. Stephen: Providing them some relief from persecution and this kind of thing.

Fr. Andrew: Right, that's good. So how can we, without saying, "Yeah, Jesus is our Messiah"—

Fr. Stephen: —without saying that he rose from the dead, without saying he's the Messiah, right.

So this is written by someone who doesn't isn't a Christian, but sees Christianity as beneficial. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. How can we kind of make space for him in our in our world?

And it turns out that there is actually a figure that was expected amongst some Jewish people.

Fr. Stephen: There is a category for this that gets applied here. So this is one of the earliest instances, I think, of the application of this category to Jesus by a Jewish author, that category being what's called the Messiah ben Joseph.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, you recall, everybody, that we—I can't remember which episode it was now, but we talked in an earlier episode about there being a tradition of multiple messiahs.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, we did an episode I think on just "messiah" in general.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: And I think we even briefly talked about Messiah ben Joseph in that, as a category.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and it's not just that there's multiple different versions of the messiah; there are traditions in which there are multiple messiahs, like there will be more than one, and—

Fr. Stephen: A priestly one, a kingly one, right? So the one we usually think of as the Messiah would be the kingly Messiah, the Messiah ben David, the son of David, the king in David's line. That's usually— When we just say the Jewish Messiah or the Messiah, that's usually what we're talking about in our parlance, but there are pieces of Jewish tradition about other messiah figures:

Messiah ben Joseph, the son of Joseph, as in Joseph in the book of Genesis, as in Ephraim, the largest and central tribe of the northern kingdom of Israel, that got dispersed.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and then closely associated, then, with the Gentiles.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so then if you think about when we talked about the Testaments of the 12 Patriarchs previously in this series, we talked about how in a couple of those testaments it talks about the northern tribes of Israel being reconstituted.

Since they were dispersed among the Gentiles like seed they're going to be reconstituted from the returning Gentiles coming back to worship, people of the nations coming back to worship Israel's God.

The figure of the Messiah ben Joseph, the Messiah the son of Joseph, the son of Ephraim is this figure who would come and gather—regather—the northern kingdom by gathering people from the nations to worship the god of Israel, to leave aside idolatry, to leave aside other sinfulness and come to worship Israel's God.

And at various points throughout history, Jewish writers—non-Christian Jewish writers—have, to varying degrees, recognized Jesus of Nazareth as this figure or as maybe being this figure or Christianity as a religion being this figure, for these various reasons.

So the Apocalypse of Abraham seems to be, at least so far, the earliest testimony we have, and I don't know how much earlier you could get testimony than AD 80,

but to a non-Christian Jewish person sort of applying these traditions to Jesus of Nazareth, to say that they don't believe he's the Messiah ben David—which of course we as Christians do, believe he's the Davidic Messiah—but to say he is a messiah in some sense and to recognize what's happening in Christianity as a good thing and a movement of God.

That's not an artificial thing that Rabbinic Judaism dreamed up centuries later to try to get along better with Christians; that is a tradition from very early on, and applying that to Jesus starts to happen places like here very early.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. All right, well, that's basically our summary of the Apocalypse of Abraham.

We're gonna offer some more commentary on exactly everything that is going on when we get back after the break.

First we'll take a couple of right after this break, so we'll see you in a second.

Voice of Steve: Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick and Fr. Stephen De Young will be back in a moment to take your calls on the next part of The Lord of Spirits.

Give them a call at 855-237-2346; that's 855-AF-RADIO.

Announcement: The centuries after the Protestant Reformation brought about a radical reinterpretation of the epistles of St. Paul, disconnected from any historical reality.

But Paul operated, during his entire life, as a faithful Pharisee within the Roman Jewish world.

In Saint Paul the Pharisee: Jewish Apostle to All Nations, Fr. Stephen De Young surveys Paul's life and writings, interpreting them within the holy Tradition of the Orthodox Church.

This survey is followed by De Young's interpretive translation of St. Paul's epistles, which deliberately avoids overly familiar terminology.

By using words and ideas grounded in first-century Judaism, De Young hopes to unsettle commonly-held notions and help the reader reassess St. Paul in his historical context.

Available now at store.ancientfaith.com; again that is store.ancientfaith.com.

Voice of Steve: We're back now with The Lord of Spirits with Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick and Fr. Stephen De Young. If you have a question, call now at 855-237-2346; that's 855-AF-RADIO.

Fr. Andrew: Hey, welcome back, everybody. On this episode of The Lord of Spirits podcast, we are talking about the Apocalypse of Abraham, one of those—

Fr. Stephen: I just got an important communication from Amazon.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, really?

Fr. Stephen: They want me to organize my space with stylish bookcases.

Fr. Andrew: All right. I mean, if you need to go do that, um, go ahead!

Fr. Stephen: I don't know. I'd probably take too long.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I'm sure the heathen dogs would get in the way.

Fr. Stephen: Oh, yeah. If at all possible.

Fr. Andrew: We are going to take a couple of questions. So, waiting very patiently, all the way from the great, white, frigid north, Ontario, we have Amir. So, Amir, welcome to Lord of Spirits podcast.

Amir: Hello, Fathers, can you hear me?

Fr. Andrew: We hear you. Welcome.

Amir: Awesome, awesome. Yeah, so I have a question about— Are there any books that are dangerous to read? Because I was reading about St. Ignatius Brianchaninov—I hope I'm saying that right—but he was talking about this one monk on Mt. Athos, and he read The Imitation of Christ by I can't remember which Catholic author, but the monk became so delusional he was just deep into prelest; he was, like, chained up or whatever, feeling hot to the touch or whatever.

So I was wondering can that happen? Are there books where we should avoid to something like that or anything?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. I mean... Yeah, that was written by Thomas à Kempis, by the way, from the 15th century.

I mean, I am— Certainly there have been times in the history of the Church where books have been destroyed, particularly when you're talking during some of the Imperial Era, the Roman imperial Era, Byzantine Empire, but I don't recall—

I mean, Father, correct me if I'm wrong about this, but I don't recall conciliar decrees forbidding certain things from being read, like: "You must not ever read this, and that is a rule for all Christians" or something like that. I think—

Fr. Stephen: Well—

Fr. Andrew: Go ahead. Yeah, go ahead.

Fr. Stephen: You've got to contextualize it a little, right?

Fr. Andrew: Right, that's my thought. It's like—

Fr. Stephen: The vast majority of Christians couldn't read for most of history.

Fr. Andrew: Right, right, right.

Fr. Stephen: So it wasn't an issue.

Fr. Andrew: I think if someone came to me, I would say, "Well, what is it— Why do you want to read this book? Are you doing research? Are you planning to submit yourself to the wisdom or, you know, information, whatever, contained herein?"

Because the idea that reading Thomas à Kempis is going to kind of magically destroy your spiritual life—I don't think that that's true.

I mean, I don't know the particulars of the story about this Athonite monk and why why he did that, what he was hoping to accomplish by that. Obviously it was not a good idea for him.

Many people have read it and didn't fall into some kind of delusion or whatever, although I'm sure someone's going to write it and say, "Actually, every single person who has ever read..." No, I don't think that's true.

So, I mean, I would say— You know, it's just like anything— You know, on some level all things are lawful but not all things are expedient.

Is it a good idea? Is it worth your time? Is this something that's actually going to be valuable?

I mean, mind you, there are some kinds of literature that are completely unredeemable, like, you know, you should not read pornography—not because there's a rule against it, but because it's terribly bad for you.

It's just— We don't need a rule against it. It's like: Yes, there's a rule: Do not drink poison; that's a rule. No, you just shouldn't drink poison because it's going to kill you.

Like I said, I'm not aware of like "officially forbidden books." I don't know.

Fr. Stephen: Well, so, for the most part, 99% of the time this is a very personalized question that really

should be between a person and their spiritual father. It's not a: "Is this a book that should be read?" it's: "Is this a book I should be reading right now?"

And that's going to be different for different people. Like I famously, for decades now because I'm an old man, have read Nietzsche every Lent, and that's not like a spiritual discipline I recommend to people. [Laughter]

There's a lot of people who don't need to be reading Nietzsche, where it's either a waste of time or might be deleterious to them in some way. So that's not— My conscience has been seared as by a hot iron, so there's no further damage possible to my soul.

So 99% of the time it has to do with the person. And that's— I'm also leaving in the "has to do with the person" category books that are just frivolous, because, as we talked about with the whole clean and unclean, thing the opposite of holy is common, not evil.

And so reading novels that are just dumb entertainment because you need a break and you need relaxation as a human with human physical and mental limitations. like reading Charles Dickens, which is the literary equivalent of a sitcom

Fr. Andrew: Come on!

Fr. Stephen: It absolutely is.

Fr. Andrew: Massive shade!

Fr. Stephen: Charles Dickens would be writing sitcoms if he was alive today.

Fr. Andrew: That's probably true.

Fr. Stephen: They were serialized a chapter at a time in newspapers. Every sitcom has done an adaptation of A Christmas Carol, QED.

Fr. Andrew: It's just an indication of how far we've fallen. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: QED!

But just reading, you know, that's just fine. I'm not saying there's something wrong with that.

Now, even that you need to discuss with your spiritual father, because there's an issue of, you know, how much of your time are you spending doing that?

If you have a job that's mentally taxing and you want to come home for an hour and read some, you know, John Grisham novel or Stephen King novel or something, just to unwind at the end of the day, that might be totally spiritually healthy and fine for you.

There are other people who become obsessive about all kinds of things and [for] whom that might not be good, or they're going to be squirreling away way too much time that they should be using on other things doing that.

There are actually in the world evil books. There are. There there are literal evil books.

You will probably not run into them. You won't just run into them walking around.

This is going to come off as kind of a tease, but I'm not going to go further into the story, but just through a long series of events I was mailed a copy of an 18th-century German literal magical text—

Fr. Andrew: Wow! I'm not surprised.

Fr. Stephen: To dispose of it. And literally an hour of it sitting in my mailbox warped and rotted out the wood of my mailbox.

Fr. Andrew: How about that?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. I burned it, for the record.

So there are actual evil books out there that no one should read and no one should even own, but unless you're going out looking for, like, occult books—

and by "occult books," I don't mean the ones you find in the like astrology/occult section at Barnes and Noble that are about crystal power and stuff; those are just dumb. You will lose IQ points reading them, but, like, they're not going to bring demons into your home.

There are actually— I'm talking about actual evil books. You would have to go out and find them on purpose for the most part.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: And—don't. [Laughter] Like, don't do that!

Fr. Andrew: Seems obvious.

Fr. Stephen: But those books are and have been— These are the kind of books that like in the book of Acts when they say they're coming out and burning their books of sorcery and stuff, those are the kind of books I'm talking about.

That's not Dungeons & Dragons books; that's not rock albums. This is a whole other thing, and when you're around it you know it.

But that's, you know, this fraction of a percent of books in the world.

Fr. Andrew: Right, right. Well, does that help you, Amir?

Amir: That does. If I can just add one comment, if that's okay?

Fr. Andrew: Sure.

Amir: Yeah, so one thing about this question— I know it's a fake book but that's one book like the Necronomicon or whatever— I couldn't remember who it's by but that just reminds me of it, saying, "Oh, if I read this, I'm going to go crazy or whatever." But that's just what Father…

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. That's a fictional book, though.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, exactly.

Fr. Stephen: Now, my wife has a cookbook based on it called The NecroNomNomicon.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Of course she does!

All right. Thanks for calling, Amir. We're gonna take one more call, and we have Gregory calling from— at least his phone says he's from Jacksonville, Florida, although... Are you from Jacksonville?

Gregory: I am now from Jacksonville. I was from Colorado.

Fr. Andrew: You were from Colorado. Actually now that I look closely at the call board, your phone does say you're from Colorado, but you say that you're from Jacksonville—and we believe you.

Fr. Stephen: You've gone from the heights to the depths.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, boy. It's true.

Gregory: It's fitting to my question. I have a question about dragons.

Fr. Andrew: Okay! You've come to the right place.

Gregory: From the heights: you said the word "cherub" is translatable to "living creature," and I know that "seraph" means "serpent" or like "fiery," and I guess it just occurred to me— I cued into the idea that—

I've been always interested in St. George the Dragon-Slayer, and I'm of firm belief that what he fought was maybe— maybe not carbon-based, but it was definitely a dragon, like unquestionably a dragon.

So I'm wondering if maybe you can bring some clarification to the idea of, like, the falling of angels and the falling of higher angels, being capable of being, in a sense, living but also maybe not necessarily carbon-based but still we can interact with them and St. George can slay one.

And so I just want to see if you have anything that maybe you can share with me about that relationship.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean there's... Like, dragons... I mean, there's good dragons and bad dragons, you know. I mean, generally speaking, particularly in Western Christian tradition, most dragons are bad, although not all, but, you know...

And in the Orthodox tradition, yeah, there's bad dragons, right—the serpent, the devil, you know, all this kind of stuff—but there are also good dragons, you know, which are the obedient seraphim.

And you can even see— I was actually at a Greek monastery in California this past weekend, and on their iconostasis they had both good and bad dragons.

So you could tell the good ones because they were up on top of the iconostasis, like right next to the cross, you know, kind of honoring the cross and guarding the cross: so these were functioning like seraphim.

But then on— among other images on the holy doors, these incredible, beautiful, carved-wood holy doors, you see dragons that are being scared away by angels with swords. So clearly those are not good dragons because they're being attacked by angels.

So, you know, St. George is obviously functioning in that same way. He's functioning this kind of Michaelic way, like St. Michael the the Dragon-Slayer—kind of the original dragon-slayer in a lot of ways, as he's depicted in the book of Revelation and stuff.

So, I mean, Father, comment on this idea of of living creatures. I mean, does that—? I tend to think that, for instance, the reason that Western dragons have four feet is because of this kind of almost a half merger of seraphim with cherubim, because cherubim are usually depicted as four-footed, but seraphim either no feet or maybe just two.

Fr. Stephen: Right, well, yeah. So it's also worth mentioning that according to the synaxarion of his feast St. Michael is also a seraphim.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Dragon-on-dragon action.

Fr. Stephen: But, yeah, so what's really meant by "cherubim" is a Lamassu actually in the original context.

So, think, you know, it gets translated "zoë" like "living creature" in Greek, and then the faces, the four faces, are described.

But the idea is more of like a sphinx-like creature from our perspective, what we think of when we think of a sphinx, or a Lamassu, which is the Babylonian version that has like a human head and then like a lion body and wings.

So it's more a sort of typical theriomorph thing than a dragon thing. [Laughter]

And so like in— For Babylonians those were different, because the dragons were sort of the primordial gods, whereas the Lamassu, which would correspond more to the cherubim, were sort of the guardians, the throne guardians of the gods. So they're sort of— There was a definite rank system there.

They get merged a little more— So what you really have happening in the Hebrew Bible is that the Hebrew Bible is constantly interacting with neighboring traditions, and those traditions are not identical.

So, for example, a lot of the Hebrew Bible is interacting at the same time with Mesopotamian traditions and Egyptian traditions, and then also Canaanite traditions in addition, but—

So when you think about Egyptian traditions and the way serpents function in Egyptian tradition, it's much closer to the way that the Lamassu, the cherubim, function in Mesopotamian traditions, whereas the dragons are sort of elevated above that in Mesopotamian tradition.

And so I think that's why you get the places in the Hebrew Bible where you get this kind of equivalence and semi-merger between seraphim and cherubim, is because these different roles in Egyptian versus Mesopotamian tradition, and the Hebrew Bible interacting with both of those at the same time, if that makes sense.

But yeah it doesn't take either of those as being a hundred percent accurate. It doesn't pick one and say, "Okay, this is the one that's true." Both of those sets of pagan traditions aren't actually true; it's interacting with and trying to refine both of them, and so you get a little loss of clarity between those two sets of beings.

Fr. Andrew: Does that help clear things up for you, Gregory?

Gregory: There's a million follow-ups, but I'll try my best to retain those for maybe an email chain or something for the Facebook group.

Fr. Andrew: Okey-doke.

Gregory: I guess mainly— It was mainly just the idea of, I guess, cherubim and seraphim are mentioned as being the highest ranks among angels before their fall, and then after their fall you would assume that they still sort of hang on to this title as like biggest brute, you know.

And the idea of the the spiritual world and the physical world just being the world, like there is no one and then the other; there's just there is right: it's mostly the idea of what St. George accomplished to me is more than just like: Oh, he kicked a demon out by praying, and it's a little bit more violent, like physical on physical, I guess.

I'm just making sure I'm not like in a really bad wrong thinking with that.

Fr. Stephen: But it's also not like he killed one of the last surviving dinosaurs.

Fr. Andrew: Right.

Fr Stephen: That kind of total materialist kind of way of going about it from a Young Earth perspective, of like: Oh, just some random dinosaur had survived in Libya, and St. George killed it.

Fr. Andrew: I mean, it should be mentioned— St. George accumulates lots and lots of different elements to his story, but the one that's always the most important is that he's a martyr.

And to me that's— You know, there's so many so much in our hymns about the martyrs defeating demons by virtue of being martyred that I think that that's the key to interpreting what's going on there.

That doesn't mean that we shouldn't tell the story in the way that it's traditionally told—we absolutely should, absolutely should—but I think it's important, you know, as Fr. Stephen alluded to, to not make it like about: Oh, he was just this amazing soldier who killed a big lizard, you know—a demon lizard, but a lizard. But, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: There's a golden mean between these two extremes of just spiritualizing everything or just trying to turn everything into a modernist materialist kind of thing.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Thank you very much for calling. Okey-doke.

Well, where are we going now, Father? You want to talk more atonement stuff?

I mean, it's interesting. We did that episode on on atonement a while ago now, a few years ago now, and it's still one of the ones I think that a lot of people come back to and a lot of people have questions about and are really fired up about.

So, I mean, this text offers us the opportunity to go deeper and touch on some of it

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and touch on some of this.

Well, so, as we said, we've got a depiction in this text, again, from at least some quantity, some element of the Judaisms of the Second Temple period, who are, as we see in this text, looking for a kind of cosmic Day of Atonement to happen, a kind of cosmic atonement to happen.

And so what we want to do for the rest of this half is kind of talk about: well, why would they be looking for that and what would the shape of that cosmic atonement that they were looking for be?

And—spoilers—in the third half we're going to be talking about Christ's atonement and how that relates to this expectation, this Jewish expectation, of a cosmic atonement,

how those how those things intersect, the actual fulfillment of the atonement of it in Christ: how that intersects with the Jewish expectation.

So when we talk about kind of this cosmic Day of Atonement we're looking for, we're talking about a fulfilled Day of Atonement, so this is not something completely different than the Day of Atonement in Leviticus 16. It is not just like: Well, that thing stinks or it's dumb so we're going to get rid of it and we're going to replace it with something else. That's not what they're looking for.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] No, that's not what fulfillment means.

Fr. Stephen: This is "fulfilled" in the sense of filled full, like we've talked about before.

Fr. Andrew: This is its final form.

Fr. Stephen: Right, yeah. Taking the structure: taking the structure, the meaning, the effect, the power of the Day of Atonement and filling that up: the ultimate example, the ultimate instance of it. That's what we're talking about.

And so that's why we've been describing it as cosmic. This is not cosmic like it has to do with space; Silver Surfer does not make an appearance. This is cosmic in the sense of it has to do with the whole cosmos, the whole creation. So it's going to affect the whole creation.

And there are several reasons why people in the Second Temple period, especially in the first century BC, the first century AD when this text is written, why they're looking for that kind of thing.

And one big one is that Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the ritual that they've been doing since it was given in Leviticus 16 kind of points to its own limits.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Yeah!

Fr. Stephen: It's just limited by nature, and you can tell that by the practice of it. Practicing it is going to show you the limitations.

So, for example, we have to do it every year.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which suggests that it kind of wears off or is needed again, you know.

Fr. Stephen: Right, meaning it's not— It's limited in its effectiveness; it's limited in the duration of its effectiveness at least, that we have to keep doing this.

It's additional to the other sin-offerings and peace-offerings. So they've got this daily and weekly cycle of sin-offerings and peace-offerings going on to deal with sin, and then we also need to do the Day of Atonement once a year.

So clearly the Day of Atonement by itself is somewhat limited in terms of how it's able to deal with sin, which is the very problem it's there to deal with.

Now, that said, we have to be careful, and this is again a point that St. Paul always makes very carefully when he's talking about the fulfillment of things in the Torah, that this is not to say Yom Kippur was bad, the Day of Atonement was bad, that it didn't work. It did everything it was supposed to do, did everything Leviticus 16 said it would do.

The problem is not with the Day of Atonement; the problem is not with the Torah—the problem is with humans, the humans who are trying to practice it and failing.

So the reason you have to do it every year and the reason you have to do all these other sin-offerings and this is human sinfulness. The real problem is that the humans keep sinning: the people at the camp keep sinning; the Israelites keep sinning, and making this this perpetual thing that has to be dealt with.

And, remember what we're talking about when we talk about the Israelites keep sinning, because a lot of us were brought up in a Western Christian context, for lack of a better term, where we look at sinning as: oh, making bad choices, doing bad things: "Well, people just keep doing bad things. If they'd just knock it off..." [Laughter]

You know, that would make that would make confession really easy for me, if i could just, you know: people come and tell me what they did, and I could just go: "Well, knock it off!"

Fr. Andrew: "Stop sinning!"

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] "Just quit it!"

Fr. Andrew: I'm not about preaching sermons like that but... "Stop it!"

Fr. Stephen: "Come on, man!" [Laughter]

We all know that's not how it works, right, that sin is this power that has a hold of people, like it's described in the Apocalypse of Abraham, and that's getting that from the Hebrew Scriptures,

that sin is something that takes a hold of you, and once it's got a hold of you, you can't just stop; you can't just quit. You're not free to do that anymore when sin has you in its grip.

And so every year, the Day of Atonement is dealing with the sins that people have committed, which are like symptoms of the disease, and it's dealing with the effects and the stain and the taint of the sin, but the people remain infected with the sin itself.

So it would be like if you had a horrible disease and we treated your symptoms so that you could function, and, once a year, we cleaned out your whole house and burned all your bedding and clothes and gave you new so that you wouldn't spread the disease—

but never actually tried to cure your disease, because maybe we couldn't, and so we had to just keep treating it and treating it and treating it.

That wouldn't mean there was a problem with the treatments; that would mean there's a problem with this disease.

So we see that limit there.

But then, complicating that even further—and this is something that doesn't weigh on us in the way that it weighed on the Jewish people of the first century BC, the first century AD, is it's not just that this was true, but also they were still living under the consequences of that sin and the failure of their fathers to correctly manage that sinfulness with the Torah.

So the northern kingdom, most of the tribes of Israel, most of the people of Israel had been destroyed and were just gone, had been wiped out by the Assyrians, and those who were left, the Judeans, were the descendants of the tribe of Judah—and a few from Benjamin and some Levites—

they had all been exiled in Babylon, and while some of them had taken the opportunity to go back to Judea, a lot of them hadn't, and when they got back to Judea, it wasn't the same.

I mean, they built a new Temple, but the glory of God sort of didn't show up.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. They all kind of noticed that.

Fr. Stephen: The Hasmoneans managed to get independence for Judea briefly, but it was briefly, and then they were under the Romans, which was worse than the Greeks in a lot of ways.

And so that exile wasn't really over. The Jewish people who were left were scattered all over the world. The ones in Palestine were not doing well under the Romans. Exile hadn't truly ended.

And so this is something, and now— You know, at the time the Apocalypse of Abraham is getting written, the second Temple has been destroyed by the Romans, and the Romans are trying, deliberately trying, to de-Judaize the whole region.

Just building a third Temple and purifying the sanctuary with goat blood was not going to solve all this.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it was just a temporary measure to clean things up.

Fr. Stephen: Right, that wasn't going to fix everything, because building the second Temple and purifying it with blood had not fixed everything.

So it's not just: we have this disease and the Day of Atonement is treating it but not curing it; it's: we've actually deteriorated from this disease to a point that's near terminal, and because that treatment can't cure the disease, it also can't restore us to health and bring us back to life.

So they see how this isn't going to do it, and so, from that perspective, they then envision: Okay, well, what would do it? What version of this form—? We have this form, this shape, this outline, this pattern in the Day of Atonement: what version of that, what form of that could solve the problem, could restore us to health, could cure us, could do the job?

And that's where the images that we get, for example, in the Apocalypse of Abraham and in other Second Temple Jewish writings of this cosmic atonement—frankly, the picture we get—we were talking about this this morning—the picture we get in the New Testament of the atonement. That's where this comes in.

So we need to have a purification, but it needs to be a final purification, one that doesn't need to be repeated; it needs to be dealt with once and for all.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean— I think, especially if you think about where the Jews are at this point in their history—as you said, they were under the Greeks, they were under the Romans, and this is not great—but there's no clear— there's no set— there's no way— There's no way that things are going to be like they were under David.

Fr. Stephen: Without God directly intervening, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly. Like, the world is encroaching in on them; empires have taken an interest in them and have taken their spot over and over again. It's— And they cannot keep them at bay; they do not have the power for that.

So this idea of this idea of this final hope, it only makes sense that there's going to be this desire there.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so, yeah— And even just them starting to now practice the Torah, again, wouldn't cut it without God directly intervening.

So the Pharisaic position at this time was not: "Oh, if we all just start following the Torah perfectly we'll all be fine."

Fr. Andrew: No.

Fr. Stephen: The Pharisaic position was: "If we begin to follow the Torah and show our faithfulness to God, in contrast to our previous unfaithfulness, then God will intervene!"

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, yeah.

Fr Stephen: Right, that will bring about God's intervention.

So this isn't, like: Oh, well, the Pharisees thought just Torah-keeping was the solution to everything and, you know, then there were these other dissonant groups who thought God was going to apocalyptically intervene.

No, this is across the board. The question is: How will God intervene? Can we do something to bring about God intervening? And how will he intervene? Those are the discussions.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean— And this is one of the things I think that underlines, if you actually read the Torah— There's this especially this dispensationalist idea that the Torah is kind of, Track A for salvation, and then Jesus is—

Fr. Stephen: It's a means of personal salvation, yes.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, like: Did you read it, though? Does it say that, ever, anywhere in it, that these commandments are going to result in this?

It doesn't say that. It's just not in there.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. So even the Pharisees like this— The only people who thought God wasn't going to intervene directly were the Sadducees, and that's why they became Roman collaborators.

Fr. Andrew: Right, because this—

Fr. Stephen: That's why they got rich on this earth, because they're like: there's nothing else coming; we need to just do what we need to do here. [Laughter] This is kind of nihilistic, being a Sadducee.

Fr. Andrew: You live only once.

Fr. Stephen: That's why they don't exist anymore. [Laughter] They got what they wanted. Anyway...

Fr. Andrew: Or, as someone once, said, "They have their reward."

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Right. So there has to be this final intervention by God.

And in terms of that final intervention, that final atonement, that has to be a purification not just of a sanctuary or of a camp or of a nation but of the whole cosmos, the whole universe, the whole creation—has to be purified, meaning—

And what that means is the things that are done in the Day of Atonement have to be done finally and completely.

So the devil—Azazel, whatever we want to call him—and all the powers of evil, the demonic powers, have to be dealt with in a final way: bound, imprisoned, punished, done.

Sin as a power in the world— Sin came into the world through Adam, St. Paul summarizes for us in Romans 5: "Through one man sin came into the world."

Sin needs to be removed from the world, that power of sin. That thing that was stalking Cain needs to be shoved back in its box, which is the same box as Azazel the devil and his ilk need are going to be imprisoned in.

That needs to go away because then human beings will be free. Freedom is not being able to do what you want; freedom is being able to flourish.

Freedom is— The freedom to destroy yourself is not freedom.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Freedom to sin is not actual freedom; that's slavery.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean— It's like— I recently gave a sermon in which I was talking about how, you know, slavery to sin is is described as debt in some places in the New Testament and that continuing to sin even after you've been forgiven is like paying a debt that you don't have to pay.

You keep paying it as though you're still enslaved to that creditor, but you're not. You can— You're free. You don't have to do it anymore. You can live. You can live.

So, all right, well, that's the second half—

Fr. Stephen: And so—

Fr. Andrew: Oh, I'm sorry. Go ahead. Go ahead, Father.

Fr. Stephen: I was just going to say: so now, third half, we're going to talk about, okay, this is the shape of the expectation and a little bit of why they had it, and now we're going to talk in the third half about—with that in mind, let's look at Christ's atonement.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, indeed. All right! We're going to take our second and final break, and we'll be right back with this episode of The Lord of Spirits.

Voice of Steve: Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick and Fr. Stephen De Young will be back in a moment to take your calls on the next part of The Lord of Spirits.

Give them a call at 855-237-2346; that's 855-AF-RADIO.

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Voice of Steve: We're back now with The Lord of Spirits with Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick and Fr. Stephen De Young.

If you have a question, call now at 855-237-2346; that's 855-AF-RADIO.

Fr. Andrew: And we're back!

Fr. Stephen: —back when she, big famous commercial lady, just to slum it with us?

Fr. Andrew: Yes, that's right. I told people: "That was the voice of Trudi we just heard!"

Some people don't— Unless they've ever called, they may not know what Trudi actually sounds like.

Fr. Stephen: Or! Or, right, think about this: maybe if you hang around with us too long, either of us, you end up just becoming a disembodied voice.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Is that what happened to Steve?

Fr. Stephen: I think maybe, and now it happened to—

Fr. Andrew: I feel a little bit bad because sometimes when people meet Steve they will— and they hear him talk, like: "You're the Voice of Steve!" He's like: "I'm a person!"

So, guys, if you meet Steve, don't call him that; don't call it that.

Fr. Stephen: I mean, you know, we we all saw what this kind of invisible joke did to John Cena: he finally snapped. [Laughter] So I'm expecting a Steve Christoforou heel-turn, like, any day now. He's just gonna start lashing out at random children who are fans of his work.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] "It's just a TV show!" Yeah.

I also want to say— So I mentioned at the beginning, you know, everybody, get your tickets for Lord of Spirits-fest in October. I also just want to throw out, especially for those listening live, my final speaking engagement for this Lent is happening this weekend.

I'm going to be at St. John the Baptist Antiochian Orthodox Church in Post Falls, Idaho this weekend.

We're doing a retreat all day long, and it's free. So, people up there in eastern Washington, western northern panhandle of Idaho— which actually, by the way, apparently Father, includes our our YouTube guy, Simon.

Simon told me he's going to come to the retreat. So, everybody, if you come to the retreat you can meet Ancient Faith celebrity Simon Nelson, the YouTube guy.

Fr. Stephen: Will he be showing you his drawrings?

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah, so bring your YouTubes, and you can have Simon sign them right there at the retreat. I mean, that should be pretty great, way up there in northern Idaho.

Fr. Stephen: Once again, masterful self-shill.

Fr. Andrew: Thank you. Thank you very much.

Okay, so, what's in the third half, Father? Isn't this really all just about penal substitutionary atonement?

Fr. Stephen: Well, we're gonna do a PSA about PSA.

Fr. Andrew: Nice. I mean, it's low-hanging fruit, but thank you.

Fr. Stephen: It is, yeah. We didn't get any calls yet? I'm kind of surprised.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I turned them all off.

Fr. Stephen: We will now.

Fr. Andrew: I've had it with people. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Once you start talking about penal substitutionary atonement, people go crazy. [Laughter]

Yeah, so I'd like to think that us talking about, addressing penal substitutionary atonement at this point would be beating a dead horse, but this horse is very alive.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, totally, yes.

Fr. Stephen: And kicking, like, despite the best efforts of a growing number of people, even within Protestantism now, to point out that that dog don't hunt.

But this is going to be less—as may have happened in certain previous episodes—Fr. Andrew and I using PSA as a piñata and more by way of clarification. There's gonna be a little bit of hitting it with a stick.

Fr. Andrew: I mean, that's pretty fun.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, and ironic when you think about it. [Laughter]

But one of the first things we could say in the context of what we're talking about in this episode is the kind of cosmic atonement we were just talking about that comes out of the Hebrew Scriptures and this expectation and this need felt by Jewish people in the first century BC, first century AD.

Penal substitution and penal substitutionary atonement doesn't do a cosmic atonement like that. It fundamentally doesn't answer that the needs—those needs.

Right, now you can say: Well, okay, the New Testament just completely redefines atonement and blows all their expectations out of the water—maybe, except for the fact that penal substitutionary atonement is less full than what they were expecting, not more.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, the expectation is for a cosmic cleanup, not—

Fr. Stephen: And that's not what penal substitution does.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, in fact, for an individual debt fix.

Fr. Stephen: Right. Penal substitution does nothing about the cosmos or creation

Fr. Andrew: Right, because it's—

Fr. Stephen: —at all.

Fr. Stephen: Right? Because penal substitution is completely individualistic.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, like, where's Israel in all of that? It's just not even in the picture even.

Fr. Stephen: Community of Israel, all that, it's totally out of the picture. It's just a question of what Christ's atonement is thought to do in the case of certain individuals, not even all individuals usually: certain individuals, but has nothing to do with creation, nothing to do with sin as a power; it's just a question of sins and punishment.

So, that said— So it sort of fails that test, so people will say, like— What I mean by this is people will will make this argument sometimes—and I don't think it's an accurate argument. I think if you study who the Messiah was in Jewish expectation, I don't think the argument i'm about to make holds water; the dog doesn't hunt

But you will hear people say—who haven't really studied it, and if you want to study it you can start by listening to our episode on messiahship—but they'll say, "Well, okay, there was this expectation at the time of Jesus of this kind of political Messiah, à la John Hyrcanus or one of the Hasmoneans, one of one of the Maccabean rulers, who would come in and overthrow the Romans, but Jesus comes as the actual Messiah, and he blows that out of the water; he does so much more than that."

So even though I don't think that's correct about Jewish expectation, the argument itself at least kind of makes sense, because you have a small expectation: "Oh, this person is going to set up a political kingdom on earth over a particular strip of land," versus what Christ actually did which is so much bigger than that.

But here, with atonement, the expectation was for this cosmic thing that would radically transform the entire creation, purifying it from sin and evil, dealing with the demonic powers once and for all, all of these things, and instead we got: "Well, okay, God isn't going to punish you, individual person, for the individual sins you have committed."

That's far more narrow and small and finite than the expectation. That's the opposite of fulfillment. That's a denuded kind of thing.

But we also— We need to— One of the things that I feel like we haven't done adequately when we've talked, when we've critiqued penal substitution before, is clarify exactly what it is, because almost every discussion I enter into about this with anyone, including Orthodox people, shows me that most people have no idea what it is.

And so they'll either say, like, "It seems right to me" or "I reject it" based on— And what they're actually talking about isn't what penal substitutionary atonement is.

So we want to kind of here clarify what it is.

Fr. Andrew: Who originally defines that? Is that like—? Is that a John Calvin thing? Is that—? I mean, who's really laying that out?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, it comes out of the Calvinist strand of Reform tradition.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, okay.

Fr. Stephen: Now, previous to that, and what still holds in the Roman Catholic Church, give or take, I mean— There's a really real problem of pointing at anything and defining what actual Roman Catholic doctrine is now, as exemplified by the fact that anytime we or anyone else not Roman Catholic tries to do it, we're always told we're wrong.

Fr. Andrew: Could you? Have you considered you might just always be wrong, Father? [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, well it's impossible! It is impossible for a non-Roman Catholic to correctly even define— Not, like, they might have a valid argument against it, but even define what it is, even describe what it is: you can't do.

Fr. Andrew: It is, I mean. It's frankly— It is a moving target, especially over the last 150 years. It's just—

Fr. Stephen: Right, because if I quote the Council of Trent, somebody will point at something else. If I quote the Catechism of the Catholic Church, "Oh, well, that's not authoritative; that's just suggested." If I— right? You can go on and on forever, right?

Fr. Andrew: But anyway—

Fr. Stephen: —if you want to play that game. At any time I have actually just nailed it beyond reproach I just get called mean, so I'm not even bothering anymore.

Fr. Andrew: I mean, okay, you are mean, but—

Fr. Stephen: Yes, I'm a mean man. Cruel and vicious at my core. I have a wonderful community of people around me in my parish, but they are—

Fr. Andrew: They're the best, and you are—

Fr. Stephen: I'm you are an overlord who is lording it over them every Sunday.

Fr. Andrew: —for their sins, yeah.

But, okay, like, is it related to—? I mean, there is this medieval…?

Fr. Stephen: Right, and that's what holds Catholicism—

Fr. Andrew: ...satisfaction?

Fr. Stephen: At least. To some extent at least, they've never rejected Anselm of Canterbury, whom they consider a saint, and Cur Deus Homo, so satisfaction theory is what prevailed for many centuries at least, within Roman Catholicism.

Fr. Andrew: And it's baked into the whole purgatory model, too, which is like: your sins can be forgiven, but you still have to offer satisfaction to God for those sins, so you're going to kind of toast for a while, and then you—

Fr. Stephen: Well, that's— Now, you see, you're going down too far into the— Then we've got to explain temporal guilt and stuff.

Fr. Andrew: I know, I know, I know, okay.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, we don't want to go that far down the rabbit-trail, but—

Fr. Andrew: Leave that for another day, but it is there.

Fr. Stephen: Right, the idea of satisfaction theory is: There's a problem between God and humans, and that's humans sinning. And human sinning is an affront to God whom they're sinning against, and that situation needs to be made right: there needs to be justice; the situation has to be resolved somehow.

And in the idea of satisfaction is that Christ offers himself as a sacrifice to the Father, the Father is pleased with that sacrifice, and so, because he is pleased with the sacrifice that Christ offers him, he accepts that sacrifice, and things are are made right between God and man. His need for justice is satisfied by the sacrifice of Christ.

And then the benefits of that are given to individual human persons in a variety of ways. We won't go down all those rabbit-trails—

Fr. Andrew: Sure, sure, because that's not what this show is about.

Fr. Stephen: But there is no element here of, as the "penal" in penal substitution, of God punishing Christ for people's particular sins.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, you know, you flipped off your brother the other day and so Jesus has to experience this!

Fr. Stephen: You just got a window into Fr. Andrew's home life by the example that immediately sprang to mind.

Fr. Andrew: Actually, I don't think I've seen my kids flipping each other the bird, thank God. I'm not saying they're always nice to each other—

Fr. Stephen: You were thinking about Clyde? Anyway, so...

So that's a different thing than penal substitutionary atonement. The Roman Catholic Church has never, traditionally, believed in penal substitutionary atonement.

In fact, built into— You read Roman Catholic doctrinal expressions about this, they talk about how one drop of Christ's blood, him offering one drop of his blood, would have been sufficient as a sacrifice to make atonement for the whole world, because he's offering it as a pleasing sacrifice to God, so there's no kind of idea—

This is within a better understanding—I don't think it's perfect, because it's a little different than the Orthodox view, but a better, still a better, in the 11th century, understanding of sacrifice, for example, than what you find later, especially in Protestant circles.

So that's not penal substitution. Penal substitution comes about within the Reformed tradition because it has to. It has to.

You can't really hold to penal substitution and not be a Calvinist. It doesn't work.

Because what penal substitution says is that there is a punishment for the particular sins committed by particular people—

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, like, it's a crime and punishment idea.

Fr. Stephen: —and Christ, in the past, took the punishment for particular sins committed by particular people. And therefore, those people are not punished for those sins.

Meaning, you have to accept that L in TULIP, limited atonement, to really believe in penal substitution.

Now, you could be a universalist. As we've pointed out before, when we talked about universalism on the show, someone like David Bentley Hart is basically a liberal Calvinist. He's like a Barthian Calvinist.

Fr. Andrew: It's all just modernism.

Fr. Stephen: Barth was Reformed. He's a Calvinist, who says just basically everybody's elect. [Laughter] You just say, "Every human is elect!" Or you have to say some subset of humans.

But it does not make sense for anyone to say, "Christ took the punishment for sins XYZ committed by person A, but they didn't accept Jesus, and so, now God is going to also punish them for those same sins." That doesn't make sense!

So, if you're going to believe in penal substitutionary atonement, you have to be some kind of Calvinist.

The original Arminians—not Armenians: Arminians—

Fr. Andrew: Although there are Arminian Armenians.

Fr. Stephen: There probably are.

Fr. Andrew: And they can be wearing Armani.

Fr. Stephen: And there's an Armenian comedian...

But, right, the original Arminians believed— did not believe that Christ— Well, not— I shouldn't say the original Arminians. The original remonstrant Arminians did, but that's not who we think of as Arminians. Who we think of as Arminians are Wesleyan Arminians, and the Wesleyan Arminians—

Wesley did not say that Christ died for everyone's sins in a penal substitution way. The distinction between him and a Calvinist was the Calvinist said God chose, according to his will, according to his good pleasure, whose sins Christ would die for,

whereas the Arminian, the Wesleyan Arminian, said God knew in advance who would accept Christ, and so Christ died only for those sins.

But either way, you got the limited atonement part.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: So that doesn't get you out of that.

Wesleyan Arminians are sort of like three-point, maybe four-point Calvinists, honestly.

So that's what we're talking about. We're talking about PSA to some extent.

Now, that is not Orthodox. The Orthodox Church does not, nor has it ever, taught penal substitutionary atonement, despite what you may have heard from some catechumen/inquirer online, or self-appointed teacher online, despite what you may have heard from some very well-meaning priests and monks, and maybe even some bishops somewhere.

Well, why would they say things like that, then?

Well, I'm not talking about cranks on the internet, right? Who can explain their wacky behavior?

I'm talking about the well-meaning priests and monks and maybe even bishops somewhere. What's going on there? Why are they saying that?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it's because there are certain kind of shorthands that are being used to define penal substitutionary atonement that aren't actually what it really is, traditionally.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so— And this is on both sides.

This is on both sides, in the sense that this isn't just these well-meaning Orthodox people. There's a lot of Protestants who would say would say that they do believe in penal substitutionary atonement who don't actually understand what it is, or who, when you explain to them what it is, they're like: "Oh, no, I don't believe that."

So just saying Christ died for our sins: that is not penal substitutionary atonement, necessarily.

Fr. Andrew: Sure, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: That's open to a wide variety of interpretations of in what sense Christ died for our sins.

Even saying Christ died in our place in some way is not necessarily penal substitution.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, it's sort of substitutionary on some level, but—

Fr. Stephen: Right, or on our behalf, which is actually closer to what the Greek says in those passages: he died on our behalf, he died with benefit to us.

That's not penal substitution, okay.

So here's the core; here's the very core of this and why the Orthodox Church has never accepted it.

And this is very clear in the teaching of Calvin and the Calvinist tradition.

We've talked before on the show about how St. John of Damascus distinguishes between two kinds of death, and this is a basic theological distinction in Orthodox theology. He isn't saying this to innovate; he's saying this in his expositing on theology and summarizing the theology of the Fathers before him.

So this is— He considers this basic Christian theology, that there's two kinds of death. "Death" is used in the Scriptures in our Tradition in two different senses.

One of them is physical death. Physical death is when the human soul is separated from the human body.

The other way it is used is to refer to spiritual death, when the human soul is separated from God, which is the source of life, and that's why it can be called death.

For humans, when God says to Adam, "On the day you eat of the tree you will surely die," he's talking about spiritual death, and that happens to Adam on the day he eats of the tree.

His soul is, to some extent, cut off from God who is the source of life; he's cut off from the tree of life.

And the effect that has is that it eventually brings about his physical death, and his soul is separated from his body until the bodily resurrection.

He defines those.

So you will sometimes hear folks, Orthodox and otherwise, who are trying to defend the idea of penal substitution who will say, "Well, Christ died in our place," and they'll want to say, "Well, no I'm talking about physical death," because this is people who accept Chalcedonian Christology.

The claim we're making when we say Christ died on the cross, or even more provocatively God died on the cross—the claim we're making is not that the divine nature somehow "died"—"died" not never— "Death" never means "ceased to exist," you notice here. It never means anything like that.

What we are saying is our Lord Jesus Christ is a divine Person who takes upon himself human nature; that human nature includes a human soul and a human body, and so Christ allows—because he does it voluntarily—his human soul to be separated from his human body.

Fr. Andrew: That's what death is. That's what physical death is.

Fr. Stephen: That's what death means for everyone—is that your human soul is separated from your human body.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and, you know, I mean, it's at least a very natural question if people say, "Well, Christ died in our place," and it's like: "Well, but doesn't everyone still die?"

Fr. Stephen: Right! And so if someone wants to say, "Well, that's what we're talking about; we're talking about physical death"—I'm still going to die a physical death.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah so there wasn't— He didn't do it in your place. He didn't die so—

Fr. Stephen: Right, he didn't do it instead of me. I'm still going to die a physical death, right?

And we say this in the prayer that priests say often, preparing for liturgy and in liturgy, that Christ's human soul is separated from his human body, his human body goes into the tomb, his human soul descends into Hades to harrow it, and as God he is everywhere present and filling all things.

He is with the thief in paradise, he is on the throne with the Father and the Spirit, etc., etc. That's what we're saying about Christ.

So for this to work— for penal substitution to work, fundamentally—and this is the claim Calvin and the Calvinist tradition make—Christ has to experience spiritual death on the cross.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which is the separation of the soul from God.

Fr. Stephen: Right. Christ's human soul has to be separated from God.

This is what Calvin and those of the Calvinist tradition who teach penal substitutionary atonement say happened.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and that's why you get some people who will say, "Well, on the cross God turns his back on Jesus."

Fr. Stephen: "And where he suffered hell on the cross."

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and they'll misunderstand— they'll misquote, you know, Christ's reference to Psalm 21/22, where he's actually referring to the whole psalm and not just to one line.

Fr. Stephen: And that claim is heretical.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because, I mean, what does that mean? The Father is separated from the Son? Like, what does that mean about who God is? How—? Is he not God anymore? I mean, what's going on? It's just nuts.

Fr. Stephen: You either have to be a Trinitarian heretic or a Christological heretic to hold to it.

Fr. Andrew: Or you could be—

Fr. Stephen: Or you could be William Lane Craig and go for the hat trick. [Laughter]

But if you're not a Christian, like William Lane Craig is not, you could just make up a religion and do whatever you want theologically.

And I know that sounds harsh when I say that, but I have, through a slight proxy, on a livestream, questioned William Lane Craig about this, and his argument to defend his view of penal substitution with Christ—

He appealed to the fact that he is a self-described neo-Apollinarian—Apollinarianism being a condemned heresy—with his Christology: he doesn't believe Jesus has a human soul.

That was his answer to me questioning him about this, so I'm not being harsh; I'm taking him at his word, that he has heretical views of these things that put him outside of Christianity according to the— not like the later Ecumenical Councils that Protestants don't like— like the first one, like the second one.

The ones that produced the Nicene Creed, the ones that supposedly all Christians agree on, he doesn't.

But, I mean—and I'm going to be blunt here, again. When you read the Reformed tradition and they're talking about this issue, most of them opt to become Christological heretics in that they basically adopt a Nestorian Christology, where Christ's humanity and divinity are separate, at least on the cross;

that Christ's humanity is in some way separated from his own divine nature, from his own Godhood, in order to make this penal substitution thing work.

So this is a theological debacle.

And so to those well-meaning clergy and monastics and stuff out there, if somehow you hear this, who go around saying things like: "Oh, no, we accept penal substitutionary atonement, because we think Christ died for our sins," stop saying that. That's not what penal substitutionary atonement means.

You don't believe this. We don't co-sign this.

We do not think it is possible that Christ's human soul could be, in any way, for any period of time, separated from God. Not possible, not in our Tradition.

And if you're paying attention to the liturgics in Lent and Holy Week and everything, our Tradition over and over again says the opposite, that it's kind of amazing that Christ was able to be dead for as long as he was,

because it was impossible for him as God to see decay, for his soul to remain separate from his body for that long is itself wondrous and miraculous.

But he had something he was doing in harrowing Hades and in fulfilling the Sabbath resting in the tomb.

So we need to just leave off with this. We don't believe this. No one should believe this.

Protestants who aren't Calvinists definitely should not believe this, and even Calvinists—some of them are coming around—you don't need this!

This penal substitutionary atonement, it's not coming out of the Bible and it breaks the rest of your logic. It requires you to believe things about who Christ is and about the Holy Trinity that you know are wrong in other contexts. So let's leave that off.

So, enough! Enough negativity. You know me, I hate negativity.

Fr. Andrew: Why are you such a downer, Father?

Fr. Stephen: I hate negativity!

Fr. Andrew: So negative.

Fr. Stephen: Love to focus on the positive.

What are the the positive images we get? Well, it's related to what we were talking about in the second half.

We have two main positive images of what Christ does in his death and, oh yeah, resurrection—we'll get to that in a second [Laughter]—and those are related to two different feasts in the Hebrew Bible.

The first one is Pascha, Passover, Pesach. Passover: and what's happening in Passover? We've talked about this before the show, so we won't belabor it now.

There's no penal substitution going on there at all. What's going on at the Passover is manumission: people being set free from slavery in Egypt, and the judgment, as God himself says on the Passover night: the judgment of the Egyptian gods: the judgment being rendered against the demonic powers and the people being set free.

And this is fulfilled in Christ, filled full in that in Christ we're not just set free from living as slaves to some Egyptians on this earth, but we're set free from the powers of sin and death.

And the judgment that's rendered is not just against— not just the Egyptian gods being exposed as being not really gods, but all of those dark powers being defeated once and for all.

The other feast is what we've been talking about tonight: the Day of Atonement.

And again you go back to our atonement episodes: nothing about penal substitution going on there at all.

In Leviticus 16, you have two elements: expiation (sin being taken away) and the purification and purgation of the sanctuary, the purification, and the sins being sent—returned to sender—back to their origin, back to Azazel

And the cosmic atonement we were talking about in the second half is the fulfillment of that. Christ accomplishes that. He purifies, according to 1 John 2:2, the whole world that was previously under the power of the evil, one according to 1 John 5, but now has been purified.

He defeats the power of sin, he defeats, destroys the works of the evil one as 1 John says, and accomplishes this cosmic Day of Atonement.

And this is summed up in a very simple phrase uttered by St. John the Forerunner when he says about Christ, "Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world."

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because "Lamb of God"—

Fr. Stephen: He has smushed these together.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, "Lamb of God" is Passover language; "taking the sins away," that's Atonement Day language.

Fr. Stephen: Right. These are brought together in the one Person of Christ and in his action of atonement, which includes the Cross—doesn't begin there; as St. Athanasius tells us, it begins when he's conceived, which we celebrated a couple days ago—and doesn't end at the Cross either, but continues into and through the Resurrection, through the Ascension and his enthronement, on into his glorious appearing.

But I want to pause for a minute to talk about: "Hey, what about the Resurrection?" because I think there is a real imbalance in Western Christian thought, because the questions Fr. Andrew and I get in response to us talking about atonement—

Fr. Andrew: And I'll say, by the way— I know you're about to finish the sentence, but, like, the YouTube chat has been lit up with exactly these kinds of questions. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. "Well, what about the Cross, then?" "Well, what does the Cross do, then?" It's: the cross, the cross, the cross, the crucifixion, the cross, the crucifixion—where that's the central point; that's the end-all and be-all, like everything's accomplished right there: it's done.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which is kind of funny.

Fr. Stephen: What about the resurrection?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I'll say, by the way, just to telegraph: our next episode is going to be about the Cross, so, you know, come back later.

Fr. Stephen: We are going to get— We're going to get right to that question.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, exactly. But it's interesting, you know, when Jesus says, "It is finished," he's not dead yet. You ever notice that, guys? I just want to put that out there!

Fr. Stephen: And we'll talk more about that, what that means, next time.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, exactly.

Fr. Stephen: But we don't stop at Good Friday. In fact, we just celebrated the Sunday of the Cross, and

it's smack in the middle of Lent. Lent is not preparing for the cross; Lent is not preparing for Good Friday. Lent is preparing for the celebration of the Resurrection.

So people are stopping a little too early in their thinking, because when St. Paul talks about Christ's death and resurrection, he sometimes refers to the cross, but when St. Paul refers to the cross, if you read closely and follow what he's saying, the cross for him includes the whole sequence of events.

The cross includes Christ's whole life and all the suffering and everything he endured, leading up to the actual crucifixion, but it also includes his resurrection.

And the cross part, the part about being dead, the part about suffering—that part we've already got.

We're already spiritually dead. Israel was already dead. They were dry bones in a valley—see Ezekiel, which we read right before Pascha! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, as part of the Holy Saturday series of services.

Fr. Stephen: Already dead! We got that part! What we're looking for is the renewed life, the new start, the renewal of our nature, the freedom that comes on the other side right of Passover, of Pascha.

That's what we're looking for, that's what we're hoping for, that's what our trust is in, that's what we're preparing to celebrate.

And so if you just stop at the Cross and try and view that as the end-all and be-all of atonement and of salvation, you're really missing a lot of the core of Christianity,

which actually surrounds the fact that Christ, you know—I'm saying this early, but Christ is risen! He still is, even when it's during Lent. It's not like he stops being risen

That's at the core of the Christian proclamation.

All kinds of Jewish people and lots of atheists and lots of people of other religions—not Muslims, but just about everybody else—acknowledges that Christ was crucified.

What separates Christians is that we believe he's risen.

So we should think about that a little, and if our mind and our theological thinking can't move through the crucifixion to the resurrection, we've got a blockage there that needs to be cleared in our thinking.

But, that said, we'll get into the Cross more next episode, as Father—

Fr. Andrew: Yeah.

Well, to wrap things up briefly here at the end...

I mean, I think, especially in looking at this text which has this profound hope for the atoning of all things, that is to say, the cleaning up of all things, and God's intervention and pushing the devil away, you know, from from this world and sending the sin back to him and all this kind of stuff—

I mean, I think that that's very applicable for this moment in in human history where many of us—maybe not the whole world, but certainly many of us here in the West, and particularly many of us in America—often, you know, at this moment I think many of us feel like the world is closing in around us.

I hear people say all the time, "The world is crazy." Whether that has always been the case or whatever doesn't matter too much because we're having that experience. People feel like our society is cracking.

And one of the reactions that I see people have is despair. And, you know, despair, for some people, that leads them over the edge and they'll take their own life or whatever.

But also what despair does is it can be nihilistic and harm other people.

So despair is kind of the basis for terrorism, you know, for mass shootings and all this kind of stuff.

I mean, this is why so many people who commit these mass shootings, the last person they shoot is themselves, because in some sense they feel that the world has fallen to pieces, that there's nothing there for them.

And Christianity absolutely has critique for the world, absolutely. Of course it has critique for the world.

But what it has more than anything else is hope.

Christ didn't come into this world to condemn it, but to save it. That is explicitly in the Scripture.

Again, that doesn't mean there's no critique. It doesn't mean that sin isn't condemned. But fundamentally, what the message of Jesus is to the world is a message of hope, of rescue from all of this darkness, of rescue from slavery to sinful passions, which is really about involvement with demonic powers.

And one of the things I like about the text we talked about tonight is that it makes that spiritual warfare very, very explicit. I mean, you actually see, you know, this demonic being Azazel, who is essentially the devil in a number of these kinds of texts.

You see him on the scene and being battled against, interestingly, by Abraham. Yes, God, his angels, and so forth are all involved, but Abraham is the locus of all of that.

And our call is to be—sons of Abraham. Our call is to be, you know, his offspring, to use the language of St. Paul.

And if we are Abraham's offspring, meaning if we are the faithful, if we do as Abraham did, then that means that we inherit the promises to become like the stars, to become like the angels, because that's what was promised to Abraham from the beginning and that's what salvation ultimately is. It's becoming equal to the angels, as Jesus says.

And so I, you know, even though maybe this is not one of the greatest hits of the Apocrypha, although,

I mean, I think this is a really interesting text— It may not be the one that, you know, people clamor about most. I still find it absolutely fascinating and very hopeful.

You know, it tells this story in a particular way that I think connects with us here in the 21st-century West very well, not just in terms of the assessment of how we feel the world is at this moment, but also in terms of: Okay, here's what we do.

And, you know, if you're going to imitate Abraham in this particular text, it's about offering those sacrifices, both in the literal sense of participating in the Divine Liturgy, but also in the broader sense of offering ourselves as living sacrifices, as turning over what it is that we have to God, so that can be transformed and made salvific for us.

Yeah, so I really enjoyed this discussion. And even though this is a text not written by a Christian, obviously Christians can get a whole lot out of it, a lot of beautiful, beautiful stuff.

So, yeah. Thank you. Thank you, Father, for guiding this conversation.

So what is it that you have to say here at the end of all things?

Fr. Stephen: Well, hopefully not. [Laughter] I don't know that I'm ready for that.

Fr. Andrew: All these things.

Fr. Stephen: I should be more ready than I am.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: But yeah, so... I know this, what I'm about to talk about, is something I've talked about probably even fairly recently on the show, but I find myself in real life, meaning as a priest dealing with a group of parishioners and trying to help them and guide them and just family members and everybody in general, I find myself having to say this over and over and over again,

which tells me that probably if I say it over this microphone to people, there's probably at least some folks out there who need to hear it again, even if I have talked about it recently.

The Christianity that those of us, at least in the United States—again I can only speak about that experience, because I haven't had any others—the Christianity we grew up around came from one of two categories, largely.

And, you know, people who want to defend those types of Christianity will call this a caricature. I don't care anymore what you want to say about what I say um.

But this— What I'm about to say, even if you think it's a caricature of what they're trying to teach, this is what a lot of the people within these traditions have actually received.

So it's very easy to defend some tradition based on what's in the books and what's, you know— what we would mean to say, but I'm talking about what the people whom I encounter, the people who talk to me about spiritual things, the people who come to me and give confessions:

what they've received from the Christianity they grew up around, how that has shaped them, how they think because of it.

And if people, representatives of those groups, want to say that's not what they meant to teach, cool—but maybe some introspection on why that's not what people are receiving.

Anyway. What people have received comes into two categories.

One is sort of the "Smile and Bob Shuler" school of: "God loves you just the way you are, and you don't have to do anything; just don't worry about it. Just smile and be happy and listen to the hymns of your choice that you'll enjoy."

That worked— I'm going to again be very blunt. That worked really well with Boomers. That seemed to answer something they needed to hear. Maybe they they're a generation who grew up with very dissatisfied perfectionist parents, and so just hearing you're fine just the way you are was what they needed,

but that doesn't work on subsequent generations because subsequent generations are more realistic—or nihilistic, depending on your point of view—and know there's something deeply wrong with themselves and with the world around them.

So just telling them over again, "No, no, you're fine; everything's fine; everything—" it doesn't work. That's why those kind of churches are all empty now.

The other school of thought is pretty much the exact opposite. It's: "God doesn't really love you. In fact, he's pretty angry with you. And he's getting ready to send you to hell."

And the only way to avoid that is, depending on your tradition right, for you to love him nonetheless really sincerely—and there's a rabbit-hole to go down: How sincere am I ever, really?—

and/or do that plus live your life and live your life in a certain way and follow certain rules, which will differ based on tradition, and which you will inevitably fail at.

That second one is most of the people whom I interact with on spiritual matters. And it's almost like they've been taught and they've internalized that their life in this world is this sort of really horrible reality show, almost like Squid Game,

and, like, God is about weeding out contestants and narrowing it down to this faithful few, and everybody else goes to hell, goes to eternal punishment, except for this faithful few,

who, again, depending on your tradition, he may just pick, or, you know, they're the ones who really did it right; they're the ones who really loved him sincerely, or they're the ones who really live their life the right way.

And any way you slice those things, most people, again, are realistic enough that when they look at their life they don't see a lot of evidence in their life and their actions that they're one of the people God picked,

or they don't see a lot of evidence of their life that they're really sincere about following God,

or they don't see a lot of evidence of their life that they're really toeing the line and living the life they know they should be living,

meaning most people are walking around, like, religious people—walking around thinking that they're probably going to end up in hell, that God is probably mad at them most of the time, and that he's looking for them to make some misstep, so—boom—they can get nailed.

Also, most atheists are walking around doing the same thing. They're protesting constantly that there is no God, because they can't deal with that guilt and stuff that they've internalized. They can't live like that.

No one can live like that, but their route to trying to live like that and deal with the cognitive dissonance is just to deny that any of it's true, over and over and over again, publicly, loudly, to anyone who will listen, whereas the religious people are just in this kind of quiet desperation of: How do I figure this out?

So, let me reiterate again—and penal substitution plays a big part in this; that's why I'm bringing it up in this context—God loves you.

Jesus said so, St. John's Gospel: the Father himself loves you. He is not angry at you. He does not want to destroy you for your sins. There is no power of justice that commands him to do so. No one commands him to do anything.

He loves you. He wants you to find salvation, but salvation is a thing you have to actually do.

He wants you to do it. The Bible says so. "God wills that all men be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth."

But you have to do it. He empowers you to do it. He forgives you when you mess up trying to do it. He heals you when you damage yourself, trying to do it and failing.

He is entirely on your side. The God who created the universe is entirely on your side. And the saints are on your side. And the Church is on your side. Everyone is on your side.

Christ is advocating for you. Everything is set up for us.

When St. Paul says to us, "Continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling," you don't stop there, like Kierkegaard did. Read the next verse: "Because it is God who is working in you, to will and to do, according to his pleasure."

We continue on and we work out our salvation because we know that God is on our side, and empowering us to do it and loving us and loving other people through us.

We need to pray about that. We need to pray it. We need to repeat it. We need to kind of imitate what the atheists are doing: we need to say it out loud; we need to say it to each other; we need to say it to everyone who will listen.

That God loves you and wants you to find salvation, wants you to be healed, wants you to be set free from sin. He wants all these things for you.

That doesn't mean you have nothing to do. That doesn't mean you're fine just the way you are. You know you're not fine just the way you are. But it means that he is there to help you to grow, to be transformed into the person who you need to be and want to be, the person he created you to be for eternity.

That's the actual message of Christianity. Don't accept any substitutes for that, ever, at all, for any reason. That's what I have to say.

Fr. Andrew: Amen. Well, that is our show for tonight, everyone. Thank you very much for listening.

If you didn't happen to get through to us live, we'd still like to hear from you.

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Fr. Stephen: And join us for our live broadcast on the second and fourth Thursdays of the month at 7 p.m. Eastern, 4 p.m. Pacific.

I sailed the sea of desolation and dropped my anchor there. / I plumbed the depths of isolation, walked its length, and was not scared.

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Went from end to end to end, and then from there I went again, / the road that only this one knows, off to nowhere: here I go.

Fr. Andrew: Thank you. Good night. God bless you.

Voice of Steve: You've been listening to The Lord of Spirits with Orthodox Christian priests, Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick and Fr. Stephen DeYoung, a listener-supported presentation of Ancient Faith Radio.

"And I beheld, and I heard the voice of many angels round about the throne, and the beasts and the elders, and the number of them was ten thousand times ten thousand, and thousands of thousands, saying with a loud voice,

'Worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power and riches and wisdom and strength and honor and glory and blessing' " (Revelation 5:11-12).