Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick: Good evening, giant-killers, dragon-slayers! You are listening to The Lord of Spirits podcast. My co-host, Fr. Stephen De Young, is with me from Lafayette, Louisiana, and I am Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick in Emmaus, Pennsylvania. If you’re listening to us live, you can call in at 855-AFRADIO; that’s 855-237-2346. Matushka Trudi is taking your calls tonight, and we’re going to get to those in the second part of our show.

Tonight we’re talking about baptism. I’m very happy to let you know that this is the first part of a series on the holy mysteries of the Orthodox Church. This may be at least seven episodes, maybe more, maybe less.

Fr. Stephen De Young: This could be the rest of the show. [Laughter] We can just keep going…

Fr. Andrew: That’s true. That’s true. I’m pondering that now. It’s good. Yeah, so what is baptism? How is it different from the ritual washings of the Torah? What does it do? How is it related to circumcision? Why is the water so cold? What does St. Peter mean when he says baptism saves? Someone told me earlier that that makes them uncomfortable. [Laughter] When someone is baptized, is anything happening in the unseen world?

All good questions that we’re going to address, but first we’re going to start with circumcision! We’re not going to need a parental advisory, though, this time, Father?

Fr. Stephen: Well, I am using alcohol and tobacco, and firearms, and that last one doesn’t even make sense. Why would I do that during a live podcast? Just to be complete.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I can see that my little red phone is starting to ring over here in the corner.

Fr. Stephen: There we go.

Fr. Andrew: This is not unexpected, yet…

Fr. Stephen: And hate mail, too: Fr. Andrew Damick at Ancient Faith dot com.

But we are going to start with circumcision, and we’re not going to be describing the process in detail.

Fr. Andrew: No. You can look that up if you need to.

Fr. Stephen: That’s not germane. We’re going to be talking about what circumcision does in the Old Testament, starting in the Torah, how it’s seen, and the role it played in terms of ancient Israel and Second Temple Jewish community. And the reason we’re doing that is, as we’re going to see in a little bit, the ideas surrounding circumcision form the foundation for the understanding of baptism, once we get into the New Testament and the new covenant.

Circumcision is sort of the foundational commandment. It’s sort of the Ur-commandment, the first layer.

Fr. Andrew: The first thing God tells him to do.

Fr. Stephen: Because it’s given to Abraham. I mean, you could say, yes, technically before that, God tells him to go to Canaan, but that’s not a commandment for anyone other than him.

Fr. Andrew: And it’s not an ongoing thing. It’s not a foundational…

Fr. Stephen: Right, so this is going to be a commandment that’s going to be practiced by him, by his descendants. So it’s a commandment in the sense of the commandments of the Torah, and it’s the first one, by a long shot, in terms of sort of a direct and particular commandment. This also doesn’t mean that it’s the first ethical rule. Yes, before this commandment is given, murder still bad. [Laughter] That’s not what we’re saying. There was still good and evil before this, but this is the first commandment of that type, of the type that we’re going to get many of later on in the Torah, when the covenant is given through Moses. But it’s worth noting that this one comes, depending on your dating, at least 500 years before Moses. That means that it has certain unique features as compared to those others.

It’s given in Genesis 17, and the commandment is not just for Abraham to circumcise himself, but to circumcise his household, which means Lot, his nephew; which means his herdsmen and shepherds, cousins, servants.

Fr. Andrew: Now, this is before Isaac is born, or Ishmael.

Fr. Stephen: Right. This is all the male. And when they are born, they are circumcised, but the commandment is given here. This commandment is so foundational that, as we talked about, back in our episode talking about priesthood, this is part of how the priesthood is taken away from Moses and given to Aaron. This is where leadership, that will eventually become kingship, and priesthood get separated, is particularly related to an obedience to this commandment.

Fr. Andrew: You can see this happening in Exodus 4, where Moses fails to circumcise his sons, and his wife ends up doing it and is really mad about the whole thing, threatening to kill him. [Laughter] It’s not spelled out in the text in the sense of, “And so therefore God took the priesthood from him”; it doesn’t say that, but right after the incident where Zipporah, Moses’ wife, responds to him in this way and does it, immediately what you see happen next is God begins speaking to Aaron, in a completely different place: Aaron’s not with Moses, out in Midian at this point. So there’s this sense of God turning away from Moses in a certain way, and beginning to deal now with Aaron. And Aaron, then, of course, becomes the first high priest of Israel.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and then in that previous episode, we then talked about how, in the golden calf episode, sort of eldership gets separated from priesthood, and the priesthood gets given to the Levites—but we won’t rehearse all that now. But the key is that Abraham, when he’s given that commandment of circumcision, he’s also told to walk before God and be righteous, to live in a righteous way. The circumcision commandment is not just part of that, is not just sort of a sign of that; keeping that commandment itself, as we see with Moses, is a primary issue of obedience or disobedience, that it doesn’t matter if Moses was trying to live a righteous life and just “oh, oops, I forgot to circumcise my sons” and himself, or he just got squeamish and wasn’t up to it. This is treated as an act of disobedience to God at a very basic level.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, this is a big deal.

Fr. Stephen: I’m not a prophet nor the son of a prophet, but I know a lot of folks, and I know that there are some folks listening to this who think they know where we’re going with this circumcision thing and are bringing it up on the baptism episode, because they think we’re going to say that baptism replaces circumcision at the end of this half. We are not! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, circumcision does not go away, but hold on. Listen to the whole episode!

Fr. Stephen: Right, so this is not just like: “Hey, they used to circumcise kids, and now we baptize kids, and it’s the same thing!” Usually, that kind of, shall we say, unnuanced argument happens among our Protestant friends when they’re arguing about infant baptism. That’s not at all where we’re going. [Laughter] We are going to take a much more nuanced approach.

Fr. Andrew: Stay tuned, everybody!

Fr. Stephen: We’re going to start by— I’m not going to do it—digging a little deeper into circumcision. I wanted to make a really bad pun, but—

Fr. Andrew: You may not. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Part of that is, then, since we’re not doing that just sort of “oh, it replaces it” switch, the other place where circumcision comes up in the New Testament, maybe the most Protestant place—Protestant? prominent—most prominent place, if you’re a Protestant— [Laughter] The most prominent place it comes up in the New Testament, aside from what we’re going to go on to talk about, in terms of the relationship with baptism, the most prominent place where it comes up is in this entanglement between St. Paul and certain parties that’s reflected in Acts 15; it’s reflected in pretty much his whole epistle to the Galatians. A lot of discussions, Christian discussions on circumcision, just focus on this whole thing, and on a particular reading of Acts 15. Both the position taken by our Baptist friends, that there’s no relationship between circumcision and baptism, and the position that’s taken by our more sort of Protestant Reformation friends, that baptism just replaces circumcision, are both based on the idea that circumcision kind of gets dust-binned, along with the rest of the commandments of the Torah.

Fr. Andrew: Right, which we’ve talked about that relationship many times.

Fr. Stephen: Acts 15 and Galatians are often the place where they go; this dispute is where they go to argue that it’s dust-binned. This is a big part of the reason why we’re going to end up in a different place than either of those positions, because it wasn’t dust-binned.

Fr. Andrew: We believe don’t that the Torah has been erased, or…

Fr. Stephen: Nullified.

Fr. Andrew: I mean, that’s what Jesus said. [Laughter] Wait a minute, that’s what Jesus said!

Fr. Stephen: That’s the opposite.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, how about that!

Fr. Stephen: So to understand what’s going on with that controversy, we have to kind of understand what it was about in the first place. The way it’s often presented, frankly, doesn’t make sense, historically. The way it’s often presented is that St. Paul is starting these churches in these different Roman cities, and in these churches there are Jewish people and Gentiles, non-Jewish people, who become Christians. The Jewish people in those churches think that the Gentile people in those churches have to get circumcised, and that’s what the fight’s over. Then, once it’s presented that way, they say, “Well, the resolution of this controversy is that St. Paul wins the day and says: You don’t have to be circumcised any more.” Then when you get to St. Paul going and sponsoring sacrifices for people at the Temple taking a Nazarite vow, or St. Paul having St. Timothy circumcised, people get really confused.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because that doesn’t make any sense. Why would he…? If St. Timothy’s already done what needs to be done…

Fr. Stephen: Right. On top of that, historically, Jewish people did not go around trying to get Gentile people to be circumcised.

Fr. Andrew: Well, okay, but why? Don’t they want everyone to be a Jew?

Fr. Stephen: No. [Laughter] And that’s not part of the Torah. This is a difference between what’s outlined in the Torah—and we’ve talked about this some before on the show—and many other religions—not all other religions, but many other religions. Christianity, obviously, involves evangelism, and Islam likewise involves… But within the Torah, we’ve talked about how there were sort of— Because God came to dwell among his people in Israel and then in Judah, that created these sort of concentric circles of how close you were to God’s holiness. The nation of Israel was called to maintain a level of holiness higher than the other nations, and then the priesthood to a higher level than that, and then the high priest to a higher level than that, because he was going to go into the most holy place once a year. So they didn’t think that the whole priesthood had to maintain the same level of holiness as the high priest. The Torah doesn’t teach that.

Fr. Andrew: Different standards is part of the way the Torah is actually laid out.

Fr. Stephen: Right, because it’s how close you are going to draw to God. They didn’t think that everybody had to maintain the same level of holiness as the priests. The priests had to maintain a higher level of holiness during the time they were serving in the tabernacle or the Temple than they did when they weren’t. The regular folks… So there is no “hey, we need to go stop those Greeks from eating bacon.” [Laughter] That didn’t happen. It never happened. They thought they should stop worshiping demons and idols, but they didn’t think they had to become Israelites. That’s not a thing, and it wasn’t a thing in the first century.

In the first century—and I know we’ve talked about this on the show before—most of the first layer of St. Paul’s Gentile converts were what were called God-fearers.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, Gentiles who liked to hang around synagogues and study the Torah, but not actually take on the whole life of being a Judean.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and the Jewish folks were not trying to persuade them to do that; in fact, they actively discouraged it.

Fr. Andrew: Why would they do that? Why would they discourage them from doing that?

Fr. Stephen: Because they didn’t think it was appropriate. They thought the Jewish way of life was something given to them by their God for them, that separated them from and distinguished them from the other nations. And that didn’t have to do, at that time, primarily… See, again, we’re approaching this from a Christian perspective where we’re thinking about “Well, you have to do this stuff to get into heaven” and that was not on the table at all. They weren’t thinking that way. They weren’t thinking that these Gentiles need to come and get circumcised and follow the Torah or they’ll go to hell; that was not a thing. There were no Jewish people in the first century who thought that way.

This raises the question, when we see this group who Acts 15 says is from the party of the Pharisees, that there are these Jewish Christians who want the Gentile Christians in particular to get circumcised. So what is going on? Well, part of what reveals what’s going on is the way in which this dispute was settled by St. James, the Lord’s brother, at what we call now the Council of Jerusalem in Acts 15, when the apostles gathered to hear this. What happens there is that St. James ends up taking a very literal and strict reading of the Torah, specifically of part of Leviticus that is called by scholars now the holiness code, that starts in Leviticus 17 and runs to 23, 24—people argue; you’ve got to write journal articles and dissertations; they argue about where it ends.

But this portion of the holiness code, the vast majority of the commandments in it, Moses is told, “Say to the sons of Israel this: this is what you must do.” This includes food laws; this includes all these things. But in four places, it says, “Say to the sons of Israel and all those foreigners and aliens who live among you, all those sojourners that live among you, that they must keep these commandments.” So there’s a subset of those commandments that apply to everyone and not just to Israelites. And those four places happen to be, not coincidentally with Acts 15, sexual immorality as defined in Leviticus 18, idolatry, and twice about eating and drinking blood.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which, as we’ve said before, has to do with idolatry.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so those are the four commandments that Acts 15 says apply to the Gentile Christians from the Torah. So how does that help us with…? Or that means they’re being treated as sojourners. They’re still Gentiles, but they’re Gentiles who have come to live among us Jewish folks. How does that help us with what the problem was in the first place? Well, in that same part of Leviticus where it’s laying out “These are the things that the sojourners and the foreigners need to do,” it says, “Unless…”—actually, I think it says, “But if”—“But if one of those sojourners”—one of those foreigners, one of those Gentiles living in Israel or Judah—“if they want to eat the Passover,” which is sort of the symbol of full participation. If you’re eating the Passover, this means that you’re participating in the sacrificial system. If you want to do this, then that person has to become circumcised and become an Israelite.

Fr. Andrew: If you want to go all the way, then this is the process. I mean, so then the question that I would have, based on that, is, given what we’ve said before about the Passover and Pascha being the same thing, that the Eucharist is essentially eating the Passover within the Christian context, why does that not apply to everybody, then?

Fr. Stephen: Right, well, that’s precisely what caused the disagreement, is that you now have within the Christian community… So there was already a way of being settled in terms of the synagogue on the sabbath, in terms of Gentiles being in and around the synagogue, but now we have this additional layer on the Lord’s day, of gathering together to eat the Eucharist, which is seen as this sacrificial meal, which is connected to eating the Passover. And at those Christian meetings, Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians are coming together to the same table and participating in the same sacrificial meal. So this is what engages the disagreement.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so they were saying, “Look, we’re eating at the same table. Come on, you guys have got to be circumcised, because that’s how this works.”

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so the real question that’s being decided in Acts 15 is about the status of Gentile Christians. By being Gentile Christians, have they become in some sense Jewish and therefore would need to be circumcised? Or are they still Gentile Christians; are they more like Gentile sojourners? And the decision of the apostles is the second. What this does, what this functionally does in early Christianity, is there is a new Christian way of life that is created for Gentile Christians. What do I mean by that?

Pre-Christianity—we go to the third century BC—you have Jewish people, Judean people, living as Jewish people: keeping the Torah, hopefully, following it, worshiping the God of Israel. And then you have pagans; you have Gentiles. So you have Greeks who are living as Greeks and worshiping the Greek gods and following Greek customs, which include things like sexual immorality and these other things. So when Christianity comes along, what St. Paul helps forge is the idea that they can no longer live as pagans. They can’t keep worshiping the pagan gods. They can’t keep participating in sexually immoral behavior. They can’t keep—etc., etc.; they can’t keep doing that. But he’s also not evangelizing Judaism; he’s also not saying, “You need to become Jews.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and isn’t this basically just a fulfillment of the Old Testament prophecies that talk about all the nations coming to worship Israel’s God?

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so the contours and shape of what that looks like, that’s what’s being formed here in St. Paul’s ministry.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s not the elimination of all of the nations; it’s the transformation of all the nations.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and this continues. I say it begins in St. Paul’s ministry, because this happens every time Christianity comes to another culture. We’re seeing it in St. Paul’s ministry coming to, for example, the Greeks and the Romans, but when St. Boniface brought the Gospel to northwestern Europe, to my ancestors, they could not continue living as the pagans they were before, but they also did not become Jews or Greeks or Romans. But within that evangelical ministry, a new way to be—this is anachronistic, but just for the sake of the expression—a new way to be Dutch was formed.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Why Dutch?

Fr. Stephen: We were still stingy… [Laughter] Except with the Church, right?

Fr. Andrew: Looking for discounts.

Fr. Stephen: But we had to cease with the pagan god-worship. We had to cease so that… It wasn’t that [we] stopped being who we were, but what it meant to be who we were changed, because what it means to be a Greek Christian is not the same thing as it meant to be a Greek pagan, and there were a first group of Greek Christians whom St. Paul is writing letters to and help sort that out, what that means, what can stay and what can go.

So that was the core of that controversy. It was a controversy about Jewish identity and the particular commandments that are related to Jewish identity. Those are the things that St. Paul in his writings are going to call the works of the Law, the works of the Torah—not good works in general, not keeping commandments in general. The works of the Torah were the boundary-markers that made someone Israelite and then made someone Judean, made someone Jewish. That’s what he’s talking about, and that’s why he’s so keen to say that salvation is not based on those boundary-markers. If it were, then that would be saying only Jewish people find salvation, which St. Paul, of course, is not saying, nor were any other Jewish people at the time saying that. [Laughter]

The boundary-markers are those issues. That’s what’s under debate and what’s being discussed. So circumcision comes into that as being one of the primary commandments related to those boundary-markers.

Aside from that role that it eventually played, what did circumcision do? Now we’re going back to Abraham to get some more pieces on what’s going on with circumcision.

Fr. Andrew: I think it’s especially worth noting, as we said earlier, we talked about the way the Bible sets up narrative, like what comes after what. It’s not like a news program where, “Okay, and now—”

Fr. Stephen: “Here is every event that happened in the world.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, every event just has nothing to do with the one before it. The Abraham story comes when? Right after the Tower of Babel story, despite there being, what? How long between these actual events, historically speaking? Maybe hundreds of years.

Fr. Stephen: Well, it depends. Potentially, if I’m right that this is about the rise and fall of the Babylonian Empire, Abraham was kind of before. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Mm. Interesting. But this is not a hill that we plan to die on, probably.

Fr. Stephen: Right, but the point being: there is a very deliberate reason. I may be wrong about what it is—I don’t think I am, or I wouldn’t say it, but I could be—but there is a reason why we don’t have any time-lapse described between the Tower of Babel and Abraham. There is a reason. If you look at a lot of ancient Jewish literature, they notice that, and they combine the stories. They put Abraham into the construction of the Tower of Babel, which I think that was based in part on a historical memory of the fact that the great ziggurat of Ur was being built during Abraham’s day, and that’s part of how those two things got mixed together.

But people have noticed, that is to say, for thousands of years, that there’s no time markers there. That means that these two things are being deliberately set next to each other for a reason.

Fr. Andrew: That these are related.

Fr. Stephen: You can theorize about the reason. So Babel, the nations, are scattered and separated. The 70 nations are divided; angelic beings are appointed to watch and shepherd over them. That’s what we’ve described as sort of the third fall of humanity; this is sort of the last nail in the coffin of that. Abraham’s story is the beginning of the solution. This is the place where God again draws near to humanity to begin to dig our way out, to begin to repair what was broken. This is also the beginning of, therefore, the creation of Israel. Notice—got to do it; sorry, Calvinists—God does not pick one of the 70 nations.

Fr. Andrew: Right, there’s not an election in that sense.

Fr. Stephen: He doesn’t look at the 70 nations and choose one based on his own good pleasure, and that is Israel. He creates a new one. He creates a new one that did not exist previous to that. That creation takes a lot of time, because he starts with Abraham in his advanced old age, with Sarai, and it takes centuries to get to nationhood in the exodus. But this is making something that before was not, that did not exist. They were not a people; he made them a people, as he reiterates several times in the Old Testament.

What this means, though, is because this is a created nation that he is bringing into existence, starting with one man, that the structure of it is inter-generational and family-based. This is based on extended family, originally with Abraham and the patriarchs—Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Jacob’s sons. But also, even when Israel is a full-blown nation, and Israel and Judah are two separate full-blown nations, they’re still structured according to extended families that are part of clans, clans that are part of tribes. These units are inter-generational familial units. This is one reason why circumcision, that is, something done to sons, as a generational ritual, is particularly appropriate in demarcating it, because of this familial structure. This is just basic to circumcision. We’ve already talked about it as boundary-marker, but it’s also as designating this family, forming this family, that previously was not. This is done in part through circumcision. So it’s not just accidental or because at eight days old you won’t remember it or something that this is done to children, that circumcision is done to children.

But notice also, circumcision shows us something important, even though there is that familial relationship: it’s a father circumcising his son; it’s the head of the extended family who’s performing the circumcision on the other males. So there is this familial structure. The fact that there is this commandment means that it is not strictly a familial issue.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s not just Dad making a decision.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and it’s not just: “Hey, you happened to be born into this family, and that makes you an Israelite.” The commandment has to be kept.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there’s a faithfulness thing going on there.

Fr. Stephen: Right, you have to be faithful. So this is— When St. Paul talks about Abraham and talks about circumcision and talks about Abraham’s faithfulness—and it really should be translated “faithfulness,” not just “faith”—this is part of what he’s talking about. He’s saying without the faithfulness, the biology—the biological descent doesn’t matter without the faithfulness. He says this pretty directly in Romans 2.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right, where he says— This is— As St. Peter said, sometimes St. Paul is hard to understand… [Laughter] But this is what he says in Romans 2:25:

For circumcision indeed is of value if you obey the law, but if you break the law, your circumcision becomes uncircumcision.

So it’s bound up with that notion of faithfulness. It’s not… Yeah, it’s only valuable if you’re actually doing something.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so if— The fact that when you were eight days old you were circumcised by your dad, if you proceed to live a life where you violate all the commandments of God, that ain’t helping you! If you’re breaking all the commandments of God, then you might as well be uncircumcised.

The other obvious element of this, when we’re talking about boundary-markers and this kind of thing, is that women, obviously, aren’t circumcised. [Laughter] So does that mean women are like the heathen? [Laughter] No—quick answer. The way that this works is that someone who is the wife or other female member of a household—because we talked about servants: all kinds of other folks are included in this—that person—that woman, that female adult human—is made an Israelite, or later a Judaite or a Judean, by their relationship—if we’re talking about a wife, being the wife of a circumcised male. That makes them part of the household, because the idea here is that the man, by receiving circumcision, what he is doing is he is sanctifying himself; he is setting himself apart. We’re going to get into that a little more here. So he’s setting himself apart, and he’s doing that for and with his family.

Fr. Andrew: I think part of the reason why it might be hard for us to parse this is because modern people tend to think in individualistic terms, that you’re not a member of something by virtue of another relationship you have: you’re either a member individually or not. But that’s not how it’s actually set up in the Torah.

Fr. Stephen: Right, or in the New Testament, for that matter, because St. Paul applies this same logic to baptism, when he talks about people who are married to unbelieving spouses.

Fr. Andrew: I think people tend to read that as “Well, maybe you’ll influence them to make their own personal decision.”

Fr. Stephen: Right, but that’s not what he says.

Fr. Andrew: That’s not what he says, right! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: He says that the faithful spouse sanctifies—makes holy—the other spouse and the children. And he there is applying it to baptized men and baptized women, because most of the early Christians were women and slaves, so it was far more common in the communities St. Paul is writing to for there to be a Christian woman married to a pagan man than vice-versa. In fact, vice-versa almost never happened, because if the man became a Christian, the woman was going to be a Christian in that culture, regardless. So he applies it in both, the same logic in both directions, so this isn’t something that just goes away. Christianity did not become individualistic in the New Testament. Christianity became individualistic in Western Europe in the 16th century. Send your hate mail to Fr. Andrew Damick at Ancient Faith dot com. [Laughter] Some people think that’s a good thing, though. Some people think the individual is a good thing.

Why circumcision? Why this particular thing? I mean, there are lots of visible things you could do. You could have people wear beards, men wear beards or not wear beards. You could have men wear their hair in a certain way. You could have them cut off the last knuckle of their left pinky. There’s all these different things you could hypothetically do to indicate that a person is set apart or this kind of thing, so why this in particular? Which is painful… Definitely in our post-Victorian age, definitely seen as unseemly to even talk about in any detail.

You had a note on that from apparently something someone had suggested to you. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Right, someone asks… I’m sorry, I’m getting a little lost here. Yeah, we’re having issues, by the way, everybody, streaming on YouTube. Of course, if you’re hoping to find us on YouTube, you’re not hearing me say this, so I don’t know. But, yeah, some people might wonder about what’s called female circumcision.

Fr. Stephen: Not where I was going.

Fr. Andrew: Well, yeah, okay. [Laughter] That was one of the notes that I had.

Fr. Stephen: Oh! That is not the same thing.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, we don’t have to talk about it.

Fr. Stephen: We’re not going to describe what that is on the air. Even I—!

Fr. Andrew: I think we’ve covered that in a sense, talking about how the relationship actually works in the Torah. That’s a completely separate thing that’s not practiced in Israel.

Fr. Stephen: I think this was more you said somebody asked about the garments of skin, and that had something to do with it.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, yeah, right! Yes, we actually did get a question about this in our Facebook group—thank you for reminding me—which was: Is circumcision a kind of ritual removal of the garments of skin? Which we’ve talked about. God gives mortality to mankind in the wake of the events of Genesis 3, and that mortality is given to him to enable him to repent. We talked about this in our Fall of Man episodes, in the first one, I think. The problem with seeing circumcision as the ritual removal of the garments of skin is that would mean you’re ritually removing your ability to repent, which—why would you then give all kinds of commandments in the Torah of how to repent if you’ve ritually removed your ability to do that from the get-go? So, no, that’s not what that is, but, you know, I can see why someone might think that, because it is the removal of some skin, but, no, it’s not “the garments of skin.”

Fr. Stephen: Right, and the garments of skin are not a bad thing.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, no!

Fr. Stephen: The garments of skin are this enabling of repentance.

Fr. Andrew: Right, it’s a gift from God.

Fr. Stephen: Sometimes, like if you look at some Gnostic sources, they look at the garments of skin to mean the materiality, or having a physical body, or a material body. Just to be clear, that’s not what we’re getting at. This is a beneficial thing, ultimately a beneficial thing, as we talked about when we talked about death ultimately being given, if you read Genesis 3 closely, being given as a grace to humanity, not as a punishment.

But so then why we’re not talking about garments of skin, even though there’s skin involved—there’s skin in the game, as it were— [Laughter] Very clearly, circumcision involves something being cut off. We’ve been told that the first cut is the deepest. [Laughter] I did it. I’m sorry.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s fine. It’s fine.

Fr. Stephen: I’m not sorry. I won’t lie on the air. I’m not sorry. [Laughter] But something is being cut off. Other than the obvious, what is being cut off? Well, this is given, first, remember, to Abraham. Abraham, remember, is called out of Ur of the Chaldees, is what we’re told in Genesis. As we mentioned back in the Abraham episode, “Ur of the Chaldees” is an anachronism. The term “Chaldean” for “Babylonian” comes from the Neo-Babylonian Empire, which is 1500 years later. So why, though, is that anachronistic term used here in Genesis? It’s used again to connect the Ur out of which—the city out of which—Abraham is called to Babylon, as we were just talking about the Tower of Babel. So there is a division, as we were talking about in the Torah, between the nations—the 70 nations, the world out there—over against Israel. And Abraham is called out of these foreign nations that have been dominated by demonic powers, including where he came from.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so it’s a ritual participation in coming out from the nations.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and Joshua’s final speech in Joshua, he makes it very explicit that even within Abraham’s household as he left Ur, many members of his household were still idolaters. They were still kind of immersed in that, and we see things don’t go so well for Lot. He kind of starts creeping back over into a city. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, the wrong places, too, the really idolatrous places.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so we have a cutting-off, which is enacting Abraham—or Abram at the time—cutting himself off from the world and the world off from himself, being separated from it, being separated from it. Holiness is about being separated from evil.

There’s the cutting-off. Why the genitals in particular?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, it seems a little… sensitive. Why that?

Fr. Stephen: Why not the last knuckle of your left pinky?

Fr. Andrew: Right, I mean, you could spare that, maybe.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, or your ring finger, if you’re joining the Assassins. [Laughter] But this is because the genitals, very obviously, this is connected to that inter-generational familial character of what’s being done.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s a nation being made.

Fr. Stephen: And it’s being made in this context of families and tribes and clans. Obviously, this is where babies come from; this is how they get made. So that seems to be the connection there, sort of ritually.

Something that I don’t think people have noted enough about circumcision, which ought to jump out at Orthodox people, but I don’t think does as much, is that circumcision was done on the eighth day. The eighth day. And normally when you say “the eighth day” to Orthodox people, their eyes light up. [Laughter] This is connected to that eighth-day symbolism: the seven days of creation, and there’s the eighth day, the beginning of a new creation. So the circumcised person becomes a new creation, who is part of this new creation of Israel, [which] is made of these newly created families, the designated families.

Again, there tends to be in certain bad theology this tendency to say, “Well, okay, this Old Testament stuff, this old covenant stuff, it’s all about this physical, material stuff, and then you get to the New Testament, and the stuff get spiritualized.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, or: “Well, that was all works righteousness, but then we’re given the righteousness of Christ!”

Fr. Stephen: Yes, the spiritual. “And so this is why we can dust-bin circumcision and all those kind of commandments and things.”

Fr. Andrew: No, Gnostics! No! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: But if you read the Old Testament, beginning with the Torah itself, carefully—so if you read, for example, Deuteronomy 10:12-17, Deuteronomy 30:6, and then the Prophet Jeremiah returns to this in Jeremiah 4:4 and Jeremiah 9:26—those Jeremiah chapter numbers are in your non-Orthodox Study Bible version of Jeremiah—those passages talk about the circumcision of the heart as being what’s truly important.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah! It’s there! Stop skipping parts of the Bible, people.

Fr. Stephen: This isn’t some new spiritualized thing in the New Testament. This was always true, that the real circumcision was a circumcision of the heart: your heart, your soul, being cut off from the world, the flesh, the devil; it being cut off from them and them being cut off from it. It being kept holy and separate and apart is always what the aim was of the physical ritual.

So when we get to Christ himself, though we don’t talk about it as much for reasons that are probably obvious—again, post-Victorian squeamishness—we celebrate the feast of Christ’s circumcision on January 1.

Fr. Andrew: Right, also the feast of St. Basil, so none of the— When kids look at the feast of the icon and say, “Why does that priest have a knife?”

Fr. Stephen: Well, I’ve never been to a church that actually had that icon out. They always have the icon of St. Basil! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Oh! Well, here in Emmaus, we have one icon that is both.

Fr. Stephen: Oh, okay.

Fr. Andrew: It’s got both St. Basil on it and, I mean, they’re sort of separate scenes, as it were…

Fr. Stephen: That would be a little weird if they inserted St. Basil into… [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: That would be a little odd. But, I mean, maybe that exists somewhere, I don’t know! But, yes, it’s got him on there, and it’s got the scene of the circumcision of Christ. You see his Mother holding him as a baby, and you see the priest with a knife off to the side.

Fr. Stephen: And this isn’t just an incidental thing, where somebody sort of did the math and said, “Okay, wait. So if Christ was born on the 25th, then that would mean he got circumscribed…” [Laughter] And we need another feast for some reason… This is because, as you know, if you’ve listened carefully to the epistle reading that’s read at that service, St. Paul actually talks about Christ’s circumcision. So this is actually theologically important, Christ’s circumcision, to understanding all of these issues we’ve been talking about.

So why is this relevant? In understanding one of the trajectories, one of the ways in which St. Paul presents Christ’s death—and it’s not coincidentally that he presents it this way in his epistle to the Galatians, which is where he’s talking about this whole dispute about circumcision; this is not a coincidence—is for example, in Galatians 3:13, where he talks about Christ “becoming a curse.”

Fr. Andrew: Right, so he writes:

Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, for it is written: “Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree.”

Fr. Stephen: And as we talked about before, back in the “Blessings and Curses” episode, the curse of the Torah here that we’re talking about is, for example, in Deuteronomy 28-30, where the blessings and curses of the covenant are set out.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s suffering the effects of sin.

Fr. Stephen: Right, the effects of sin. These are the things that are going to happen when you don’t keep the Torah, when you don’t keep the commandments. Here’s what’s going to happen; all these bad things are going to happen. The sky’s going to become like iron; the ground’s going to become like bronze, meaning you’re not going to be able to get any crops out of it; you’re not going to get any rain. All of these things that will happen.

And so, as St. Paul quotes there from Deuteronomy, everyone who is hanged on a tree is under a curse, so Christ’s crucifixion in particular, that he is crucified, points to this reality of Christ becoming a curse, meaning Christ voluntarily suffers the effects of sin, that cursèd state that results from sin. Christ takes that upon himself. And how is that ultimately described? That state of curse, in the Torah and the rest of the Old Testament, is being cut off from among the people. You are cut off. That’s the number one way in the Torah in which the death penalty is described. When someone is going to be stoned to death for some unrepented sin that requires that. It’s they are to be cut off from among the people. I think we’ve talked before on the show how, when “cut off from among the people” occurs in those passages in the Pentateuch, it’s not clear whether it’s talking about death or exile, because those were seen as being the same thing.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s ambiguous.

Fr. Stephen: But so Christ suffers the curse in being cut off when he is crucified. But even though Christ is cut off in his death, in the crucifixion, he is not cut off from God, because he is God…

Fr. Andrew: He is God. Sorry, bad readings of his comments on the cross. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Or he’s quoting the psalm. He’s quoting a psalm, people: read the rest of it. Anyway. He is not cut off from God, and so what does that mean? Well, because Christ is not cut off from God and therefore not truly cut off from life, what happens, when he is cut off from the world, is that the world essentially has cut itself off. It’s like the world is sitting on the branch, and it saws off the branch behind itself. This is “the world” as in that system, that world system.

St. Paul, not coincidentally, later in Galatians, sort of applies it exactly this way in Galatians 6:14.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, yes, where it says: “But far be it from me to boast—” Yeah, this is a famous passage. Well, these are all famous, really! [Laughter] “Far be it from me to boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me and I to the world.” Again, that’s sort of being dead to the world, but the world is dead to me at the same time. There’s this distinction.

Fr. Stephen: Right, that being cut off. So this “cut off,” rather than being truly a curse, becomes a blessing, becomes essentially holiness, becomes sanctification, becomes this sort of holy separation. And then that carries with it, as St. Paul famously says in 2 Corinthians 5:17, “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.” So that new creation element of the eighth day likewise comes into effect.

This is what happens with Christ. The crucifixion is therefore, in this sense— St. Paul applies this language and understanding of circumcision to it. How is that benefit, that becoming a new creation—how is that applied to those in the Church, to those in the Christian community, especially those in the Christian community who are uncircumcised themselves?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because there’s… I mean, not too far down the road, and it’s most of them.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Right. How does that come to them? Because St. Paul is arguing in Galatians that it does not come to them by those Gentiles being circumcised.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. I think— Well, it’s right here in our notes! [Laughter] So 2 Corinthians 5:17: “If anyone’s in Christ, he’s a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.” There’s a difference that’s happened on a fundamental level. It’s a new era in a real sense.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. But the way that then gets applied to the Gentiles is, explicitly for St. Paul, through baptism—

Fr. Andrew: Yes, which is—what do you know!—also right there in Galatians.

Fr. Stephen: Right, where he says, “In Christ Jesus you are all sons of God through faithfulness.” So, again, this idea of forming a family. “For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ.” So you’ve received this through baptism. Baptism, though, does not, any more than circumcision did, does not obviate faithfulness. It’s not that “Oh, I was baptized; I don’t have to worry about any other commandments,” any more than being circumcised caused you to not have to worry about any other commandments. So faithfulness is still there, but baptism is the beginning of that. And he goes on to say, in Galatians 3:

There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s offspring and heirs according to the promise.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which puts it again firmly back into that faithfulness definition, what it means to actually be part of the nation.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so through baptism and through faithfulness, like Abraham’s faithfulness, that is the way in which these Gentiles, these Gentile Christians, become Abraham’s offspring. That is how they become part of the family of God, not through being circumcised and becoming Jewish. Again, St. Paul points to more than once in Galatians and in Romans that Abraham is prophesied to be the father of many nations.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, not just one nation that everyone’s getting added to, but there’s— I mean, it’s dual. So on one hand, he’s the father of many nations, but on the other hand, everyone who is his offspring is Israel. So it’s both at the same time.

Fr. Stephen: Is part of his family, is part of this. Right, because for St. Paul, Judah (or Judea) and Israel are two different categories. When he talks about Judea and Judeans, which— The word that gets translated as “Jews” in a lot of our modern translations, English translations, is actually “Judeans.” So when St. Paul talks about the Judeans, he’s talking about Jewish people; he’s talking about a particular group of people, this particular group of people. When he talks about Israel, he’s talking about the whole family of God. Because remember: Judea, Judah, was not all of Israel in the Old Testament.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, one tribe.

Fr. Stephen: Well, and it includes—the nation of Judah includes the Benjamites and some Levites, but it’s still a subset. The northern kingdom of Israel had the majority of the tribes, and we won’t go into all this now. Future episode, where we can get into this in more detail. But the connection, the particular connection that St. Paul sees between the Gentiles and the northern kingdom of Israel. But the idea that Israel here as the people of God is this larger, more inclusive category, whereas Judeans, Jewish people, is a particular group. They aren’t just synonymous in the way he’s using them in his letters.

So the baptized Greek, the Greek Christian in Corinth, is still a Greek. He is not now Jewish. He is still a Greek: he is a Greek Christian. The difference has to do with how he lives his life, because, as we said, there is this new thing forming, which is what it means to be Greek and Christian, as opposed to Greek pagan.

Fr. Andrew: Right, you can have both identities at once, but one of them is radically altered by the other, and that’s what we might think of as an ethnic designation is radically altered by being Christian.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And this is reflected, for example, at the very end of the book of Revelation, where the people from all the nations come into the New Jerusalem, and they all bring with them the treasures of those various nations, while nothing—

Fr. Andrew: I was going to say, reminiscent of the looting Egypt image.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, but explicitly nothing unclean or impure can enter in. So all of the garbage of the various nations is all the sinfulness, all the uncleanness: that gets left behind. And the treasures—the gold, the silver, what is pure, what is holy—that gets brought into the family of God.

There is a place that I already alluded to, which occurs in the epistle reading for the feast of Christ’s circumcision—it’s actually Colossians—where St. Paul really pulls all of these ideas we’ve just been discussing together all in one place.

Fr. Andrew: Okay. Yes, so Colossians 2:8-12. St. Paul says:

See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ. For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily, and you have been filled in him who is the head of all rule and authority. In him also you were circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, by cutting off the body of the flesh, by the circumcision of Christ, having been buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through faithfulness in the powerful working of God who raised him from the dead.

Fr. Stephen: And so here we have very clearly the benefits of Christ’s circumcision are bestowed upon these Gentiles in Colossae, explicitly through baptism.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so it sets up the same relationship as being the wife or daughter of a circumcised man in the old covenant, because the Church is the bride of Christ, and so therefore the relationship in these terms is the same: Christ’s circumcision counts for the Church.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and this is why Hebrews and several other places talk about Christ sanctifying himself before his crucifixion. Those are weird passages and people kind of don’t know— like: “Why did he have to— Christ was holy the whole time. Why did he have to sanctify himself?” This is talking about that, him being set apart so that that can be bestowed upon us as his bride through his circumcision. And so this is the ultimate argument from St. Paul as to why Gentile Christians not only don’t have to get circumcised to be able to receive the Eucharist and be full participants in Christian ritual life, but should not be, because, for St. Paul, by demanding that they be circumcised individually in the flesh, as he says, that would be replacing Christ’s circumcision, for St. Paul, with their own.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that would be like if you were baptized in the Church and then you decided to go get your own baptism somewhere else because you felt like it wasn’t… It didn’t really do the job or whatever.

Fr. Stephen: It would be saying, “I’m not going to be made holy by Christ; I’m going to make myself holy.” And this is why, in this context, St. Paul talks about people trying to establish their own righteousness rather than receiving the righteousness of Christ through faithfulness.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s not about… If you think about that, him talking about people establishing their own righteousness, that’s often, especially in Reformation framework, read as “stop trying to do good things; Christ has already done good things,” but that’s not what’s going on. It’s the establishment of righteousness; it’s not just doing good things.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and that righteousness is received through faithfulness, which involves keeping commandments. “If you love me, you will keep my commandments,” et al.

Fr. Andrew: Which it says a gazillion times in the Bible.

Fr. Stephen: Yes! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Just do a word search, everybody for “love” and “commandments,” and see how many places they are paired together in the Bible. It’s a bunch, a bunch. Well, with that said, it was a good, beefy first half. We’re going to go ahead and take our first break. We’ll be right back with the second half of The Lord of Spirits.

Fr. Andrew: Welcome back, everybody! Feel free to give us a call. We’re talking about baptism tonight. We actually got a question in email. Someone was asking about infant baptism. They were saying if baptism washes away sin, why would an infant who has never sinned need this, and related sort of questions in terms of seeing things in a Protestant way. For instance, shouldn’t the person baptized first believe in God, have the salvific power of baptism; why is there no profession of faith, and that kind of thing. I think that those questions largely are answered by the foregoing, but we’ll kind of flesh it out a little bit as we go. I mean, these are important questions that people have.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, well, part of that is a reductionist thinking. So repentance and the forgiveness of sins is part of, obviously, baptism, and we’re going to get into that some more here, but that’s not all.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that’s not all it is. The Scripture says it does a lot of things.

Fr. Stephen: That doesn’t exhaust what baptism is about, just me being forgiven of my personal sins. Again, that’s a very individualized approach.

Fr. Andrew: We got another question, which is related to this, too, and actually connects directly to what we were just talking about at the end of the first half, which is—I mean, it’s kind of a sticky question: Should people be baptized when they become Orthodox even if they have been baptized before? If someone has been baptized—and that’s for the Church to determine whether that actually has happened—then the answer is no, because of what we just said. You don’t go and do it again. While this is not a show about the canons and how to apply them—

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Because I don’t think there are enough bishops listening, so that would be irrelevant to our entire audience, pretty much.

Fr. Andrew: But the truth is that if you actually do read the canons, they do not ever say it doesn’t matter at all what anyone’s previous religious experience was: baptize them all no matter what. They in fact— The canons say, “Well, these people, we do this with them; these people we do this with them,” and so forth. And it’s largely— The question seems to be: Do we consider what they had before a baptism or not? And that’s because they’re trying to be careful not to baptize somebody twice. That’s the point.

Fr. Stephen: I don’t think that’s inaccurate, what you just said, but I don’t even think we need to go that far. What did we say about circumcision? It’s an act of faithfulness; it’s an act of obedience. Faithfulness and obedience doesn’t mean “I do what I think is right.”

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I know! What an irony, right? For people to come into church and say, “Look, this is how I want to be received.”

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] So this is basic. This is an act of faithfulness and obedience, so, yeah. That individualism rearing its ugly head again. And it’s no good; it’s very bad. “No man is an island.”

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] All right, so here we are in the second half.

Fr. Stephen: Now we’re going to take you to the river and put you in the water.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly, yes. I mean, suddenly I’m hearing in my head that great old song: “I went down to the river to pray, / studying about that good old way.”

Fr. Stephen: Well, see, I was going for Talking Heads, but that’s fine.

Fr. Andrew: I know, I know, and I was doing bluegrass, old-timey music. That’s difference between you and me, Fr. Stephen. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: It’s real old-fashioned.

Fr. Andrew: The irony is: you’re the one who lives in the Deep South; I live up here in, well, Yankee-land, I guess.

Fr. Stephen: I live in Cajun territory, which I’ve recently learned is very small. So Alexandria and Shreveport? Suburbs of Dallas, apparently.

Fr. Andrew: Nice! Wow. That’s…

Fr. Stephen: Lake Charles: suburb of Houston.

Fr. Andrew: Wow. That’s sharp! [Laughter] I was going to say this, though, about Emmaus, Pennsylvania. Here’s a little bit of really obscure history. In the very first land grants that defined Virginia, where I live was actually included in Virginia, as was most of the United States, actually, and much of Canada. But after about three years, the line got moved just southwest of me. So where I am now was Virginia, so I do still claim sometimes to be living in the state I was born in. Once upon a time, this was the South.

Fr. Stephen: I used to try to get people to call New York “New Amsterdam,” the way they call Istanbul “Constantinople.”

Fr. Andrew: Yes, well, people just liked it better the other way.

Fr. Stephen: It got the works.

Fr. Andrew: Indeed. I should point out, everybody, by the way, that that’s not a song original to They Might Be Giants. It’s originally The Four Lads.

Fr. Stephen: No, that is a Klezmer Music Classic.

Fr. Andrew: There you go. That’s right. Klezmer! Is that the first time we’ve brought up Klezmer on Lord of Spirits?

Fr. Stephen: Who knows?

Fr. Andrew: I don’t know. We should try to come up with that more often. Klezmer is a cool kind of music, everybody, if you’re not into it. [Laughter] Speaking of John the Baptist…

Fr. Stephen: But we digress!

Fr. Andrew: We didn’t really digress at all in the first half, so I feel like we’re due a digression

Fr. Stephen: Well, you know… I don’t need permission to digress. I can digress freely and at will.

Fr. Andrew: That’s true.

Fr. Stephen: But in this second half, we are going to be talking about St. John the Forerunner, St. John the Baptist, because how can you talk about baptism and not talk about St. John the Baptist, as he’s known.

Fr. Andrew: Southern Baptist? American Baptist?

Fr. Stephen: Well, on behalf of my grandmother, I would have to say General Association of Regular Baptists. [Laughter] You wouldn’t want an irregular Baptist.

Fr. Andrew: I was going to say, when will G-A-R-B age finally be ushered in? [Laughter] Sorry, that’s an old joke from my childhood.

Fr. Stephen: So as St. John is affectionately known by my fellow Dutch people, it’s more like St. John the Dooper.

Fr. Andrew: Dooper! I know! This is really… And isn’t it really “dope,” d-o-o-p? Isn’t that “baptism” in Dutch? Doop.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, I’m sure it’s etymologically related to “dip.”

Fr. Andrew: That’s a very dope etymology.

Fr. Stephen: There are a bunch of obvious Amsterdam doper jokes that suggest themselves, but we’ll just pass over them in silence. St. John the Forerunner is in the wilderness. He’s at the Jordan River. He starts baptizing people at the turn of the era. So what’s he doing? What would— How would the people at the time have understood what he was doing? Because in a sense, this sort of comes out of nowhere, in the sense that there aren’t people getting baptized per se in the Old Testament. I say “per se” because we’re going to see there are some things. There are some incidents where people who are being healed are getting into the Jordan River, those kind of things, that are certainly connected, but the main context into which the baptism of St. John enters is into the idea of the various ritual washings that were common for various purposes in Second Temple Judaism.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, of which there were a bunch.

Fr. Stephen: Growing out of the Torah itself. One thing we have to remember when talking about these is, despite how sometimes it’s treated in terms of modern readings, uncleanness and sin are not synonymous.

Fr. Andrew: Right, unclean, unclean—you could be unclean just by having leprosy.

Fr. Stephen: Right. Well, even far more simple things than that. [Laughter] Going to the bathroom.

Fr. Andrew: Touching a dead body. But even things that might otherwise seem good, like doesn’t touching Torah scrolls render you ritually unclean?

Fr. Stephen: Right. Yeah, so any holy thing that’s out of its original context makes you unclean and becomes unclean. So we have to divide between what are commonly called, in the scholarly taxonomies, ritual uncleanness and moral uncleanness.

Fr. Andrew: They are related, though, right?

Fr. Stephen: They are related. So ritual uncleanness is the broader category. This broader category includes the things we were just mentioning: going to the bathroom, bodily emissions for men and women, bleeding, touching a dead body—even if you’re doing something good, like going to bury a family member, but coming into contact to clean the body and prepare it for burial: you’ve touched it; you’re now unclean. All of these things. Those make you ritually unclean. The reason it’s called “ritual uncleanness” is that then there is a ritual washing that you undertake before…

Fr. Andrew: I was going to say because— Like you said, it has to be undertaken, and the reason is that the uncleanness is not just sort of a state of being bad or dirty or whatever; it’s that something needs to be done.

Fr. Stephen: Right. It doesn’t mean you’re guilty of something. It doesn’t mean you need to repent of having gone to the bathroom.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Right.

Fr. Stephen: Again, this is not sin.

Fr. Andrew: Right, but there’s a washing that needs to occur.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and that then remedies it. You have to perform that washing before you go deeper into those concentric circles we were talking about.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, approaching God.

Fr. Stephen: So if you’re going to approach God, if you’re going to go deeper into those concentric circles, you need to ritually wash to remove that uncleanness.

The other category is moral uncleanness, meaning—

Fr. Andrew: Which is a subset.

Fr. Stephen: You have committed sinful acts, and in addition to the way that those sinful acts have to be dealt with, they also make you ritually unclean.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so there needs to be both repentance and washing.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so touching a dead human body makes you ritually unclean; making a dead human body, by killing someone, makes you morally unclean, which includes ritual uncleanness. So that has that added element of repentance.

Now, it is possible—someone who is ritually unclean who does not perform the ritual washings before going deeper into those concentric circles can contract moral uncleanness by virtue of that. So, for example, if you’re Nadab and Abihu, Aaron’s sons, and you’re drunk and messing around, and you go into the Temple in that state, you’re going to be on fire for the Lord—and not in the good way that you want to be.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] It took me about two seconds for that joke to sink in. Man! “He’s on fire!”

Fr. Stephen: So it could become that. So obviously the deeper in you are in those concentric circles, the more often you’re going to have to participate in these ritual washings. Priests are having to do this much more frequently, because they’re going to go and serve, and they have to maintain this ritual cleanness all the time, and moral uncleanness, obviously, as well. And the high priests, then, most of all.

Because of the need for this, we have—archaeologically, we’ve found— So at the time when you get to first century BC, first century AD, there are huge communal baths, essentially, in Jerusalem for pilgrims who are coming to the Temple, for Passover or for the other feasts. And when I say huge communal baths, this is what this looks like in terms of the excavations. Imagine an Olympic-sized swimming pool, and on each of the long sides of the rectangle there are stairs, stone stairs, leading down to the bottom of the pool, so that pilgrims come in a group, go down the one side into the water, and then walk up the stairs on the other side, having passed through it.

Fr. Andrew: So the idea is so that lots of people can go through this all at once and get through it.

Fr. Stephen: So when you have thousands of pilgrims coming off the road and whatever they’ve been doing and all that, and now come into the Temple courts, they can pass through there and perform that ritual washing in an efficient way.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because otherwise this is stuff that you would just do privately for various kinds of acts, but when you’ve got all these people coming at once, you need to figure this out logistically.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, it’s not like one of those places with one metal detector, where each person has to go and wash, and you have to wait. That would not be functional.

Fr. Andrew: Like the airport. [Laughter] This is the TSA pre-check version… No.

Fr. Stephen: And the idea here, at the core of it is that when one comes and presents oneself to God, you present yourself to God clean and whole, and that “whole” is where the bleeding and the emissions and that kind of things come in, because you’re seen to be depleted. I mean, in the case of bleeding, this is literally true. You bleed, you lose some blood, and it takes time for that to regenerate. But so that’s the idea behind it.

This is still in our tradition. If you pick up a copy, at least of the Antiochian Archdiocese’s priest guide, there’s hygiene rules for priests in there.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right, and there’s even in some editions of the Liturgikon, you’ve got the commandments of St. Basil to priests at the beginning, which relate to some of this stuff. There’s the tradition—

Fr. Stephen: The bishop washing his hands before the celebration of the Eucharist.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, the bishop washes his hands. The proskomidi where we cut the bread and pour the wine: there’s a washing that happens before that. And traditions about clergy, and traditionally, frankly, anyone who’s going to receive Communion, abstaining from marital relations the night before. There’s all these ideas of preparation and setting-apart. The fasting rules connected with Communion are related to this as well.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And again, this is not because there’s something evil about those things. This has to do with how we come and present ourselves before God in worship.

In terms of what St. John is doing, in terms of pushing people under the water, this is… It’s within this context of ritual washings. So the people who see him doing this are going to understand this within that context of ritual washings.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, they’ve seen this before.

Fr. Stephen: But there are also features of what he’s doing that separate it from the regular, run-of-the-mill washings that we were just talking about. I say “run-of-the-mill” because they were happening continually in the life of people who were trying to follow the Torah.

St. John is doing this out in the desert. The immediate significance of that that you might see is that the purpose of the ritual washings was to allow you to draw near to the Temple, to draw near to where God— He’s actually having people do this; he’s calling them further away in order to do this.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that’s… weird.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] So there is— In what St. John is doing, there is an inversion going on. What he’s doing is inverting the way in which most Judeans would have at least wanted to see themselves, because he’s calling the people out of Jerusalem and out of the other cities of Judea and Galilee and Samaria, calling them out to the Jordan. He’s calling them to remove themselves from the world, but “the world” here is Jerusalem and these other Jewish cities.

Fr. Andrew: Which—what does that say about what’s Jerusalem’s status and the status of the Temple there?

Fr. Stephen: Right, it’s treating Judea as the place of sin, so it’s treating Judea like Egypt in the exodus, or like Ur when Abraham is called. Herod’s Temple, which is the Temple that’s standing there at the time, is being treated not as the place where God dwells, shall we say, not as a holy place. And that is not unique in Second Temple Judaism, as we’ll see here in a minute. Different groups within Second Temple Judaism had different relationships with the Jerusalem Temple. But the juxtaposition here is they’re being called out of what was supposed to be the holy city. This is supposed to be the holy city, the city that is holy and set apart: Jerusalem; Mount Zion; city on a hill, the original; light to the nations.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, this kind of explains why St. John was so unpopular with certain people, because what he was doing was a fundamental insult to the Temple.

Fr. Stephen: Right, to the Temple, to the priesthood at the time, which was the Sadducees, to Herod… Herod realized that, we can tell.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, this guy’s a real rebel.

Fr. Stephen: And so he’s not only calling them out, but he’s calling them to this baptism that is not just about— It’s not about forgiveness of sins just in the sense of “hey, I committed a crime; God’s mad at me, and I need to go and get baptized, and then I’m off the hook, so I go to heaven and don’t go to hell.” Again, that’s not in view here. This is: “You need to be purified from the way of life you’ve been living and the residue that’s been left on you.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which explains why it says in the Scriptures, when various groups come to St. John, they often ask him, “What are we supposed to do?” Like: “Now that I’ve come and done this, how is my life supposed to change?”

Fr. Stephen: Right. “I can’t just go back.”

Fr. Andrew: He gives them specific commandments.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. “Can’t go back to just doing things like I did before.” And he gives them— What he says to them in terms of commands is ways to remedy that way of life. We read about particular people in the gospels who were sort of not interested in St. John’s offer, who didn’t take them up on it.

Fr. Andrew: Not the Jordan.

Fr. Stephen: One of those groups is at least many of the Pharisees. There are particular examples of Pharisees who did receive St. John’s baptism in the same gospels, but, for the most part, the Pharisees were not interested, and you see that, for example, in Luke 7:30. Why were they not interested? Well, the word “Pharisee”—and this is not 100% certain, but this is pretty much every scholar’s best guess—comes from a word that means to be set apart, to be separated.

Fr. Andrew: So they basically: “We’re already separated!” [Laughter] “We’re separated the good way!”

Fr. Stephen: Right, and that’s why, when you hear Pharisees speak in the gospels, they often refer to sinners as these other people.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, “we’re not them.”

Fr. Stephen: So they have— From their perspective, they already have this ambivalent relationship with Herod’s Temple. This is what allows the Pharisees to survive the destruction of the Temple.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, they’ve already defined themselves over against it.

Fr. Stephen: In terms of the later Judaism, they already had this sort of ambivalent relationship with it. I say “ambivalent” because it’s not like they never used it or wouldn’t go near it or anything, but… It was the Temple, but they acknowledged that the Sadducees running it and the way it was being run was corrupt and needed to be purified. There’s good evidence that they believed that the Messiah was going to do that when he came.

Fr. Andrew: They weren’t wrong… [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Agreed!

Fr. Andrew: Like, hey, you guys got this one right!

Fr. Stephen: But they had this ambivalent relationship already, and from their perspective, what being a Pharisee was all about was separating yourself from, yes, that sinful way of life that unfortunately is going on in Judea., but we’re the ones who are separated. And therefore they didn’t think they needed what St. John was doing. They thought they had already sort of had that taken care of, many of them.

Sadducees, it might be obvious why they weren’t interested. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, they were the establishment.

Fr. Stephen: Luke 20:1-8, this is where the Sadducees and some Torah scholars and some people come to Jesus to test him again, and he kind of throws a question back at them, which is always bad news for them. And they say, “By what authority are you doing the things you do?” and he says, “Well, on what authority did John baptize? Was it from human— was it from men or from God?” And of course, they’re like: “If we say men, then all the people will get mad at us, and if we say God, then they’ll ask, ‘Hey, why didn’t you get baptized, then?’ ” So they just kind of wander off. [Laughter]

So this shows that they weren’t interested, but, I mean, they’re the ones being denounced. [Laughter] This is the high priestly family. These are the corrupt people whom he’s talking about. So, yeah, they’re number one, not super willing to accept that they’re corrupt and evil, and, number two, not going to change their ways. That seems to be why they weren’t interested.

So we also talked about— We did our episode, just on St. John the Forerunner a while back—

Fr. Andrew: Yes, one of my favorites.

Fr. Stephen: —and in that, we talked about the whole idea of remnant theology, as it’s called now in scholarship, but that idea that there’s a faithful remnant, always preserved within Israel and Judah, going back to the Prophet Elijah after the showdown on Mount Carmel, where he says, “I’m the only one who still worships Yahweh the God of Israel. Might as well just take my life,” and God says, “No, there are all these who have not bowed the knee to Baal,” that there’s that remnant. And how St. John, part of what he’s doing is, again, reforming that remnant, out there on the other side of the Jordan, putting that people, that family unit together again, so that he can then turn that over to Jesus as the Messiah.

This of course brings us to Christ’s baptism.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, finally! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so we move from Christ’s circumcision to Christ’s baptism.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, he shows up there at the Jordan, at the beginning of the gospels, depending on which one you’re looking at…

Fr. Stephen: And all four of them, showing how important it is, because there aren’t a lot of things that are actually in all four, but this is one of them. We’ve talked about this a little bit before, too, but St. John of course protests at first, basically. He says, “I need to be baptized by you,” sort of acknowledging: “Hey, the whole forgiveness of sins part and being added to the faithful remnant and all this… You don’t need that! You’re already there.” In fact, he says, “I need to be baptized by you,” meaning: “You’re above me, not the other way around.”

Fr. Andrew: “And you’re the one through whom all this is really happening.”

Fr. Stephen: Right, in the first place. But Christ says he’s going to do it to fulfill all righteousness, and so we see that there is another sort of inversion happening here, that Christ, when it comes to— And again, we’re going back to this sort of uncleanness category and this wholeness category. When Christ goes and touches a leper, he doesn’t become unclean; the leper becomes clean, the leper is healed. When he touches a dead body, he doesn’t become unclean; the dead body comes back to life. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Right, because uncleanness is about your relationship to God. It’s about your ability to approach God, and he is God.

Fr. Stephen: God approaching them.

Fr. Andrew: He cannot become unclean, because he’s the goal of cleanliness.

Fr. Stephen: So when Christ goes into the waters, the waters don’t make him clean; he makes the waters clean. All the language— And again, like I said, we’ll just do this briefly, because we’ve talked about this on the show before. The waters are purified. All the language in the feast of Theophany that we use about the waters being purified, the dragons there being crushed, the spiritual powers of the waters, and all of the “new creation” language, the “eighth day, new creation” language, the waters being cut off—all of that language that we’ve been talking about tonight gets attached to Christ’s baptism as the beginning.

This also is deeply connected to why St. John is doing this in the Jordan and calling the people out there out of the sinful world, is that Christ’s name, even though it drives me bonkers when people pronounce it the Hebrew way—got to admit, people get mad at me when I say it, the people who say “Yeshua Ha Mashiach” and stuff, that’s like, “Bob, your grandfather’s Norwegian; what are you doing?” [Laughter] But Christ does have the same name. The name “Jesus” is the Latin version of “Joshua.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, the Latin version of the Greek version… [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yes. Well, anything in Latin is stolen from the Greeks.

Fr. Andrew: Often true. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: But the name Joshua. Of course, when Joshua leads the people into the land, they do it through the Jordan; the Jordan parts in front of them. Insert all the language about the Jordan “turning back,” which is lifted directly from Joshua, in our celebration of the feast of Christ’s baptism.

So what Christ is enacting there at the Jordan with St. John, as he takes this group of people, this faithful remnant that St. John has gathered, is a sort of reconquest.

Fr. Andrew: Mm. Like the entrance into Canaan again.

Fr. Stephen: Right, the land has become like it was, because the leaders, the authorities, have become corrupt. Herod is like Pharaoh; he’s going around killing innocent children. So this reconquest has to happen. And, as we talked about, the understanding at the time, we have all these exorcisms in the synoptic gospels because they viewed those spirits as being the spirits of dead giants, meaning they’re the same beings whom Joshua was driving out of the land.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and so this is the new—literally the new Joshua, who literally has the same name.

Fr. Stephen: Right, who is now beginning this reconquest and the resanctification of the land by, again, this imagery of Christ sanctifying himself in order to pass that holiness on to the rest of us through baptism—through our baptisms.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. I don’t think we can underline enough the significance of the place, that this is the Jordan that these same events that they continually celebrate in their liturgical life, that they hear in the Scriptures: this is where John is doing what he’s doing, as if to say: Hey, it’s all happening again, although it’s really happening in the fullest possible way this time. This is the fulfillment of what Joshua was doing, ultimately.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and that fulfillment is… Part of what’s going on… The story, in a lot of ways, of the Old Testament—and Christians have traditionally read it as a story that’s leading up to Christ; obviously, Jewish folks not necessarily, but we read it as this story leading up to Christ—part of it is the story of God creating and then sanctifying this remnant of the people to prepare for the coming of the Messiah, the coming of Christ. And part of doing that is that, throughout the history that we see unfold in the Old Testament, is that these patterns are being elaborated; these rituals are being begun; these different things are created in order that when Christ comes, those who have been faithful to what was established will recognize him, will be able to understand him.

When we talk about fulfillment, like when we talked about atonement and we were talking about the Day of Atonement and connecting that to Christ, we were really asserting that that Day of Atonement ritual and participating in it annually was so that when Christ offered himself as a sacrifice for the life of the world and for its salvation, the people would be able to understand what was happening, because imagine if we didn’t have that. Imagine if we didn’t have the Old Testament, for a second. And Christ had just come and done miracles and healed people, and then been crucified and then risen from the dead and ascended into heaven.

Fr. Andrew: Right, it would just be contextless actions. That would be impressive, but… “Oh, we’ve been visited by a god!”

Fr. Stephen: But what would we do going forward to participate in that and to celebrate that? How would we comprehend that? How would we find a way into that? We couldn’t! [Laughter] We couldn’t. And so that is… When we talk about patterns in the Old Testament being filled up to overflowing in the New Testament, that’s not a handy dodge or a weird principle or just, you know, symbolism happens or whatever; we’re talking about a sort of a concrete thing, of God preparing people to be able to understand what he did in Christ and is doing in Christ.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. All right, well, we’re going to go ahead and take our second break, and when we come back, we’re going to talk about what it means for us to be baptized. So we’ll be right back!

Fr. Andrew: You know, hearing that ad makes me think that you should do a Bible study podcast, Fr. Stephen. Have you thought about it?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah… Believe it or not, last night, less than 24 hours ago, I finished my first pass through the whole Bible in real time.

Fr. Andrew: [Gasp] You did it!

Fr. Stephen: Twelve and a half years later…

Fr. Andrew: Wow.

Fr. Stephen: From Genesee to Revelation.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Hoo! Man. I could hear John Goodman saying that. Well, congratulations.

Fr. Stephen: So, yeah, now we’ve got to start over with Genesis, because we didn’t record Genesis last time, which is actually good, because it would have been terrible.

Fr. Andrew: Back when you were still in your 30s.

Fr. Stephen: I would’ve pulled it down anyway. I didn’t know anything twelve and a half years ago.

Fr. Andrew: Wow. Yeah… I mean, on the podcast for Whole Counsel of God in terms of what’s being released, it just started 1 John. So I think we’re maybe two or three months behind on the podcast?

Fr. Stephen: Probably. Revelation took a minute.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I’ll bet! You didn’t just tell everybody to read Andrew of Caesarea?

Fr. Stephen: Basically. Yeah, you can just do that. It’s very disappointing, because there’s nothing about China in there, actually, or Moscow, or any of that stuff.

Fr. Andrew: Or America’s place in biblical prophecy?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. Well… [Laughter] That actually is in there, but not in a way that anybody’s going to like.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Is that when Leviathan comes up out of the water?

Fr. Stephen: No, that’s more like Babylon, that nice young lady, drunk on the blood of the saints.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Whew! That’s exciting.

Fr. Stephen: Teaser.

Fr. Andrew: All right. Well, we’re back. Feel free to give us a call. We will still take your calls. Now we’re talking about Christian baptism. First we talked about circumcision, and then in the second half we talked about the baptism of John the Forerunner and Baptist, and now we’re talking about Christian baptism. True to form, right? The thing that our episode is about, we finally get to it in the third half?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and that was circumcision in general, not Christian circumcision—

Fr. Andrew: That’s not a thing.

Fr. Stephen: —because you’d be hard-pressed to find a Christian mohel, I think.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] That’s true! Of course, now that I’m thinking about it…

Fr. Stephen: I don’t know of any!

Fr. Andrew: Now that I think about it, that’s probably a thing.

Fr. Stephen: Okay, now we need to find out. If you’re listening to this and you are a Christian mohel, email Fr. Andrew at Ancient Faith dot com with your…

Fr. Andrew: I’m Googling “Christian mohel” right now. [Laughter] Anyway…

Fr. Stephen: But, yes, now we’re talking about Christian baptism per se, because, as usual, it is in our third half that we get to our actual topic.

At the core, as we’ve already seen, like in St. Paul’s writings about us being buried with Christ in baptism, dying with Christ in baptism, rising again to new life, that if we want to talk about what’s going— what baptism is doing, then, at a very basic level, baptism is about a movement from death to life through water. And because of that, as we were just saying at the end of the second half, the apostles in the New Testament are going to look at these patterns that are established in the Old Testament as ways of understanding what’s now going on in baptism into Christ.

One of these that we talked about at length in one of our Pascha episodes has to do with the crossing of the Red Sea, or the Sea of Reeds, with Moses. We talked about how the Sea of Reeds in Egyptian stories was something that had to be crossed in order to get to the afterlife, and that they would offer sort of incantations and various ritual offerings to get the gods to sort of bring them across the Sea of Reeds safely into the afterlife. There was the possibility of becoming entangled in the reeds and becoming one of the drowned ones, which was essentially their name for the damned.

Both in the way the story is narrated in Exodus, but then especially the way it’s described in Exodus 15 in the Song of the Sea, it is directly connected to these traditions and these stories. So this isn’t… We’re going to quote St. Paul in 1 Corinthians here in a minute who makes this comparison. St. Paul isn’t just coming up with an allegory or an analogy. He’s definitely not saying the original thing didn’t happen. [Laughter] But he’s reading what happened there in terms of what it originally meant, that this was for the Israelites a passage from death to life through water, that they were passing through the realm of death safely, unlike the Egyptians, who ended up being the drowned ones, and they were being delivered in this real sense.

The most prominent place where St. Paul refers to this, or at least the most explicit one, is in 1 Corinthians 10, right at the beginning of the chapter.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, so verses one and two.

For I do not want you to be unaware, brothers, that our fathers were all under the cloud and all passed through the sea, and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea.

Probably the phrase that may be weird to people is being baptized into Moses.

Fr. Stephen: Right. [Laughter] “Wait, what?”

Fr. Andrew: I don’t know what’s going on in the Greek there, but, wait…

Fr. Stephen: That’s a pretty straightforward translation.

Fr. Andrew: Christ… baptized into Moses…

Fr. Stephen: St. Paul says many things that are hard to understand.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I’ve heard that!

Fr. Stephen: We’ll put a pin in the cloud part for now—see future chrismation episode—but the sea part, obviously, is a little more clear. So this “baptized into Moses” part has to do with the way this is seen as sort of one event. The Passover, the exodus out of Egypt, and the coming to Mount Sinai and the receiving of the Torah are intimately connected. This is similar to the way in which for us as Orthodox Christians and, I think, for most Christians who have any kind of liturgical sense, the way that Pascha—that Easter, that Christ’s resurrection—and Pentecost—because, remember, Pentecost was originally the giving of the Torah, the giving of the Law—the way those two events are sort of connected. They move together on the calendar. It represents sort of their own cycle over against the fixed feasts. And they sort of form this unit together. So it was in the same way.

As we saw, when we were taking things St. Paul said about circumcision and baptism, he sees baptism as then immediately connected to faithfulness, in the same way that circumcision, going all the way back to Abraham, was immediately connected to faithfulness: “You’re to circumcise and walk before me and be righteous.” He’s connecting those who are baptized in the cloud and the sea to those who are then called to keep the Torah when it is given. Moses is used there because Moses is sort of the mediator of that covenant to the people.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, he’s the instrument by which it’s happening.

Fr. Stephen: So this is effectively about them being baptized into the Torah, that this event establishes now this relationship. That’s why, in 1 Corinthians 10, if you go on past verse two where we read, St. Paul—the reason he starts this with: “I do not want you to be unaware, brothers”: “I’m reminding you guys,” that after that happened, those who were faithless died in the wilderness.

Fr. Andrew: Mm. They were left behind.

Fr. Stephen: And so he’s saying to them, “Yes, you were all baptized into Christ, but if that does not now become a life of faithfulness, then that baptism by itself isn’t going to do you any more good than it did those who died in the wilderness in disobedience.” Remember the Torah contained both blessings and curses of the covenant. Baptism is the beginning in that sense, of that life of faithfulness.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s a new life, not just a badge.

Fr. Stephen: Right, or a status.

The other major sort of Old Testament pattern that gets brought forward as a way to help understand Christian baptism—and now we’re going to go with St. Peter—is the flood of Noah.

Fr. Andrew: And that’s because it’s about water, right?

Fr. Stephen: Yes, that’s it. That’s the only connection.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] That’s all there is to it. So that means that all the people—

Fr. Stephen: Anything with water in it, that’s about baptism now.

Fr. Andrew: All the people who died in the flood are being baptized. Wait…

Fr. Stephen: Any time you see a stick of wood in the Old Testament, that’s the cross. [Laughter] ...as Nietzsche joked. But, no, that’s not what we’re saying. St. Peter is going to make a much more involved connection than that.

Fr. Andrew: And this is actually the passage where we get the title for our episode tonight: 1 Peter 3:18-22.

For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh but being made alive in the spirit, in which he went and proclaimed to the spirits in prison, because they formerly did not obey, when God’s patience waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was being prepared, in which a few, that is, eight persons, were brought safely through water. Baptism, which corresponds to this, now saves you, not as a removal of dirt from the body, but as an appeal to God for a good conscience through the resurrection of Jesus Christ, who has gone into heaven and is at the right hand of God, with angels and authorities and powers having been subjected to him.

There’s a lot going on in that passage.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, but I think it’s pretty self-explanatory, not difficult like St. Paul.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, good night, everybody!

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Right, so we’re focusing, of course, on this baptism element, but it’s important that we see that St. Peter has this whole narration before he says, “Baptism, which corresponds to this.”

Fr. Andrew: To this, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Right. So it’s not just the last word of verse 20 is “water,” and then, verse 21, “Baptism, which corresponds to this”—corresponds to “water”! See? Water! [Laughter] That’s not what he’s doing.

He is telling the story of Christ’s descent into Hades. In that descent into Hades—I know we’ve talked about this on the show before, but it’s been a while. In that descent into Hades, he confronts these spirits who are imprisoned there and makes this proclamation to them. We’ve talked about how this mirrors, in the book of Enoch, Enoch’s descent to the imprisoned Watchers, where they kind of ask Enoch to help get them off the hook, not because they’re actually repentant but just they don’t like being imprisoned. So they say, “Hey, God likes you, Enoch. You’re a righteous man. Can you make an appeal for us to God?” [Laughter] So Enoch, being a good guy, does, and God sends Enoch back to tell them, “Nope.” [Laughter] “You guys are staying here, until the end of days when you’ll get thrown into the lake of fire, so you have that to look forward to!”

But this is the same kind of thing here, because which spirits are these whom Christ makes the proclamation to? It’s the spirits of the disobedient of the days of Noah.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so these are dead giants.

Fr. Stephen: These are nephilim, these are Watchers: this is directly what St. Peter is referring to. In 2 Peter, he refers to the book of Enoch even more obviously than this. It’s those particular spirits that he makes this proclamation to of their doom, and then Noah was sort of saved out of that world through water.

Notice after he says, “Baptism, which corresponds to this,” meaning all of that, that whole narrative, he ends the passage we read by talking about Christ having ascended into heaven “with the angels, authorities, and powers subjected to him.” So angelic beings are still closely in view in what St. Peter is talking about. When we come to the “baptism now saves you,” the correct question to ask is: Saved from what?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, the frame here is definitely evil spirits and good spirits.

Fr. Stephen: Right. What was Noah saved from? Noah was saved from those people who—“those people”! those spiritual beings, evil spiritual beings—to whom Christ proclaimed their doom when he passed through the underworld.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which just underlines once again that the Gospel isn’t good news for everybody.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] So Christ passes from death to life. Noah passes from this world of evil, through water, to life. And now we also are saved from the powers of evil through baptism, and it is then the beginning of, just as after baptism, after he mentions baptism, Christ’s story continues with his ascent into heaven and his enthronement, baptism also for us is the beginning of our life of theosis, our life of becoming like Christ, being conformed to his image, which culminates in the enthronement of humanity, because as Hebrews says, “It is not to angels that God has subjected the world to come.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, see also every reference to “thrones” in plural we’ve ever made.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: See also one of my favorite verses to quote: “That we become equal to the angels” (Luke 20:36). I mean, this is just everywhere, all this theosis language, all over the Scripture in terms of being enthroned with Christ and being stewards of the life of the world to come.

Fr. Stephen: And so there is contained then within baptism this element of spiritual warfare, this idea of entering into a declaration of war against the evil spiritual powers. This is why in Orthodox tradition we spit on the devil—on, at, with the devil; sorry, that was a Lutheran joke.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] “In, with, and under”? Sorry.

Fr. Stephen: At the devil. There is this element of when someone comes to be baptized, they are now entering into spiritual warfare.

Fr. Andrew: It’s underlined, very much—for instance, the beginning of baptism in Greek is called the apotaxis and the syntaxis, which means basically coming away from the ordering in which you were and now being re-ordered along with Christ. The idea is you’re leaving behind the devil and his hosts and joining the Lord of hosts himself. I mean, I think that those are actually military terms; I’m not sure, but often of course it’s described in sermons about it as being “enlisted” with Christ and all that kind of thing.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. A couple things before we end the episode, related to baptism. First, another what baptism is not. This stems from—this is also something that St. Paul addresses to the Church in Corinth, that baptism into Moses as mediator. There was a confusion apparently in the Corinthian church that was leading to some bad results in terms of how they viewed baptism and what baptism was doing that’s related to both of the things that we just talked about, not just the idea of being baptized into Moses, but also the idea of sort of “you’re now on this team in this fight.” And exactly how those teams are designated.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so we’re just continuing on, 1 Corinthians…

Fr. Stephen: This is earlier.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, this is earlier, sorry. Chapter 1, verses 10-17—and you will recognize this, everybody.

I appeal to you, brothers, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and in the same judgment. For it has been reported to me by Chloe’s people that there is quarreling among you, my brothers. What this means is that each one of you says, “I follow Paul” or “I follow Apollos” or I follow Cephas” or “I follow Christ.” Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul? I thank God that I baptized none of you except Crispus and Gaius, so that no one may say that you were baptized in my name. I did baptize also the household of Stephanus; beyond that I do not know whether I baptized anyone else. For Christ did not send me to baptize but to preach the gospel, and not with words of eloquent wisdom, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power.

Fr. Stephen: One of the reasons I really like this passage is that you can tell how close it is to St. Paul’s dictation, because he’s literally like, “Boy, I’m glad I didn’t baptize anybody except this guy and this guy—well, okay, there was also that guy, maybe this other guy… Okay, I don’t know if I baptized anybody else, but anyway, you get my point!” [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, and he’s… This is a straightforward sense here, which he’s saying there’s not sects within the Church; there’s not… I mean, we can have schools of thought on some level, but it shouldn’t be teams.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and Christ is the mediator between God and man.

Fr. Andrew: Right. Our loyalty is to Christ, not to any human teacher or leader, whether they have a high and exalted ecclesiastical position or a gigantic following on the internets. Our loyalty is not to any of them as Christians.

Fr. Stephen: And this is what St. Paul is getting at. It may sound weird at first when he says, “For Christ did not send me to baptize, but to preach the Gospel,” because your brain might go to Matthew 28 and the great commission, where Christ says, “Go, make disciples of all nations, baptizing them…” Kind of sounds like he’s sending the apostles to baptize! But that’s not what St. Paul’s getting at. What he’s getting at is that he wasn’t sent out to make Paulians.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, followers of Paul.

Fr. Stephen: He wasn’t sent out— Christianity and evangelism is not like Amway. [Laughter] And just to clarify, I’m not saying anything negative about Amway.

Fr. Andrew: It’s just not like that.

Fr. Stephen: I’m just vaguely suggesting that if one were to diagram the structure of the organization on a piece of paper, it would be very narrow at the top and wide at the bottom. That’s all I’m saying.

Fr. Andrew: That’s like some shape we might have heard of before, I don’t know…

Fr. Stephen: Send your emails to Fr. Andrew at Ancient Faith dot com, and legal service also can go through him.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Good thing that’s not a real email address.

Fr. Stephen: But that’s not what it’s about. It was not making followers for himself—

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which unfortunately—

Fr. Stephen: —but to preach the Gospel, which is about Christ.

Fr. Andrew: About Christ, yeah. Unfortunately, that’s… Sadly, that’s a thing amongst people who call themselves Christians. I don’t think I’ve really seen this, but I hope that no one ever out there is like “I’m a Lord of Spirits listener!” You know? That’s not a thing, people. That’s not a thing. It’s not what this is about. We’re pointing you to Christ; we’re pointing you to life in parishes. It’s not about which team you’re on or whom you follow or whatever. That’s not it at all.

Fr. Stephen: This is part of what’s behind my “stop simping” rant a few episodes ago.

Fr. Andrew: Yes.

Fr. Stephen: And this is the real reason— It’s not just like: Oh, I hear someone say they’re a Fr. Stephen De Young fan, and I’m uncomfortable with it—I mean, I am, but that’s not what I’m getting at. [Laughter] The place where this rubber meets the road—and this happens all the time in the life of the Orthodox Church and pretty much all other Christian communities and non-Christian communities—is people get put in this position of leadership or prominence or whatever it is, and people don’t even realize they’re doing it. They’re starting to put their loyalty and their trust in those people. And the rubber meets the road when those people let you down, when those people mess up.

This is why I don’t want simps. This is why I don’t want people being like: “I’m a Fr. Stephen De Young fan,” because I will let you down. I will mess up. Eventually I’ll succeed at getting myself canceled. Eventually I will say something that offends you, like maybe you thought I was great, and then I just took a shot at Amway for no reason! [Laughter] But whatever it is, potentially it’ll happen, and I don’t want that to cause you to leave the Orthodox Church. I don’t want that to drive you away from Christ. That’s why I don’t want it.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and there’s a flip-side to this to, and that’s that people who attach themselves to some figure in loyalty then are incapable of noticing when they do mess up. They end up making excuses for all kinds of bad behavior. And then kind of another flip-side of it is when you do see someone mess up, then you denounce their Christianity entirely, like: “Well, he’s just one of the bad ones, because he did this one thing or said this one thing” or whatever it might be, because all of this is to absolutize individual people when it’s Christ who is the absolute. So then we can— If we have Christ as our absolute, then we can say, “This is a good action or a good word; this is a bad action or a bad word”—because it’s all judged by Christ, and not which “team” you’re on.

It’s such a toxic way to be, and we all do this. We all do it, whether it’s teachers in the Church or on the internets or politics. This happens all the time. “I’m on this person’s team” or “I’m this person’s friend, and so therefore…” Or “I’m not on their team; I’m not their friend, so everything they do is bad.” That just shows we need to reorient ourselves toward Christ whenever we behave that way. And we all do it, so let’s all repent.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. I hope that, within my deluge of content I pour out continuously, there are things that are helpful to people, but those are things that will be found amidst that content; that’s not me as a person. “Me” as a person, Fr. Stephen De Young, I will become a stumbling-block for you eventually. I’m not a very good person. [Laughter] So just accept that now. But because God was able to speak through Balaam’s ass, hopefully some good things for you will come out of me. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and so the point here is that baptism does not make people—does not put people into a sect: it’s into Christ, who is the Savior of the world.

Fr. Stephen: And so, sort of a summary of what we’ve been talking about now, because ritual does something. It doesn’t represent something, it’s not a performance for you to view of something, it’s not giving you food for thought: it’s actually doing something. What does baptism do, in summary, all the kind of concepts we’ve been talking about? Baptism removes a person from the world.

Fr. Andrew: And we should emphasize it’s this sense of the world we were talking about earlier, sort of the world system of evil and darkness and demons, not the creation.

Fr. Stephen: Right: the world, the flesh, and the devil.

Fr. Andrew: Right. That sense of the world.

Fr. Stephen: The source of sin. Separated from that, and therefore, by that separation, made holy, sanctified. It is, as we were just saying, a declaration of spiritual warfare. It is the death of the person who went into the water and the new life of the person who comes out, the beginning of the life of the one who comes out. I tell people when I receive them into the Church, whether it’s baptism or chrismation, however it happens, that there is no reason why the day after they’ve been baptized they have to be the same person they were the day before. Anything they want to leave behind they can leave in the water and start over. It is the beginning of membership in the family of God, the big extended family, that includes all of us. And it makes us co-heirs in Christ, meaning all of the promises of Christ he shares with us when we’re baptized into Christ, as we talked about. All of these things. There’s nary a one of them that infants don’t need, going back to that question at the beginning of the second half.

So after that summary, I feel we must include this brief appendix, about baptism for the dead.

Fr. Andrew: Baptism for the dead. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Right. And of course, we’re referring to what St. Paul refers to in 1 Corinthians 15 as part of his argument about the resurrection.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, this is a completely non-controversial and totally clear verse!

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: He says:

Otherwise, what do people mean by being baptized on behalf of the dead? If the dead are not raised at all, why are people baptized on their behalf?

Fr. Stephen: St. Paul sometimes says things that are hard to understand. [Laughter] To give this a little context, chapter 15 of 1 Corinthians is really all about the resurrection of the dead. Why is this something that St. Paul has to address? Well, as we were saying in the first half, the Christian community in Corinth has two types of folks: There’s Christians from a Jewish background; there’s Christians from a pagan, Gentile background. For the pagans, the idea of the bodily resurrection was kind of ludicrous. I mean, literally this is what happens at Athens in Acts 17 with St. Paul. Everybody’s kind of vibing with him until he brings up the bodily resurrection, and then they all laugh at him, because that’s just ridiculous. “Why would you want that? Why would you want to be in a body again? Eugh!”

On the side of Jewish Christians, while there were, like for example the Pharisees—there were prominent groups within Second Temple Judaism that believed in the bodily resurrection. There were also some that did not: the Sadducees did not. Other groups didn’t or had different ideas about what an afterlife might look like that didn’t include a bodily resurrection per se. So a subset of those Jewish Christians would be familiar with the idea of bodily resurrection, but not all of them necessarily.

So St. Paul, in this lengthy chapter, sets out trying to argue for it. He argues for it on all number of bounds. Like: If you deny physical resurrection, then you’re saying Christ wasn’t physically raised from the dead, bodily. And then here’s all the things that would result from that being the case. He goes at it from different angles.

The verse you just read, 15:29, is one of his many arguments that he has lined up, where he refers to this practice that the community in Corinth at least is familiar with, that there were people who were being, as it’s translated there, “baptism on behalf of the dead.” The Greek preposition there that’s translated “on behalf of”… Greek prepositions are pretty flexible. This one can mean “on behalf of”; it really—the core of it is “for the benefit of.” So it’s not that “on behalf of” is wrong—that’s one way it could be used—but not the only way. All we know is that the baptism of these people is somehow benefiting the dead, or is somehow connected in a positive way from what they’re doing, to the dead: in that direction.

Then he follows up with: “if the dead are not raised at all, why are people baptized on their behalf?” So whatever this practice means, it would make no sense if the resurrection isn’t real. To understand this—and I know I’ve talked about this distinction on the show before—but St. Paul is very particular about when he uses “dead” in the plural, nekroi, and when he puts the article in front of it. In English we would portray that as “dead” versus “the dead.” When St. Paul uses it without the article, just “dead” in the plural, he means all the dead people, just dead people in general. When he uses the article, which we would translate as “the dead,” the article in Greek is really still kind of functioning as a demonstrative pronoun, so you could sort of overtranslate it as “these dead,” the idea being he’s referring to a specific group of dead people, not just dead people in general. That’s what the article does; it makes it specific.

Fr. Andrew: “Those dead.”

Fr. Stephen: Right. So if you track when St. Paul uses it with and without the article, what you find is when he uses it with the article to refer to a specific group of dead, he’s referring to dead Christians; he’s referring to the dead faithful, or the dead of the old covenant, the righteous dead of the old covenant. But it’s always sort of that category, of the righteous dead.

So this isn’t people being baptized on behalf of dead people in general; it’s people being baptized on behalf of these righteous dead, and dead Christians. So that means it can’t mean what our Mormon friends would want it to mean, because the Latter-Day Saints’ practice is that people who are members of the LDS are baptized for someone who wasn’t, with the idea that that makes them now baptized.

Fr. Andrew: Right, which is why they’re super-duper into genealogy, to try to retroactively include all of their dead relatives in the LDS church.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so it can’t mean that, because then St. Paul wouldn’t use the article. The fact that he’s using the article— These are already faithful people. So these are people who presumably would be in paradise, would be in the positive afterlife; these are the people whom St. Paul calls “the dead in Christ,” who are with Christ. So they don’t need to be baptized.

So then what is this relationship that’s being set up? This corresponds to the idea in Roman culture of patronage. When… This is how people got educated, not just in terms of education the way we would think of it maybe, but also like we would think of a trade school. That kind of stuff costs money. Any kind of education in the Roman world cost money. Peasants didn’t get any education. There were no public schools. So most people did not have the money they needed to go and do that, so they would have a patron who would be an older, established person, often established within that trade or within that discipline that the person was pursuing, who would effectively sponsor them, would sort of sponsor them, guide them, pay for what they needed. And then in return, the person who was being patronized—pardon the pun—would… The things he would do, at least for a certain period of time, at least while the patron was alive, would be done in that patron’s name.

The closest thing we have to this in the modern day is when you watch shows on PBS or listen to the NPR podcast or something, and they say, “This was made possible by a grant from… whatever.” So you’re kind of giving them credit for your work. If you were an artisan and you had a patron, and you would create something, and you would say, “This is by virtue of my patron So-and-so,” and that would bring honor and respect and glory to the patron.

The idea here that St. Paul is getting at is there were people already at this point—and we’re talking about 25 years after the death and resurrection of Christ, because there were already martyrs, etc., unfortunately—who were being baptized, and who were taking the names of departed saints. He talks about… There is a subgroup of people who are doing this. Everyone doesn’t do this yet. This is common practice now in the Orthodox Church, that you take a patron saint. But this is what St. Paul is referring to in its very earliest stage, the idea being, obviously, a saint in glory is more advanced on the path of following Christ than I am, by a lot, and so you take this patron saint. You establish this relationship with that patron saint, and they both serve as sort of a guide to you and what you do within the Church community, you are doing in their name. There is this connection.

Mystery unlocked, that’s what’s there, going on in 1 Corinthians 15, at least in a short version. I have a much longer version of that argument! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: You do! This is true. Yeah, and I mean, it makes sense to me.

All right, well, to wrap up our baptism episode this evening… And before we do that, actually, I just want to make a note to everybody that we— As I said at the beginning, we’re doing a series now on the holy mysteries, the sacraments of the Church. We’re going to continue doing that with the next episode. The next episode, however, is going to be pre-recorded, so you won’t be able to call in next time, although, as Fr. Stephen will remind you, if you do call in, who knows what might happen! But we will not be on the other end of the line to talk to you, that’s for sure, no matter what else might happen. But we’re going to continue next time. So just a note that next time it’ll be aired live, but it won’t be us; it’ll just be a pre-recorded episode.

Well, to wrap up our baptism episode, one of the big pastoral questions that parish priests especially deal with—but I don’t think it’s just an issue for the pastor; it’s really an issue for the whole community—is that there are people who will come to the church, and they’ll especially have their child baptized, or they might come to the church because they’re maybe going to get married or something like that and be baptized themselves, and then that’s often the last time you see them. This happens a lot. In fact, I would be willing to bet that there are more—at least in the United States, and probably in other countries, too, but I’m pretty sure about the United States—that there are more people who have had baptism in the Church who are not in the Church than are in the Church.

It’s a vexing issue. It happens all the time, and we do all kinds of things to try to mitigate that, to try to prevent it from happening. When I was still pastoring, one of the things that I would do is I would tell people, especially who weren’t part of the church community already, I wanted to see them come to church for a while before I would be willing to put the baptism of their child on the schedule. I’d say, “Yes, we’ll baptize that child, but this child needs to be raised in the Church, so show me that you’re going to do that.” There’s all kinds of ways that this gets done.

I think what this betrays is this idea that baptism is what we have talked about in other episodes as a kind of religious technique, which, if you do it just the right way, then you get a particular result; and if you don’t do it the right way, then you’re not going to get that result. In other words, that it’s a kind of magic. That it’s a kind of magic. I think that this way of looking at it is pretty rampant, actually.

It’s not just evidenced by the fact that there are people who treat it like it’s a magical spell that gets you into heaven or that gives you a membership or something like that, but it’s also evidenced by the fact that there are a lot of debates that happen, largely between people who are not actually qualified to have a debate, not just because they’re not trained and knowledgeable, although that’s often the case, but because they’re not the ones actually making the decisions and not the ones actually responsible for the decisions about—and this was referenced in the question we got in email about especially the reception of converts into the Church, people with a Christian background who, in many cases, have experienced a baptism ritual within that previous Christian experience.

So there is a particular distortion, for instance, and I’m just going to come right out and say this because it is a distortion, absolutely a distortion of so-called corrective baptism; that is, people who have been received into the Orthodox Church who—a bishop received them, usually through a priest, and they’ve been receiving holy Communion, and then they go and get baptized by somebody else. And there’s all kinds of ways that that manifests, but this is a distortion because, if you look at the actual history of the Church and the way that it has dealt with this question, there’s not a single formula. The way that we know that is by reading the actual canons of the Ecumenical Councils that say, “Receive these converts in this way, receive these converts in this way, receive these other converts in this way.”

If you compile them all together and try to come up with some kind of mechanistic theory about how it’s supposed to work, it just doesn’t actually all work out in any kind of codifiable way. It doesn’t. There’s just no sort of machine that you can put together that is sort of the baptism machine, that it works this way and not this other way. I think the attempt to do that is, once again, to treat baptism as a kind of religious technique, that it’s a kind of magic and you have to do it in an exact, certain, perfect way, and if you don’t, then it doesn’t work; there’s simply nothing—whatever happened, it backfires or whatever.

But as we’ve seen, by all this examination we’ve had of Scripture, the point of baptism—there’s many things that it accomplishes, but one of the things it accomplishes is to bring you into the family of God so that you can live in righteousness. This goes all the way back to the covenant with Abraham and continues on. As we mentioned, it’s the first commandment that is a kind of foundational, “this is how you live” commandment. It’s a commandment of faithfulness. As we said at the beginning of—I can’t remember if it was this half or the second half—that for someone to say, “Well, this is the way I want to be received and not this way,” is to begin the whole thing with disobedience, to begin the whole thing being self-willed and with individualism. And to judge the way that another bishop chooses to apply the commandments and the canons is, again, being self-willed and individualistic. As it says in Scripture very explicitly: Who are you to judge another man’s servant? And worse: Who are you to judge another man’s master, literally?

But the point is to bring someone into this life of faithfulness, and, at the end of time, we know that every person is going to be judged according to what he has done. And that’s why questions about, “Well, can someone really be saved if they have not received baptism at all or in a particular way?” betrays this kind of mechanistic religious technique approach to this holy sacrament and to all the sacraments, in a lot of ways. It’s to turn it into a kind of materialistic, frankly, formula, and that’s not what it is.

Now, by saying that, I’m not saying that the way that you do it doesn’t matter; I’m not saying that at all. But I am saying that within the two-millennia-long consciousness of the Church and how to bring people into faithfulness that it’s gotten applied in different ways, different places, different times, different groups of people, and to attempt to come up with a one-size-fits-all approach to these things is to condemn whole swaths of Church history and holy people, in fact, and that’s not what we do as Orthodox Christians; we don’t do that. Instead, we enter into the Church as it is, and we are obedient to the community that we enter into. If we’re not ready to be obedient within that, then we need to repent and become ready to be obedient.

The reason for all of that is, as we’ve said, that it’s about entering into this life of faithfulness—not a faithfulness to any particular theory, not a faithfulness to any particular preferred commenter or teacher or whoever, not a faithfulness to a particular charismatic speaker or very smart person or whatever—it’s faithfulness to Christ. And we’ve seen that faithfulness to Christ can be done in a lot of different ways throughout the Church. There’s a consistency between all of them. There’s a consistency between all of them, but it’s not a consistency of technique, that you have to get everything technically correct in a certain kind of way or else it just doesn’t work. Instead what we see is people orienting themselves towards Christ.

So I believe that baptism, of course, is a great place to talk about all of this, because it’s so full of so many things. The summary that Fr. Stephen gave there at the end, that brings all this stuff together, to try to reduce it down to some kind of formula or a technique is to really do violence to what is being joined to Christ, to what is becoming co-heirs with Christ, to what is entering into that whole life in the family of God. And what an amazing and awesome, awesome gift it is from God to be welcomed into his kingdom. Fr. Stephen?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, to kind of kick off from that, the problem of individualism is very real, and it afflicts all of us. Again, this is one of those things that’s come into us from our culture, that’s been built into us and just the way we see things in terms of how we see ourselves, how we see the Church—our parish as a collection of people, a collection of individuals—and it lends itself to a whole view of the Christian life that is very different [from] the view that’s presented by the Scriptures. When I say the Scriptures, I mean Old and New Testament, as we’ve been seeing tonight, that those are not really all that far apart, because we’ve kind of boiled down Christianity in a lot of our heads to “here’s a list of things I have to believe, meaning I have to give my assent to, true/false test-style” and then “here are a list of moral rules I have to follow, and among the moral rules, there are big ones that are non-negotiable and then some smaller ones that are maybe negotiable.” But that’s not— Again, that’s completely individualized. That’s a view of religion that’s “what’s going on in my head and what are the things that I’m not supposed to do as an individual,” and that’s totally foreign to what we get in the Scriptures, what we get in the historic Christian faith for, I’ll say, most of its history, to be polite.

Breaking that down is very hard for all of us. It’s very hard for all of us. We look at church as, on one hand: Well, this is a moral duty: I’m supposed to go to church; I’m supposed to go to Liturgy. At least on Sundays. At least most Sundays. I’m supposed to, so I should, so I really should. If I don’t, I’ll feel bad, go to confession, confess not going to church… Or—not really “or”: and: And I’m going to go, I’m going to receive Communion, I’m going to pray. Hopefully I’ll hear a good homily, but that’s like flipping a coin a lot of the time. Hopefully I will get something out of it as an individual. If I find that part lacking, if I didn’t do what I was supposed to do so I’m not going to be able to receive Communion or if I feel like I’m not going to get anything out of it, if the homilies are always not that great and I don’t feel like I’m going to get anything out of it, then that will quickly overwhelm the duty part.

And, as Fr. Andrew was just talking about, we even view baptism and the beginning of the Christian life that way. What is it doing to and for me as an individual? And how do I do it and when should I do it to maximize that benefit to make sure it’s real or make sure it takes, make sure it does what I want it to do?

But baptism is entering into a way of life that is not individual, even if you were living a very individualistic way of life before. That’s one of the things that needs to die in the water. Baptism is entering into a way of life that involves others, that involves the rest of the Christian community: immediately, the rest of the parish family into which you are baptized, and then into the broader, huger extended family of the whole Church, and then even beyond that, all through the ages. St. Paul in 1 Corinthians 10 says, “Our fathers were baptized into Moses,” and if you read a little further in that chapter, it becomes very clear he’s speaking to former pagans, but they’re now part of the family, so they’re their fathers, too. That’s the way of life that we enter into.

It is impossible to keep the commandments of Christ by yourself. You can’t love your neighbor as yourself—by yourself. You can’t even love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength—by yourself. Because part of your heart and part of your soul, and even your mind and even your strength, has to do with what and whom you love and whom you care about, and offering that to God as well. Those are the first two. We can go on and on.

To show love, you have to have someone to love. Joy is shared. You can’t be at peace alone, because peace implies there are other parties with whom you are at peace. You definitely can’t be a peace-maker by yourself.

All of what we are called to, all the things that are constitutive of the Christian life, of the way of life that leads to salvation in all of its senses, require us to be living in a community with other people—with whom we disagree about things, with whom we don’t always get along, whose personalities rub us the wrong way. There’s nothing heroic about loving someone who does nothing but flatter you and tell you how wonderful you are. There’s nothing heroic about being with people who never actually need your help. There’s nothing heroic about being part of a community that never stretches you in any direction, in any way.

If we’re serious about becoming like Christ, who did not live as a hermit, who lived his life surrounded by people, pretty much all of whom did not understand him, a massive proportion of whom hated him, who ended up murdering him for various reasons—if we want to be like him, then we have to live the way he lived, and we have to be with other people. That’s how we find our salvation, because it’s not just in this life that we’re here—to support each other, to learn from each other, to struggle with each other, to strive with each other, to have the sharp edges of ourselves broken off in the rock-tumbler that is a church community—it’s not just here and now in this life, but it’s when we stand before Christ one day.

We’re not going to be standing there alone. We’re going to be standing there, shoulder to shoulder with these same people whom we’ve lived our life with. To give an account for who we were to them and what we did and didn’t do for them and for them to give testimony to who we are and what we’ve done in this life.

So we’re not in this alone. That makes this harder in some ways, it makes it more beautiful in some ways, and it helps in some ways, but we are pursuing salvation together. And baptism is the beginning of that: being baptized and brought into this family.

Fr. Andrew: Amen. Well, that’s our show for tonight, everyone. Thank you very much for listening. If you didn’t call us tonight, we’d still love to hear from you. You can email us at lordofspirits@ancientfaith.com; you can message us at our Facebook page; or you can leave us a voicemail at speakpipe.com/lordofspirits.

Fr. Stephen: And join us for our live broadcasts on the second and fourth Thursdays of the month at 7:00 p.m. Eastern, 4:00 p.m. Pacific, except Thanksgiving when we’ll be talking about the Eucharist pre-recorded. And then, after that—baptism of fire!

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Fr. Stephen: And finally, be sure to go to ancientfaith.com/support and help make sure we and lots of other AFR podcasters stay on the air. And remember: pain lies on the riverside.

Fr. Andrew: Thank you, good night, and may God bless you all.