Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick: Welcome back to The Lord of Spirits podcast. I’m Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick in the borough of Emmaus in the commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and with me is my co-host, Fr. Stephen De Young, in the hub city, Lafayette, Louisiana. Normally you would be listening to us live, but this is actually not being played live, and the reason is that Fr. Stephen had funeral services that he needed to attend to. So if you’re listening to this at the normal time, he’s doing a funeral right now, and I might be listening in—I don’t know—but instead of canceling the episode or moving it or whatever, we decided to pre-record, so this is a pre-recorded episode, and though you will hear the Voice of Steve suggesting you call in, if you call in you will not get us on this particular time.

This is actually the second part of a two-part series on bodies. So instead of my usual introductory comments, we’re going to do a little recap of our last episode, just very briefly, and also to clear up a couple misconceptions and some questions that we got about the body of God. So to begin that I just want to play a message that we got from Kyle, and he had a really interesting question, so let’s go ahead and play that.

Kyle: Fathers, bless. The last episode, you spoke about anthropomorphizing God and how we can interpret the Bible to be a theomorphizing of humans. The Bible has God showing emotions like anger and wrath. How are we to interpret that in light of a theomorphizing of humans? Thank you for taking my question.

Fr. Andrew: All right. Well, this obviously connects directly to what we were talking about, and I noticed, for instance, in our Facebook group—hey, everybody, join the Facebook group—that there were some issues with this. For instance, one person sent a message saying, “Aren’t you basically… If you’re saying that God has a body, aren’t you just basically saying that God is just a very big version of us?” And I think that what Kyle asked here is kind of connected to that, not that he’s saying that, but he’s trying to make sense of the Bible, for instance, saying that God has emotions.

We made the point last time about theomorphism versus anthropomorphism. So, Fr. Stephen, why don’t you—for all the kids at home, why don’t you give a little recap as to exactly what that means and why we are absolutely not saying, in any particular—in any way at all!—that the body of God is kind of a really big and powerful version of the bodies of human beings.

Fr. Stephen De Young: Yes. Last time, on Lord of Spirits… Now we insert a shot of a guy turning a car key and then a long shot of a car exploding or something? [Laughter] Nothing really exploded, but we did have these questions in terms of nailing down exactly what we’re talking about. We talked about how, and tried to reiterate that when we’re talking about a body, in general, from the ancient understanding—the ancient understanding of “body”—that we’re not per se talking about a material object in the world. We’re talking about a nexus of powers and/or potentialities. I will get into that “and/or” a little more as we go on in this episode. But we’re talking about that. So that, in some bodies, in human bodies and animal bodies, that has a material form. If we’re talking about angels and demons, as we’re going to—as we always do, but as we’re going to more later on in this episode—we’re talking about bodies which are immaterial compared to ours but are still created. And if we’re talking about God’s body, there’s zero material aspect to it; we’re talking about his powers.

To directly get to Kyle’s question, first, one of the points we were trying to make is that, when we were criticizing the idea of anthropomorphism in favor of theomorphism, for example, when the Scriptures talk about God’s face—someone says they want to see God’s face—he doesn’t say, “Don’t be silly. I’m not a big human; I don’t have a face”; he says, “You can’t see my face and live. If you see my face, you’ll die,” implying he has one, but that that’s understood within the definition of “body” that we’re talking about here in the ancient world. So it’s not a material face.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and “face” is this sort of communication power.

Fr. Stephen: Right, the power of communication.

Fr. Andrew: And we use the word “face,” and it includes what we normally think of as a face—something you could put make-up on—and when we use that word to refer to God, we’re not saying that God’s face is like our face, but we’re saying that he also, and in fact in the full way, has the ability to communicate and to interface—there we go: interface; what a great word!—with human beings, with angels, so forth. It’s interesting. I think it’s tough, because the Scriptures do use what we would conceive of as anthropomorphic words, but that doesn’t mean that, for instance, when they say, “the hand of the Lord was upon him,” or something like that, that there’s this gigantic hand that comes out of heaven with five fingers on it. It’s rather about God connecting with and acting in. So there is anthropomorphic language, but that’s not what’s really meant when that language is used. Am I getting that right?

Fr. Stephen: The idea is we’re not attributing this human quality of having a physical arm to God. We’re referring to… when we talk about God’s right arm, we’re talking about his power and might. Our human right arm—if we’re right-handed, at least, which most people were and are, unless you’re a Benjamite—your right arm is your strong arm. It’s the arm you use to do things with strength and dexterity. Our right arm is sort of a devalued, low-grade shadow of… our strength is this low-grade, shadowy version of God’s strength and power.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and our strength—we’re going to talk about this a lot more, but our strength includes a fleshly arm with an elbow and fingers and a wrist.

Fr. Stephen: Right. That’s the instrument that we use to exercise our physical strength. When we talk about God’s right arm, we’re not just imagining God having an arm; we’re referring to something real: his power, his might. So the same thing is true when we use this emotional language for God. We’re not saying that God is sort of passive and flies into a fit of rage or gets really sad; we’re not saying he’s subject to human emotions, but at the same time the things that we refer to, like when we talk about God’s wrath, that’s referring to something real. That’s referring to a real experience of God that we don’t want to have. [Laughter] So it’s this: “Oh, well, these primitive people, they thought of God as giant human and talked about him getting angry, but we know that’s silly,” so we just sort of abandon that. No, that was language that was used to point to a reality. We might choose to point to that reality with different language now…

Fr. Andrew: Right, and that is a normal thing that happens in the history of the Scriptures, where you see language change in Scripture. The most obvious example is the Old Testament, most of it, in its original writings—“original writings,” there I go—but you know what I mean, is in Hebrew, but then the New Testament is all in Greek. And Greek is not one-to-one an equivalent to Hebrew, in so many ways.

Fr. Stephen: No two languages are one-to-one equivalents to each other.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, they can’t be, even languages that are closely related.

Fr. Stephen: Hebrew and Aramaic aren’t one-to-one. There are words that mean different things in Hebrew and in Aramaic, sometimes subtly, sometimes in a big way.

Fr. Andrew: And this process of… I mean, this is one of the things that I study a lot, even outside of my—I don’t know: is there anything outside of religious pastoral study for me? I don’t know. But even what might be explicitly that religious stuff is something that’s really interesting to me, and because no language functions one-to-one, not just in terms of vocabulary, but in terms of grammar and the way that the words relate to each other, that means that we can’t get fixated on particular vocabulary terms. I’ll give a really quick example.

The Seventh Ecumenical Council makes a distinction between two Greek words, latreia and proskynesis, and latreia is generally translated in English as “worship” or sometimes you get “adoration,” and proskynesis is translated generally in English as “veneration,” and that worship belongs only to God and veneration can be given to his saints and to holy objects and so forth. But proskynesis is used in Scripture to refer to worshiping God! Does that mean that the Seventh Ecumenical Council Fathers are pulling a fast one? No, it just means they’re using particular words and giving them a technical meaning, but the truth is that it’s not like once that was decided, that you can only use those words in those particular ways ever after.

For instance, at the beginning of most of our services, you get: “O come, let us worship and fall down before God, our King.” That’s said a lot. Well, in Greek, that’s: “Defte proskynesomen…” They’re using proskynesis, and yet we don’t understand it as, “O come, let us venerate God,” it’s “Let us worship God.” So even though this very technical kind of definition was given at the Seventh Ecumenical Council to those two words, we don’t… it’s not like we sat down and revised the Scripture based on that, or that we’re not allowed to use that earlier meaning or whatever. Context is so, so, so, so important.

When you hear us use particular words, don’t get hung up on the particular word. If we say that God has a body, we don’t—we do not mean that God has a body in the same way that we have bodies, but rather that there is this ancient sense of what a body is, which includes what we think of as bodies but is not limited to it. So, yeah, we’re not trying to create a theological dictionary here; that’s not our task at all.

Fr. Stephen: And both of us like Battlestar Galactica, but we’re not Mormons.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] That’s right, exactly! And I love J.R.R. Tolkien without being a Roman Catholic!

Fr. Stephen: So this is important, because a lot of the questions we got were related to: well, how does this ancient use of the term “body” relate to XYZ Greek theological terms, like, how does this relate to the essence and energies distinction? how does this relate to nature, the term “nature,” physis? How does this relate to hypostasis or “person”? There’s a problem there in approach that we need to, I think, address. We’ve kind of addressed a version of this before, but we need to kind of make it plain.

Those terms, used as technical terms the way Orthodox theologians use them today, came into existence over the course of the first eight centuries of the Church. They were refined by the Fathers and refined at the Councils. Using that terminology, since they were speaking Greek, using that Greek terminology to describe the Holy Trinity, to describe Christ, to describe these other spiritual realities, those terms are all good and all valid and all important in terms of—I’ll go so far as to say those are the best way to describe those realities in the Greek language. But the Old Testament, in Hebrew and Aramaic, and even in Greek translation, doesn’t use those terms the same way. Neither does the New Testament, and so we have a whole bunch of people—19th century German theologians and their ilk—who, based on that fact, say, “Oh, well, the whole idea of the Holy Trinity, the whole idea of Chalcedonian christology, the whole idea of Christ having two wills developed later.” That those ideas, those understandings, those realities don’t pre-exist the language, the Greek language that was used for them in these later centuries.

So part of what we’re doing, last episode and on this show in general, and that I’m always trying to do in stuff outside this show, is show the continuity between late Bronze Age Israelites and 8th century Church Fathers, and that they’re pointing at the same reality; they’re coming to know the same God. The idea of the Holy Trinity, the idea of christology, these all pre-exist that later Greek language by centuries if not millennia. So when we’re talking about, for example, how “body” was used in the ancient world and how it’s used in the Old Testament, we’re talking about: Here’s the terminology that’s used in Scripture to describe these realities, so that once you understand the terminology Scripture uses, hopefully that’ll help you make those connections. So this that St. Maximus is saying about the will is really the same thing that the Psalmist is here saying in Hebrew. He’s just using different terms, but they’re talking about the same reality.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and then there’s the issue of reading English translations of both of those texts, which, again, are not one-to-one. Greek and Hebrew are not one-to-one, and English one-to-one with either Greek or Hebrew. It probably has more in common with Greek, because they’re both Indo-European languages, but still, just because you’ve read something in translation doesn’t mean that you really truly got what it is. Or maybe you understand that language; maybe you took classes and you understand Hebrew. That doesn’t necessarily mean, still, that you’re automatically going to read it well.

And this might seem like a big digression, everybody, but I think it’s a really important point. Because for this particular program the kind of expertise that, in particular, Fr. Stephen brings to the table is biblical expertise, it’s going to… the way that it gets talked about is going to be different [from] someone… For instance, if we had a patristics scholar. Now, we’re both interacting with the Fathers and informed by the Fathers and the Church services, and we’re bringing all these other things in as well, but it’s not going to be identical in terms of the language. And context is super, super, super important.

There are ways… For instance, I became aware that someone was unhappy that I used the phrase, “There is one energy,” referring to God. Well, the context of that makes a big difference, because you can see patristic language: one-energy language and plurality-of-energies language, depending on context, and that’s all just within Greek. So you can’t just pick out a particular phrase and say, “Look! Gotcha! You’re saying it wrong!” or whatever. And also, you know, it’s possible—I will admit, I’m wrong about things, and, God willing, I’m getting better. It’s okay. I’m happy to be corrected, and that’s a lot of what we’re doing here.

Like I said, it seems like a big digression, but I think it’s really important, especially important because especially the last episode got into a lot of stuff that a lot of us have never really thought much about or read much about, including me—especially me. So hang in there, everybody; it’s going to be okay. [Laughter] All right, well, let’s continue talking about this question of a body as being a nexus of powers or potentialities.

Last time we talked about the body of God. Now we’re going to begin talking about human bodies. Take us in, Fr. Stephen!

Fr. Stephen: Right! So, less controversially than saying God has one, humans have bodies!

Fr. Andrew: Yes, that should be a surprise to no one!

Fr. Stephen: Yes, but it’s important that we’re still using that same definition of “body” for our purposes, in the sense that we’re not just talking about the material body, but we’re talking about “body” in terms of this nexus of powers and potentialities, and it’s really when we start talking about created bodies that the idea of potentialities enters in. This is another place where we got some questions that indicated there was some confusion, which means we didn’t clarify it enough. SO the reason we were talking about powers and potentialities is that we were talking about bodies in general. If we’re talking about this ancient understanding as applied to God, so if we’re talking about God’s body, understood in this ancient sense, we’re just talking about powers.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, God doesn’t grow.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and he isn’t acted upon. All of that is true. So we’re talking about powers with him. When we start talking about created bodies, though, there are created powers, but there’s also, then, potentialities, because created things are acted upon and in some cases do change, etc., etc.

When humans are created—and this is going to be a little bit of recap, too, because I know we talked about this in a previous episode, but we talked about how the act of creation as it’s portrayed in Genesis 1 and 2 is… In Genesis 1, it’s God acting to first, in the first three days of creation, set the creation in order, so it’s moving from chaos to order; and then the second set of three days, the fourth, fifth, and sixth days that correspond directly to the previous days, it’s filling those spaces he created with life. Then human beings are created to continue that work, to go out from paradise, the garden that God planted, and to set the world in order and fill it with life. And we get in Genesis 2 the particular story of Adam being pulled apart into Adam and Eve, and Eve being created in particular, woman being created in particular for this function of filling the world with life, and Adam in naming the animals being the one who sets things in order.

And even as I say that, I want to also make the point that this isn’t saying, “Women just fill the world with life and men just set things in order.” Obviously the whole context of the two being one flesh is that both are participating in the other. It’s very clear, for example, that, while women give birth to children, men participate in the making of children. So there’s a mutuality there as well.

So the reason we talk about this in the context of potentialities rather than just powers is that the work that Adam and Eve are created to do is still God’s work. They’re still… they’re continuing God’s work. God is working in and through them to accomplish this. So for them, it’s a potentiality, because they’re participating in God’s exercising of his powers, his works.

Fr. Andrew: Right, it’s not… They can’t be, to use the philosophical language, fully actualized in that, because it’s God, and they’re just human beings, even in this unfallen state.

Fr. Stephen: Right. They are participating in God’s ongoing work of creation. They’re not creating additional things independently, apart from God.

Fr. Andrew: To use one of my beloved Tolkienian terms, they are being sub-creators. They can’t make things… They can’t make things come into being, but they can take God’s existing creation and re-order it, give it a higher level of order. But again, as you said, they’re not functioning independently. They’re doing… They’re being like God. They’re participating in God. They’re doing his work.

Fr. Stephen: Right. To continue the example, when Eve gives birth to her first child, she says, “I have received a son from Yahweh.” Obviously, she and Adam were involved in making the child and biological processes, and, and, and—but she correctly sees that this new life has come into the world from God, even though it turns out to be Cain.

That said, and we’ve already alluded to this, this means that we have to shift our paradigm a little bit in terms of how we understand Eden and how we understand humanity, given that most of us have grown up in a Western context, where my least favorite person to pick on, St. Augustine, because he gets picked on too much, has kind of influenced our vision and our understanding of these things in the way in which he… Well, I’ll be fair to him: we will inevitably be doing a show where we talk about the fact there are three falls of humanity. I think we already alluded to that in the five(ish) falls of the angels episode. And what you find in the early Fathers is that they will not deny any of the three—they’ll refer to all three—but they will tend to focus on one event, in Genesis 1:1-11 as being the primary event where humanity fell or when sin took hold of humanity.

St. Augustine was very much within the mainstream of that in that he picked the expulsion from paradise as being the main event in Genesis 1:1-11, and the other ones being kind of subsidiary, and kind of collapsed some of the elements of the other two into that first one. And the problem is he wrote in Latin. [Laughter] Not a lot of other people did, and so Western Christianity from the fifth century on became almost completely beholden to St. Augustine. So the more full-orbed understanding didn’t get fully handed down to his successors.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and there’s… One of the big problems with this… I mean, I’m not deeply read in St. Augustine, but one of the big problems with this is that there’s this—at least the way people now have kind of received this—Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden, everything is utterly perfect, and then it all goes wrong. That’s the image that most people have of what’s happening there. So not only is there, as you said, these multiple events that occur that kind of constitute the Fall, but also there’s the problem of seeing Adam and Eve as being utterly perfect in an utterly perfect place—that neither one of those things is true!

Now, the problem with parsing that, of course, is that we tend to use the word “perfect” to mean sinless. If I do something wrong, I could say, “Well, I’m not perfect.” But that’s not what “perfect” means, generally, for instance, when the Church Fathers use whatever their equivalent term is, usually in Greek but whatever language they might be writing in, that in English we do use this word, “perfect,” to mean sinless, but we also have the sense of something being perfected, in other words, that it’s coming into its full flower, it’s coming into its full polish, it’s becoming all that it can be. And that’s what Adam and Eve, and even the world, don’t actually have. They’re off to a good start, right? The world is off to a good start, but there is this… It’s not just an interruption; it’s also kind of an alteration, and we’re going to talk about that, I know, a lot more.

But I think it’s interesting: I’ve noticed this, that especially as English speakers appropriate this theology of Adam and Eve being sinless but not perfect before this Fall, less often do you get this idea of the world actually not yet being perfected, that it’s kind of incomplete; it’s not done yet, so to speak. And yet, these are intimately connected. Adam is the priest of this world. His task… And he’s the king of this world. His task is to rule it with God’s rule, to name it, to order it, all these things. Of course, Eve participates in that as well.

It’s interesting. I can’t remember, was it the last episode where we talked about the idea that Eden was supposed to have been expanded? I love that! That’s so… That’s really… It’s inspiring! It’s invigorating, because this is our task as well. Our task is to do the thing that Adam failed at; being in Christ, that’s our task. I don’t know, maybe I’m getting a bit ahead of ourselves here, but I’m just excited about these ideas.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, it’s in the text, if we read the text carefully in Genesis. God plants a garden in the east, in Eden. That’s not the whole world, that’s a garden that he puts in a place. That’s the place where he’s going to dwell with humanity; that’s what makes it paradise. The word “paradise” in Greek is actually taken over from Persian and refers to a walled garden, so it’s enclosed, which made me really happy when I watched the Good Omens adaptation on Amazon, that when they showed Eden it was walled in. But anyway… And there was a wasteland outside.

Fr. Andrew: That’s kind of the… Isn’t that the image that C.S. Lewis uses in The Last Battle, that there’s this walled garden as well? Further up and further in. So there you go, there’s one for all you Narnia lovers out there.

Fr. Stephen: And when Adam is created, God goes and forms him from the dust of the ground, forms him out of this sort of chaotic prime matter that’s out there, and then places him in Eden, places him in paradise. He gets created outside, and then picked up and put there. So there’s this outside area. When the command is given to Adam and Eve to fill the earth and subdue it, which is that command, the word “subdue” doesn’t just mean put in order in a general sense, like: Put all your DVDs in alphabetical order—which I do because I’m OCD. The word “subdue” there is actually the word for conquering a city.

Fr. Andrew: Oh wow.

Fr. Stephen: It implies opposition and contest and what our German friends call Chaoskampf, the struggle against chaos. So that’s the picture. The picture is that the world outside Eden isn’t finished yet in the sense of what God is doing in Genesis 1. It’s still empty, and it’s still filled with chaos, so Adam and Eve were to go out and expand Eden to fill the whole world, and then, because of their trespass, they were sent out instead. But in the same way that the creation as a whole isn’t done, Adam and Eve aren’t done. That’s “perfect,” the Greek concept of telos… It’s teleology, it’s the final, it’s the end, it’s the goal, it’s where you arrive at fullness and completion and wholeness.

Fr. Andrew: Purpose.

Fr. Stephen: At the end of the growth and change process. That’s your final form and your power level’s over 9000, right? [Laughter] That’s what it’s aiming at, right? The way Adam and Eve were going to go from this innocence to this perfection, to this completion, was by participating with God in bringing the rest of creation toward that perfection.

A crucial element of that that we’re going to talk about more toward the end of this episode is the Incarnation of Christ, which means that—

Fr. Andrew: So you’re saying that the Incarnation is not Plan B. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: The Incarnation—sorry, Anselm of Canterbury—the reason why the God-man is not human sin. The Incarnation of Christ is a super-lapsarian reality. Shout-out to all the Calvinists I just triggered. It over-arches the concept of the Fall, because the participation we were just talking about, between Adam and Eve and God finds its fullness and its fulfillment when God becomes man, when God is made man in the Person of Jesus Christ. And it’s Christ who was always going to bring not just humanity, but all of creation, to its fullness, to its telos, to its end, to its perfection, through the Incarnation.

So this is a positive aspect of salvation. This is what we’ve been talking about when we’ve talked about theosis in previous episodes, of us becoming sons of God. Christ is the unique Son of God, so it’s in his image and it’s through him that we become sons of God in that positive sense, which Adam hadn’t yet achieved. He was at the beginning.

Fr. Andrew: So salvation is not just about the forgiveness of sins and the removal of death and the rescue from the domination by the dark powers, but is actually about this growth, this realization of what it is that Adam is supposed to be, that in, if I can say this—and maybe correct it or nuance it or whatever—that Christ is what Adam was made for, not that Adam becomes Christ by nature, but that Christ is Adam’s telos. Am I putting that well?

Fr. Stephen: Right. He becomes like Christ through grace, through participating in the work of God; he becomes like Christ. Christ is the paradigm, the Logos, if you will, of the whole creation.

Fr. Andrew: There we go.

Fr. Stephen: So, yes. So there’s both… We tend to focus almost entirely—sorry, St. Augustine—but the West—and it wasn’t his fault; it was how he was appropriated—but the West has focused almost entirely on this negative aspect of salvation as if that’s the whole thing, that’s the whole enchilada, is taking care of the sin and death problem. That’s not the whole enchilada. Those are some road blocks that were thrown up on the original road.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s like a child who’s ill in a way that prevents him from growing. So heal the illness, and now he can grow.

Fr. Stephen: Now he can grow to fullness and maturity. But the fullness and maturity was always the intent and the plan. So Christ still would have been incarnate for our sakes and accomplish what he accomplished even without any, with zero falls. But he wouldn’t have died the death on the cross; he wouldn’t have… those things are to deal with death, sin, etc., but the Incarnation itself is to accomplish this original purpose in God’s creation and in his creative acts.

Fr. Andrew: And sometimes people see the Incarnation as being just kind of a necessary condition so that he can do the things like die on the cross. “Well, we needed a Savior who could do this, and so therefore we have one.” But that’s the opposite. It’s that he is incarnate, and he dies—he suffers, he dies—because of who he is, because he’s taking care of, as you said, these negative aspects of what has happened.

Well, let’s talk, then, now, about what does happen to Adam and Eve. We talked about this a little bit. We kind of telegraphed it a touch, talking about the garments of skin, for instance. So they eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and things change. So what happens?

Fr. Stephen: The tree of the knowledge of good and evil itself is talking about this issue of maturity, because everywhere else where that phrase, “the knowledge of good and evil, knowing good and evil” occurs in the Old Testament, it’s referring to maturity. Isaiah 7: “A child will be born. Before he is old enough to choose the good and reject the evil, this will happen”: before he comes of age, before he reaches maturity. So the Fathers are all very clear, and even before that, Second Temple literature is very clear, that the tree of knowledge of good and evil is not itself evil, that it represents a knowledge…

Fr. Andrew: I was going to say, why would God have put a poisonous tree in the middle of the garden of Eden?

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Right. It’s that this was knowledge that they weren’t ready for yet; this was a level of maturity that they hadn’t reached yet, and they were trying to seize it before God knew they were ready for him to give it to them.

So his commandment to them was more of a warning. It was not like, “I’m going to just arbitrarily set a test for them by saying: You know what? You can eat all the other trees; don’t eat this one.”

Fr. Andrew: Well, I mean, you know, those of us who are parents, it’s the same thing. It’s like: “Look, you’re not ready for that yet.” It’s not like I’m tempting my kids by having a car in the garage and they know where the keys are, right? I didn’t buy a car in order to send them into ruin. I mean, obviously the analogy doesn’t totally hold in every way, but, yes, they’ve seen me start the car, they could probably—not my toddler, but the three older kids could probably go in there and start the car. They could do that. They’ve seen me do it enough, they’ve seen my wife do it enough, but we didn’t buy the car in order to send them into ruin, but what we do tell them is: There is going to come a day when you’re going to be ready for this. You’re going to have this ability, you’re going to have this permission, and it’s going to be fruitful for everybody, God willing. [Laughter] I don’t have any drivers just yet, but we’re only maybe a year or two away from it. Oh, man.

But I mention that just to stave off some people. Obviously, again, the analogy does not hold in every way. They’d be like: “Well, why would God have put that tree there if he knew that Adam and Eve were going to do this?” But it was there because it was going to be for them. They just weren’t… They were seizing it, and he told them, “Don’t do that.” He didn’t hand them the keys to the car and say, “Now this is how it all works. Don’t go do it.” It wasn’t like that.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And that’s the devil’s whole presentation. “If you eat this, you could leap-frog all this hard work stuff.” [Laughter] “You could leap-frog all this subduing and all of that. You could just become like God right off the bat.”

Fr. Andrew: Boom!

Fr. Stephen: “Here’s the easy path.” But once they eat of the tree, they now know good and evil, and the word “know” we tend to intellectualize, where we think… This doesn’t mean they could write an ethics textbook. [Laughter] Like before this they had no concept of disobeying God!

Fr. Andrew: Now they have a copy of The Rules.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and now they understand deontology according to Immanuel Kant, the categorical imperative. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Who does, though, really?

Fr. Stephen: So the verb “know,” yada in Hebrew, is the same one that’s used at the end of chapter 3 to say Adam knew his wife Eve and they brought forth a son. So knowing something is more intimate and more involved than just intellectually having the idea in your head of good and evil. They now know good and they now know evil. What God says in terms of why they’re going to die, they way it’s often presented is sort of: God makes this rule and he says, “If you break this rule, I’mma kill you.” [Laughter] Like, “On that day, I’m going to kill you.” And that causes people all these problems, because they look at it and say, “Well, wait a minute. Uhh… He didn’t kill them that day.”

But that’s not what he said. He said, “On that day you will die.” So we see this kind of deliberation scene with the divine council in Genesis 3, after this has happened, after they’ve come to know good and evil, where God says, “Well, now they’re like us, knowing good and evil. What are we going to do about this. If they now go and eat from the tree of life, they will be immortal.” They will be immortal, and so that evil that they now know will be immortal. They’ll be like the demons, immortal and evil. We don’t want that.

Fr. Andrew: Spoiler alert.

Fr. Stephen: So they need to be cut off from the tree of life. They need to be expelled from God’s presence, which will bring about… which is immediately their physical death. There are two kinds of death. Spiritual death is the separation of the human soul from God; physical death is the separation of the human soul from the human body—and “body” in our material sense. So they have to be made mortal now so that that evil will not be immortal, so that that evil can die, so that they will not live forever in that state, as Genesis 3 says. So this is the idea that that mortality, being subject to corruption, then brings about mutability, and mutability brings about the possibility of repentance. If you can get sick and you can die, you can also be healed and restored.

In terms of our ancient definition of body, what we’re talking about is a lot of the powers that humanity had are weakened, and these new potentialities, of being subject to death and corruption and decay, both physical and moral, all of those things now enter into the realm of human potentiality that weren’t there before.

Fr. Andrew: Right, that God gives—and this is what the “garments of skin” are. It’s not that God makes some leather outfits for them; it’s that their bodies change, and they gain and lose, as you said, potentialities and powers, and some are weakened. And that mortality is actually a gift from God and not a punishment, because otherwise we would encrystallize in sin. I’m just kind of restating what you said, but I think it’s really important to hammer this home, that this is a gift from God so that we would become mutable. We could certainly change in the sense of growing; we had that ability to grow and so forth, but not to be acted upon and to be altered. That was necessary in order to be able to repent, because that’s what repentance is, it’s a turning back to God and reconnecting with him and so forth.

We’re about to talk about angels in a moment, but that death is God’s gift to mankind so he does not become demon. And what we do with that gift is up to us. It’s up to us, but it is a gift. It comes with some problems. Corruptibility is no joke. It’s not a walk in the park, but it is the path back to wholeness, to communion with God.

Fr. Stephen: And there’s another important distinction we have to make here, especially in terms of the way “flesh” is going to be used biblically later, like in the New Testament, but also in terms of understanding this properly, and that’s the difference between mortal flesh, the mortal body that Adam and Eve receive, and sinful flesh, flesh corrupted by sin, that’s under the power of sin. Again, because of poor St. Augustine, whom I have to keep pointing to, unfortunately, those two things get collapsed, because you get the Western idea of original sin—and I’m not going to go into the whole argument about whether that included guilt for St. Augustine or not. Anyway.

But that corruption is—that corruptibility is actual depravity. And that’s not the way the Scriptures present it, and that’s not the way—if you read Second Temple Jewish literature, the early Fathers, the New Testament—that’s not the way they understand it, because there are two different figures here who are getting put together. One of them is Adam, and one of them is Cain. The word “sin” does not occur anywhere in Genesis 3. The Scriptures do not say that Adam and Eve sinned. They violated a commandment, and the word that’s usually used for that is “trespass.”

Fr. Andrew: You stepped over a line.

Fr. Stephen: You went over the line. Right, a line was drawn, and you stepped over it. You went over the fence. But the word “sin” first appears in Genesis 4, when God is talking to Cain, and he says—this is after Cain is upset, because his offering was rejected and Abel’s was accepted, and God says to him, “Sin is crouching at your door. It seeks to master you, but you must master it.” That presentation of sin is not breaking a rule. God isn’t saying, “Hey, Cain, you’re about to break that no-murdering-people rule.”

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah, no.

Fr. Stephen: It’s: Cain, there is this force. The verb that is translated usually “crouching” there is actually a loan word from Akkadian.

Fr. Andrew: Oh boy!

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yeah, fun with Akkadian.

Fr. Andrew: Another Semitic language, everybody.

Fr. Stephen: Refers to… Yeah, it’s basically the earliest tier of Babylonian language, as opposed to Sumerian. But that verb that’s translated “crouching” is a word that’s used in Akkadian to describe a particular type of demon that they thought crawled up out of the underworld out of cracks in the ground and sort of stalked people.

Fr. Andrew: Yikes!

Fr. Stephen: So that’s the imagery that’s being invoked there, that that’s what sin is like. And we see this in… Once you know that and you read Romans 5 and what St. Paul says when he says, “Sin entered the world through Adam,” he’s not saying Adam’s the first one who broke a rule; he’s saying sin, this power, this demon that crawled up out of the underworld, it came into the world through Adam, and then it goes after Adam’s son. And it ends up winning, ends up conquering Cain and subjecting him. This is why the Fathers talk about sins as passions: they make us passive, they act upon us and take control.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. It’s interesting that there’s… I don’t know, it was not that long ago that this distinction kind of came to me in my mind, finally, that we often pray in the Orthodox tradition, for protection “from sin.” And not as much… I mean, there’s nothing wrong also to pray that God would keep us from sinning; that’s also a thing, for sure, but the notion of being protected from sin, that sin is this external thing. I mean, is it—? Maybe this is going too far or whatever, but is it wrong to say that sin is a demon or sin is demonic force or—I don’t know. There’s almost this personification of sin going on there in Genesis 4, right?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and it’s true throughout Scripture. This is another one of those places where St. Paul uses words very carefully. There are only a handful of places in St. Paul’s epistles where he uses “sins,” plural. Almost always, he talks about “sin,” singular, as this force, as this power that’s unleashed in the world that is trying to dominate us and master us the same way it mastered Cain. So Cain is—in the Second Temple Period, in the New Testament, you see this in 1 John as one shining example—Cain is the preeminent sinner, not Adam. Cain is the sinner. You read Josephus: he’s the first heretic. That gets picked up by a bunch of the ante-Nicene Fathers, that he taught his children after him evil. So he’s the paradigmatic heretic; he’s the paradigmatic murderer. He’s all of these things. St. John calls him, says he’s the son of the devil. And it’s that sonship, like we’ve talked about it in the past episodes, being a son of God, that he’s his image, his likeness, the one doing his works on earth. That’s what happens through sin, and we have to separate those.

So we’re going to talk about the bodily resurrection some more in the second half coming up here, but we see in our iconography, in our hymnography, that we see Adam and Eve being restored, Adam and Eve being redeemed, humanity being redeemed from death and from the mortality that resulted from Adam’s transgression. We don’t see the same thing in terms of Cain anywhere being redeemed from sin. Redemption from death is universal for the human race, but that negative aspect of salvation, taking care of sin and purification, is not; is not everyone.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Man. All right, well, before we go to break, I actually just wanted to read a prayer that summarizes a lot of what we just said. This is a prayer that’s said by the priest and it’s called “a prayer for one who has suffered long and who is at the point of death.” I’m just going read it to you. We don’t need to explicate it, because we just explicated everything we were just talking about, but I’m going to read it to you and you can hear everything that we’ve said, summarized now in this beautiful moment when a priest is praying over someone who’s in the process of dying.

O Lord our God, who, in thine ineffable wisdom didst create man and didst fashion him out of the dust, adorning him with comeliness and splendor, as an honorable and heavenly acquisition, to the glory and magnificence of thy glory and kingdom, that thou mightest lead him unto that which is according to the image and likeness; but, inasmuch as he trespassed the command of thy statute, having accepted the image but having preserved it not, and therefore that evil not be immortal, out of love for mankind, as God of the fathers, by thy divine will thou didst ordain remission for this, and that this indestructible bond shall be severed and dissolved, and that the body therefore be dissolved from the elements of which it was fashioned, but that the soul be translated to that place where it will remain until the general resurrection; therefore we pray unto thee, the unoriginate and immortal Father, and unto thine only-begotten Son, and unto thine most-holy Spirit, that that thou wilt release (and then you give the name) from the body unto rest, entreating also out of thine ineffable goodness forgiveness, if he in any way, whether of knowledge or in ignorance, has offended thy goodness, or is under the ban of a priest, or has embittered his parents, or has broken a vow, or has fallen into demonic delusion or shameful magic because of the malice of an evil demon.

Yea, O Master, Lord God, hearken unto my, thy sinful and unworthy servant, in this hour, and release thy servant from this unendurable sickness, and the bitter infirmity that has taken hold of him, and give him rest where the souls of the righteous abide. For thou art the repose of our souls and bodies, and unto thee do we send up glory, to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, now and ever, and unto ages of ages. Amen.

Fr. Andrew: All right. Welcome back. This is the second part of our show. Normally we’d begin to take your calls, but as we mentioned earlier, this is not a live show; this is pre-recorded.

So we talked about human bodies and what happens to human bodies especially after all the things that occur in Eden and the time after that and so forth. But what about angels? What about their bodies? We talked about that a little bit. And to start us off, I just wanted to play this pair of questions from our friend, Fr. Photius, in Texas.

Fr. Photius Avant: Hi! This is Fr. Photius Avant, and I’m very sorry, but I actually have two questions, and I hope that’s not cheating. St. John of Damascus, in his Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, says that angels cannot repent on account of their incorporeal nature, and yet he further clarifies that it is only the Deity which is truly immaterial and incorporeal. I do not see in this necessarily a contradiction to the understanding that Yahweh and the angels can be said to have bodies, if we are speaking of a nexus of potentialities, as has been mentioned. I do, however, wonder what it is about the angels’ immortality which prevents them from repenting. And, secondly, how do unclean spirits interact with the world around them, as they are deprived of the faculties of a body? Thank you so much. God bless you abundantly.

Fr. Andrew: All right. So what about that? Well, that’s what we’re about to talk about, actually, so it’s good that you asked, Fr. Photius! Yeah, I mean, I think the way for us to get into this is to talk about angels and their bodies and especially to mention… We got a little bit of push-back in our Facebook group, saying, “Well, doesn’t the Church teach that angels are bodiless? We call them the bodiless powers over and over again! How can you guys possibly say that they have bodies?” And of course, to that we will answer: Well, St. Paul says that they have bodies! [Laughter] So, I mean, you can’t go wrong by simply quoting St. Paul, right? So let’s talk about that a little bit, then.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and not only St. Paul, but numerous Fathers—I mean, St. John of Damascus is a notable one—explain that apparent disjunction of the Church using the language of bodiless and then St. Paul saying they have bodies by saying that they’re bodiless compared to us.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, it’s a relative term.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and when they say bodiless compared to us, they’re not saying… they’re not using “body” there in the sense that we’ve been talking about it, in this ancient sense. So they’re not saying that angels are powerless compared to us or they’re unable to interact with God or humans or the world less; they’re less able than we are. They mean it in the sense of physicality and materiality, that compared to us they are immaterial and lack tangibility. But they are not utterly intangible and utterly immaterial, because they’re created beings; they’re not God.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and I seem to recall… Is it St. John of Damascus that says they’re circumscribed? Meaning that there’s a, for lack of a better phrase, space that they exist in, or that they’re not limitless, to be truly…

Fr. Stephen: They’re not infinite.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, right. They’re not infinite. They’re limited; they’re finite. We are, too, though in very different ways. So they have bodies, but they’re not material bodies in the sense that we have materiality to our bodies, right? And that’s an important point. They are bodiless, but again… Again, it’s like we said at the very beginning, you can’t get hung up on a particular word. What does someone mean by the word; that’s the important thing. When we say that angels have bodies we’re not saying that they have corpses if they were to die or something like that; that’s not what we’re not, that they have arms and legs and fingers and toes, hair and eyeballs and so forth. That’s not what we’re saying.

If you don’t mind, I’m going to read what St. Paul says about this, and we can talk about this passage. This is from 1 Corinthians 15, starting with verse 38, and he’s continuing on from a little bit longer, a longer discourse here where he’s talking about bodies and the resurrection and all this kind of stuff. This whole chapter is really interesting and fascinating, and as you have pointed out many times, pivotal. So, starting with verse 38, and I’m reading here from the New King James:

But God gives it a body as he pleases, and to each seed its own body. All flesh is not the same flesh, but there is one kind of flesh of men, another flesh of animals, another of fish, and another of birds. There are also celestial bodies and terrestrial bodies, but the glory of the celestial is one, and the glory of the terrestrial is another. There is one glory of the sun, another glory of the moon, and another glory for the stars, for one star differs from another star in glory.

So I can imagine the immediate objection now to this is when he’s talking about celestial bodies. Doesn’t he just mean rocks floating in space and balls of gas that are on fire?

Fr. Stephen: Right, and some are brighter than others; that’s what the “glory” is talking about. Yeah.

Fr. Andrew: No. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: “No,” yeah, is the short answer. So a slightly longer answer is: in the Greek, both that list—the sun, the moon, the stars, the way they’re talking about—and the list in the passage you just read of the different types of animals is reproduced word for word essentially from the Greek of Deuteronomy 4. That’s a text that we’ve cited a bunch in the past in previous episodes.

Fr. Andrew: Deuteronomy 4:19 especially, right, where God says, “Don’t give worship to the heavenly…” When you look up at the sun and the moon and the stars “and all the host of heaven,” it says there, don’t worship them and serve them.

Fr. Stephen: Right. “Whom God has allotted to the other nations.” So we’ve talked about that connected to Deuteronomy 32:8. St. Paul very clearly… He isn’t just accidentally reproducing those two lists in exactly the same order. [Laughter] That’s deliberate. So St. Paul is thinking of Deuteronomy 4 here, so he’s very clearly referring to angels. What it means that the bodies of angels, in a sense, differ from one another in glory is what we talked about in our previous episode when we talked about the “ranks” of angels, that different angelic beings—they’re vast cosmic intelligences—they have different purposes, different roles, different jobs, as it were, that they fulfill, and so they receive, being created beings, they receive creative powers, abilities potentialities related to that role that they’re going to serve. So they, in that sense, participate in God’s power and his grace to those different extents, so their glory differs based on that role.

St. Paul clearly has them in the same continuum of human beings and animals in terms of bodies, but it’s especially important that he’s talking about angels here, which we’re going to talk about in a little bit, once we’re done talking about angels. He’s going to use this idea of angelic bodies and celestial bodies when he starts talking about human bodies in the resurrection and some of how they’re different.

But sticking with angels for now…

Fr. Andrew: One thing at a time.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and this kind of applies to the second part of Fr. Photius’s question, or his second question, depending on how we want to diagram his sentences. [Laughter] The second part was talking about demons, and so when we talked about the five(ish) falls of the angels, we talked about how there are different things in the category of demon, different types of beings. And demons who are fallen angelic beings, the gods of the nations who are demons, powers and principalities who are demons, the demons responsible for making the nephilim and misleading humanity, the devil—they have bodies; they have angelic bodies.

The exception to that would be the dead nephilim themselves, whom we’ve talked about, the dead giants. The spirits of the dead giants, being dead—their bodies went into the ground and decomposed—they are now, in a different sense, bodiless, in the sense that they’ve been deprived of their body, and those are the demons that we see in the synoptic gospels and in the writings of the Fathers and stories from their lives, who come and indwell both idols and come and possess humans and use those as their bodies in order to interact with the world and do what they do.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, although it should be noted that it’s not a real union. If they inhabit an idol, or even possess a human being, those physical objects do not become truly theirs; they just kind of temporarily make use of them. We got kind of an odd question—I recall this in the group—where someone essentially kind of wondered if someone, if one of these disembodied nephilim inhabit a person, possess a living human being, what does that kind of say about that human being and all this kind of stuff? Well, it’s not… That body doesn’t become their body. It’s almost like, I don’t know, a suit of clothes. It’s not your body; you’re just sort of clothed in it. I don’t know if that’s the right word to use. I could wear a hazmat suit and use that to interact with the world, but it’s not… And it moves when I move it! But it’s not me. It’s just sort of like a body.

Fr. Stephen: We have a bunch of examples of this in the synoptic gospels. Legion is an example of this.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, right. And they can be driven out.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, they can be driven out again. Now the one possible—and this is going to be a big tease—but the one possible, slightly different scenario would be in the case of vampires, but we’ll talk about that in a future episode.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah, there you go! We should do a whole episode that’s sort of vampires, werewolves…

Fr. Stephen: Werewolves, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: ...zombies. [Laughter] Yes.

Fr. Stephen: Maybe our next Halloween Special. That’s where we’ll go. But we’ll see when we get to that.

So, yes, that’s how they, then, interact with the world, is through possessing, taking possession. We use the term “possession” all the time, but that’s what it is. It’s taking possession. They’re squatting and taking possession of some body in the material world. This also… Probably the question that I think we’ve gotten the most since this show started has been about why demons can’t repent.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right, and even we got a recent question in the group. Someone was like… Someone was telling a relative, I think, about this, and the relative was like: “That’s not fair. Why doesn’t God provide them the means of repentance as well? Why can’t angels, fallen angels, demons—why can they not repent? Can’t they just change their minds? Don’t they see how horrible it is to be a demon?”

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] It can’t be fun!

Fr. Andrew: “I would love to get back on the divine council, guys. Come on! Is this really forever?” So, yeah, well, what about that? Because it’s actually relevant to us—to us, to us human beings. But let’s talk about it from an angelic point of view first, as much as we can.

Fr. Stephen: Right. I suppose it is a noble quality to have sympathy for the devil. [Laughter] And, to quote a great Armenian, “I cry when angels deserve to die.” But that one probably went right over your head, I know.

Fr. Andrew: It did. I did get the “sympathy for the devil” one.

Fr. Stephen: But there’s someone out there whom that just landed with in a big way. Send us your cards and letters telling us if it was you.

We’ve already touched on a couple elements of this. We touched on the idea that human mortality is what provides for repentance, that our mortal bodies are particularly suited to allow for repentance, and I think back in the five(ish) falls episode, again, we referenced at least the idea that one of the reasons why God provided this way of repentance for humans is because if he didn’t then essentially the evil spiritual powers would have won. That was their goal, to confound God’s plan and Christ and the Incarnation, was to destroy humanity.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and we should say here, by the way, that this idea that angels can’t repent because they don’t have mortal bodies—again, we’re not making this up. This is straight out of St. John of Damascus. He has a section about angels, and he explicitly says this here. And St. John of Damascus is not a speculative theologian; he’s a catechist! He is teaching the basics, the core stuff.

Fr. Stephen: And what he’s received from previous Fathers.

Fr. Andrew: He’s not making it up either.

Fr. Stephen: So what this all comes down to, ultimately, is: What is it like to be a bat?

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] A bat!?

Fr. Stephen: Yes, a bat.

Fr. Andrew: Oh boy.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, a flying rodent.

Fr. Andrew: Whew. This is not a vampire thing, is it? No?

Fr. Stephen: No, we’re not going back to the vampire thing yet, so don’t get excited. Don’t get too excited.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, man! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: “What is like to be a vampire” is a whole other thing.

Fr. Andrew: I was told that the world is a vampire. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Set to drain? Yeah.

Fr. Andrew: See, I can make pop-culture references, too.

Fr. Stephen: You can. And since that’s particularly appropriate since we’re answering Fr. Photius’s questions.

So “What Is It Like To Be a Bat?” is a famous-among-twelve-nerds philosophical essay by a philosopher named Nagel, who’s probably the preeminent writer in philosophy, but here’s why it’s important. What he talks about in that is the fact that, if we want to sit and discuss the question, “What is it like to be a bat?” what we’re doing in trying to imagine that is we’re essentially imagining our brain in a bat body. It’s like: what would it be like if my consciousness was inside a bat body? like a witch turned me into a bat but I was still me, and I had all my memories and thoughts and everything, but now I’m a bat?—which isn’t what it’s like to be a bat. That’s what it’s like to be a human consciousness trapped in a bat body, which is a different thing.

So we don’t know and we can’t know what it’s like to sense the air traveling around our wings while we’re in flight, or experiencing the world through reflected sound the way a bat does. A bat’s consciousness is structured totally differently than ours. So we don’t have a window into what it’s like to be a bat. We only have a window into human consciousness.

Why is this important for angels? Well, if we can’t understand what it’s like to be a bat, we can’t understand what it’s like to be a vast cosmic intelligence.

Fr. Andrew: Right. And I just looked this up, by the way, and “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” is in fact a Wikipedia article, so it actually has a nice little summary about the paper. Yeah, there’s actually a Wikipedia article called, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” and there’s even a picture of a bat, and there’s a picture of Dr. Nagel.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] And we’re talking here about the structure of consciousness. Here’s why that’s important: it means we don’t understand how an angelic being experiences reality. We don’t understand how they experience things like time and space, because, for example, we don’t have, like when Archangel Gabriel comes to the Theotokos to tell her she’s going to bear a Son, it’s not told like, “Well, he leaves heaven and then he has a 93 million-mile trip to get to earth to get to earth to get to where the Theotokos is to tell her.” He’s not traversing space like that and we can’t: “What is the maximum flight velocity of an angel?”

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yes.

Fr. Stephen: We understand innately that these are silly questions.

Fr. Andrew: You mean an African or a European angel?

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Right, exactly! Well, they were coming to help with the election, I was given to understand, by a certain prophet, angels coming from Africa and from… [Laughter] We got political, I know!

So we understand that that’s a silly question, but it’s equally a silly question for us to try to understand how angels experience time. We… Still pre-eminent… As I’ve said so many quasi-negative things about him, I’ll say something super-positive now about St. Augustine. St. Augustine’s understanding of human consciousness of time in books 10 and 11 of the Confessions is the greatest work on that subject ever written. And I can pretty much prove that, because even phenomenologists like Husserl or Heidegger basically just cribbed from it when they talked about human understanding of time; they just basically stole from it. But that is, again, just how humans experience time and memory and change.

And all of our understanding of time and change is intimately related to our mortality, our mutability; those all factor in. So what it means to talk about angels and demons, before and after they fell, and “when” they fell from their perspective—not from our perspective, because some of these events coincided with events on earth, so we can talk about from our human perspective, “Here’s what was going on on earth related to the fall of this being,” but that’s not from the angels’ perspective. That’s from our perspective, the perspective of human history and human memory. So a lot of these questions are ultimately unanswerable in terms of… I mean, when we say, “An angel in hell, isn’t he sorry? Doesn’t he want to go back to heaven?” That’s our brain, our consciousness, in an angel body. That’s not what it’s like to be an angel.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and I think… You and I talk privately often about what’s called the Dunning-Kruger effect, usually when we see people making… embarrassing themselves. But the Dunning-Kruger effect is when you don’t even know what you don’t know…

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, the less you know about something, the more you think you understand it.

Fr. Andrew: Right. Just from an experience that probably all of us have had, watching a kid thinking that he knows everything there is to know about whatever, and then do something horribly wrong, really a big mistake… The problem is that we don’t even know how we would begin to know what it’s like to be an angel. Like, you don’t even know where to begin the problem. Even the concept that a problem has a beginning is a human concept, but we can’t conceive of another way of conceiving. We don’t even know what it means for them to conceive, to think.

This causes theological problems, too. We’ve talked, for instance, about the heresy of universalism. Universalism is predicated upon these kinds of assumptions, that human consciousness is what kind of really rules the universe, is kind of the way it comes down to being, or the way that every sentient being really functions…

Fr. Stephen: Our present fallen human consciousness, to boot.

Fr. Andrew: Right! And this has enormous pastoral implications, too. Someone might say, “I have a tendency towards something that the Church says is sinful. Well, I… That’s just who I am. I was just born this way,” or whatever it might be. But we’re in a fallen state, so maybe I am born this way, but that doesn’t mean that that’s how God made me or that I have to stay that way or whatever it might be, or that I’m just subject to it, that I must accept that. We need a lot more of humility, theologically speaking and pastorally speaking, and just in terms of our own kind of psychology. Just because I feel something over and over again and I can’t imagine not feeling it—and I don’t mean just things that we think of as sinful tendencies, but even just habits of the mind. If we have that problem, where we can’t even imagine being different, then how much more is it an issue for us to try to figure out what it’s like to be an angel and what it means for an angel to repent or not repent or whatever? This is huge. Again, this is not just, as we’ve said in the past, not just nerdy giant stuff; this is not just nerdy angel stuff, but this actually comes down to kind of where we are.

Fr. Stephen: And how much more ridiculous is it for us to try to psychologize God? Or psychologize Christ? And this works in all kinds of insidious ways, not necessarily perfidious, where people talk about God planning things. Like God sat down in some point in time and planned the future. Or talk about “What was Jesus thinking when this happened?” And it’s like… Well, he’s God, so… you can’t fathom it. We can’t know what it’s like to be God. We can’t even know what it’s like to be other created things, let alone uncreated.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Okay, so, related to that, and now that you’ve heard all that, everybody, you could probably answer this for yourselves, but still, let’s go ahead and ask it. So God gives mankind mortality, altering human bodies, in order for that to be… and that’s what happens that makes us capable of repentance. What would it be like if he did that for angels? Why doesn’t he do that for fallen angels? Why doesn’t he give them mortality? One of the questions that came to my mind is: Well, would we really want materially embodied demons walking around on this earth? Would that be a good idea? What would happen? I recall in our pre-show discussion, you kind of said, well, we sort of did. Right? This is the part where everybody gets excited.

Fr. Stephen: Giants!

Fr. Andrew: Exactly, are basically that! I mean, they’re not exactly that, but they are. They’re embodied, materially embodied, demonized beings, and did they repent?

Fr. Stephen: Fully demonized humans.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, did they repent? No. They super didn’t. The flood came. They didn’t repent, or God sent Israel to wipe them out, because they had to just go. It had to be over. So, yeah… Again, I mean, we could fall back and say, well, God knows what he’s doing; how could we question God? Which, I mean, is a good answer, actually; that’s what God kind of says to Job when Job says, “Well, what about blah blah blah?” and he says, “Were you there when I made the world?” It’s not like it’s an unbiblical answer to say that, but there’s more to it than that. There’s more to it than that, and I think a lot of it is that it’s predicated upon this idea that we don’t know what it is to be an angel, so even though we sort of try to imagine what it might be for them to repent, we just… It’s not a problem that we can even think about correctly, to say nothing about solve—and to say nothing about judging God, like: “Why don’t you make this choice instead?” Because, again, we have to work with what actually God has revealed to us, not what we want it to have been.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and apophaticism, which is what this basically is, is not just a punt. It’s not just like: “Agh, I don’t know!” [Laughter] Or: “Yeah, you found a flaw in my logic, so I’m just going to paper it over by appealing to mystery.” That’s not what apophaticism is. Apophaticism is realistic humility about what humans are capable of knowing and understanding and what they’re not, understanding that if you try to come to an understanding of something that you by nature cannot understand, you’re going to come to, at best, a deformed understanding, and at worst, just total imagination and fiction.

Now let’s get back to some cataphaticism! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Welcome back to things we can say!

Fr. Stephen: And the things marginally… [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Welcome back to things we can say, everybody! All right, well, back to 1 Corinthians 15, then.

Fr. Stephen: And the immediately succeeding verses in which St. Paul is talking about… specifically about our bodies, human bodies, in the resurrection, when the resurrection takes place, and our soul is reunited with our body. Our life is brought back into our body, to animate it again.

Fr. Andrew: Right, yeah, so he had just said, “Look, there’s different kinds of bodies. There’s celestial bodies, there’s terrestrial bodies; there’s different kinds of terrestrial bodies, there’s different kinds of celestial bodies,” and then he begins with, “So also is the resurrection of the dead.” And we’re not going to read this whole passage to you, but what we’re looking at, if you want to open it up, everybody, is 1 Corinthians 15:42-54. We’re going to kind of summarize that and say what St. Paul is saying here. So what is he saying. What is this about?

Fr. Stephen: And we’ll be coming back here in our pre-Pascha episode, by the way. We’ve got to keep the teases coming, keep everybody coming back for more.

Fr. Andrew: Next time…

Fr. Stephen: The first one’s free… [Laughter] So what St. Paul talks about here is… He uses the language of the mortal being clothed with immortality, of our bodies being sowed in the ground, buried in weakness but rising in strength. And that language he’s using again makes sense if you understand this ancient concept of the body, because the transition that happened at the expulsion from paradise is powers becoming weakened, these potentialities, these passive potentialities coming into play. Those are the thing that St. Paul is calling weakness; those are the things that St. Paul is noting when he talks about mortal bodies and mortal flesh. And then that gets clothed upon with immortality; it rises in strength, meaning those powers are reinvigorated and those passive potentialities are sort of eclipsed and removed. Death has sort of served its purpose, the purpose for which we just talked about God had granted it to humanity in the first place. That purpose has now been served, so now it’s done away with, and it’s done away with by making humans no longer subject to it.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and we should point out that this redemption of human nature happens to… It’s human nature itself. So that means that all human beings are going to rise from the dead. Resurrection is not a reward for the righteous; it’s something that’s going to happen to all of us, absolutely all of us. We will be raised incorruptible—and that’s how St. John Chrysostom, in his Paschal Homily can say, “Not one dead remains in the grave.” He’s not just talking about some group of people; it’s everybody. He’s speaking eschatologically when he speaks there, because he’s obviously in the fourth or fifth century whenever he is speaking. The general resurrection had not occurred yet, just as it has not occurred yet for us. But, right, it’s universal.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and John 5:28-29 famously, Christ says, “The day is coming when all those who are in the tombs will hear the voice of the Son of man, and those who hear shall live, those who have done good unto the resurrection of life, those who have done evil to the resurrection of condemnation,” but everyone experiences this resurrection, everyone receives this new body, this new human body. So in a sense this is a reversal of what happens at the expulsion from paradise, but it’s not just that.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah! This is really intriguing to me, because, I don’t know, for most of my life I thought, “Okay, we’re finally going to get back to where we were in paradise and get back on track and continue on, have that life again,” but we can’t say, “Well, it’s all water under the bridge now.” Something has happened, which is all of these things we’ve been talking about, all of human history, all of these falls, all of our sins—all of this has occurred—even individual human history, my history. It’s not going to be erased in the resurrection; it’s not gone. So what else is happening here?

Fr. Stephen: Humanity is now in a different position than it was at the time of the expulsion from paradise, where Adam was innocent and it was at the beginning of the story. But humanity has now, through the Incarnation of Christ, this positive work that was always intended to happen, has taken place. So the adoption as sons of God that we’ve talked about in so many previous episodes, this has now taken place in Christ. Humanity has been brought to a maturity that it didn’t have originally, and so, when we receive the resurrection body, it’s not only just reversing that and taking us back to this place of innocence, but it’s not being confirmed in what we’ve become.

And that is for good and for ill; that’s where that resurrection of condemnation comes in, because, looking at it negatively, all of humanity would have ended up like the demons, immortal and wicked, if not for mortality. But the unrepentant, that is where they still end up after losing this window that God has given for repentance, this life in this world that he’s given us for repentance.

And then on the positive side, humanity has now been united to God in the Person of Jesus Christ, permanently and forever. So, again, since I want to try and balance out the things I’ve said about St. Augustine, St. Augustine, the one hymn he wrote, his ode to the Paschal candle, famous has in Latin… refers to Adam and Eve’s transgression as felix culpa, sometimes translated “oh happy fault” in English. The reason it’s happy is because of the redemption it produced. St. Augustine is even delighting in the fact that this, that the devil intended for evil, even this Christ has now turned to good for humanity.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and I think for instance about the fact that the resurrected Christ still bore, visibly, on his body, the marks of the passion. His suffering is part of who he is, if I can put it that way. I’m not trying to lay out any complicated christology here, but it’s clear that it’s not erased. It’s not erased, that it’s there and his wounds are life-giving now, thus felix culpa. That man meant it for evil, but God has turned it for good. It’s interesting that Scripture puts it that way and not man meant it for evil and God erased it. That the thing that was meant for evil has become, now, good. And that tombs, tombs of saints, can be healing rather than just destruction and decay and so forth—relics, and all of this stuff.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, and this—there’s both this positive piece and this negative piece—but this positive piece is why St. Paul, over and over again—and our reading of St. Paul’s soteriology is a mess because of a lot of Western stuff; I won’t go into a tirade against it again; I’ve done plenty of those—but because we’ve lost this positive part, again and again and again, St. Paul not only talks about repenting of sin—knock it off with the sinning, guys—I mean, that’s definitely important, and being healed of the effects of our sin is definitely important—but equally important to St. Paul, and in some epistles, more important, is him, again and again, calling the people in the communities he’s writing to to come to maturity, to push toward perfection, to be zealous for good works, to participate in the work of God in the world and be transformed in a positive way, not just in getting rid of sin.

This is a part of our salvation and is part of that original plan that we kind of lose sight of and forget about, because the picture we get at the end of the book of Revelation, of the new heavens and the new earth, there’s no Temple, and that includes no Eden, because the whole cosmos is the place where God lives now. That original goal has been accomplished: the whole cosmos, the whole universe is now Eden. It’s the place where God dwells. It is now in perfect order; it is now filled with life. That’s been accomplished—at the end. But we’re in the process of accomplishing it now, and that is part and parcel of our salvation, just as Adam and Eve were going to come to maturity and be transformed themselves by continuing the work of God and participating in it. Same with us; that’s how St. Paul sees salvation.

Fr. Andrew: Amazing! And, you know, I don’t know that we’ve made this explicit yet, but just to say this also, because I think it’s important, that passage from John 5 about the resurrection of life and the resurrection of condemnation, or, as it’s translated sometimes, of judgment or even damnation; that, because our bodies will no longer be subject to mortality, then that means that repentance is not a thing. It’s not possible after… It’s not possible not only after death, but it’s not possible after the resurrection either.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and when we say repentance is not possible, it’s important not to psychologize this, because, again, this is a person in a state other than our present human consciousness, but not just that… We’re not saying that there are all these poor people in hell, or however you want to talk about it. Usually the people who are opposed to this will conjure up some kind of fiery hell of torment which… Inevitably we’ll do an episode: that’s not what hell is; but anyway—it’s not what Hades is. That they’re there and they’re suffering horribly and they really want to repent, but they get told, “Oh! No, too late. No, you missed your window. Store’s closed.” That’s not what we mean by “it’s not possible to repent.” It’s not possible to repent, meaning in their will. They don’t desire to repent. There is no transformation that takes place, self-motivatedly.

Fr. Andrew: There’s no regret; they don’t have the capability of regret.

Fr. Stephen: Anyone who—and hopefully it will be few, very, very few, other than the demons themselves—anyone in that state of condemnation is going to be there, hating God with every fiber of their being.

Fr. Andrew: Right, which then… I just wanted to loop back to a question I don’t think we addressed directly but we get all the time, which is: Given that there’s multiple points at which angels fall, as depicted in Scripture, could that still happen, and if not, why? Like, is the Archangel Michael going to change his mind about serving God?

Fr. Stephen: Right, well, that’s, again, assuming that angels experience time the way we do, like on a parallel track. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. So I guess… We talk about five(ish) falls of angels: that’s from our point of view.

Fr. Stephen: Right.

Fr. Andrew: I seem to recall—I don’t know if it’s St. Maximus or if he was talking about… Yeah, I think it might have been St. Maximus. It talked about the fallen angels falling as they come into being, which of course makes no sense from our kind of temporal point of view, but seems to attempt to solve some of this issue, so to speak. But I think the whole point of talking about five(ish) falls of angels is to say, look, the Scripture depicts these things kind of connecting with our time in whatever way that that happens, at four, maybe five, different points; at least five events that we can point to. And maybe there’s other events that we’re not aware of. I’m just speculating here, but…

Fr. Stephen: Or maybe from their perspective it’s not an event.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, maybe “event” is a human thing.

Fr. Stephen: Right. There are five historical events that relate to this spiritual reality.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and this connects with this question of the resurrection of the dead, because, again, it’s this problem of perspective. I don’t know what it’s going to be like when I am raised from the dead. How will I think? How will I perceive? How will I function? How will I act? And that’s really all important to keep in mind for so many reasons, not just because it’s interesting to speculate whether angels could still fall, but also when I think about—I don’t know… Sometimes people will say things like, “Okay, if you go in the ground and you decompose, your molecules are going to make the way through the ground, and if they fertilize some piece of grass that’s eaten by a cow, and then the cow is eaten by a person, does he then have your molecule? And is the resurrection going to really work on you?” I’m reminded on this. There’s a whole passage in Hamlet that talks about this, about a worm eating the guts of a king and the worm being used as bait by a beggar who eats the fish.

But, again, we’re talking about—I don’t know—a rearrangement of matter itself and the way that it works, at least especially as it relates to human beings. The idea that… I think the problem is that sometimes we think, “Okay, in the resurrection, we’re going to basically be exactly what we are now except faster, stronger, better—super-humans, basically.” But no!

Fr. Stephen: Right, all-you-can-eat frozen yogurt. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: There you go: The Good Place. Yeah. Lamest afterlife ever in that show. I mean, a really fascinating, interesting show, but heaven there is awful. It’s lame.

Yeah, and St. Paul says the body is sown in corruption and raised in incorruption. It’s not the same thing. And even, there’s this image of a seed. If you think about the seed, and it’s this little thing. You put it in the ground, and what comes out looks nothing like it! It doesn’t function like it, it doesn’t look like it, it doesn’t smell like it, it doesn’t taste like it. It’s just completely different, and yet, it is the seed. It’s the same…

Fr. Stephen: It’s the same living entity.

Fr. Andrew: It’s the same human being. Yeah. Cool stuff.

All right. Well, why don’t we go ahead and go to a break, and we’ll come back for the third half of our show.

Fr. Andrew: Welcome back, everybody! This is now the third half of The Lord of Spirits, and, like I said earlier, this is a pre-recorded episode, so don’t call in; we’re not live tonight. God willing, we’ll be back live next time. Again, we’re on the second and fourth Thursdays of the month at 7:00 p.m. Eastern, 4:00 p.m. Pacific.

All right, well, we’ve just talked about the bodily resurrection. Let’s bring it to the full, final conclusion here and talk about our Lord Jesus Christ, who is the Man. He is the Human. He is the New Adam—all of that.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so, of course, since we teased the end of the last episode with: “Does Christ have two bodies?” we’re now going to talk about that at the very end of this episode.

Fr. Andrew: There we go. Exactly!

Fr. Stephen: Because that’s how we roll around these parts.

Fr. Andrew: We’re glad you stayed with us this whole time, everybody! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: So if we’re going to talk about “body” in this ancient sense, we’re talking about powers and potentialities. So as God, Christ—the divine Logos, the Word of God, the second Person of the Holy Trinity—possesses all of the powers of the divine nature. And we talked about last time how one of the primary ways in the Second Temple period and ancient Israelite religion of understanding the second Person of the Holy Trinity was as the embodied Yahweh.

Fr. Andrew: Right, because he appears to people. We talked about this last time.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and interacts with people and speaks with people face to face.

So in the Incarnation, Christ takes our shared human nature, and so he takes upon himself all of the powers associated with humanity. So, using “body” in that ancient sense, you could say—you’d confuse everyone, but you could say that Christ has two bodies in that sense, and you’d basically be referring to a concept very similar to Christ having two natures, divine and human. But there are places where, if you read the Fathers closely—St. John of Damascus does this fairly frequently, but other Fathers do this, too—where they’re talking about the Incarnation, they’ll refer to Christ’s human nature as his human body. And they’re not being Apollinarians, like we talked about last time.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah, they’re not saying he’s this material—two arms, two legs, and a head, with the soul extracted, and God in there in place…

Fr. Stephen: Right, instead. That’s not what the Fathers are saying; they clearly reject that view. So when they use that terminology that way, they’re using “body” not to refer to Christ’s material human body, which he certainly had, but they’re using “human body” in that ancient sense, to refer to a concept that includes his whole human nature—all of his powers, his human will, his human energies—all of those things can be covered by this ancient sense of the word “body.” So sometimes the Fathers will use the term “body” that way. So if you’re reading one of those texts talking about the Incarnation, don’t be confused when it says talks about Christ’s human body, and his human body being created. It’s not just talking about the physical body; it’s talking about Christ’s humanity in toto.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah… Okay, so I kind of have a question, and I don’t remember if we even talked about this pre-show or not. But in thinking about this, then, Christ takes on human nature. He takes on a human body, with all that that means. When he’s… Prior to his death and resurrection, he’s walking around; he’s material. He takes on materiality; he takes on its limitations, and we’re going to talk about him taking this on voluntarily and so forth. And then he rises from the dead, he ascends into heaven, and he sits down at the right hand of the Father. Is it right to say that he’s still material in this way if materiality is… Okay, maybe I need to back up and say this: Is materiality… is it only sort of a manifestation of the kind of mortality that we have now, or what’s going on there? I mean, human bodies changed after what happens in Eden and become mortal. Were Adam and Eve material, or they were material in a different way? Do you see what I’m getting at here?

Fr. Stephen: Right, they were material, but in a different way.

Fr. Andrew: In a different way. Okay.

Fr. Stephen: And, just as our resurrection bodies will be material in a different way… And we see this with Christ’s resurrected body in the Scriptures.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, he talked about flesh and bone!

Fr. Stephen: They could touch him; he still has flesh and bones.

Fr. Andrew: He eats.

Fr. Stephen: St. Thomas could… We’re not told whether he did or not, but I like the Caravaggio painting, so we’ll say he did put his hand in Christ’s side, and in the holes of the nails.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, most Orthodox icons show him actually making contact.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah! So all that’s true. And he eats. All of that’s true, but at the same time, he can just appear in a locked room; he can cross vast distances without running. It’s not like Christ turns invisible and then goes running over to the road of Emmaus. He’s just… he’s there in the midst of them.

Fr. Andrew: Boom.

Fr. Stephen: So he’s still… He’s clearly still material, but he’s material in a different way. Yeah, if we don’t understand that, you could get into some really goofy stuff with your doctrine of the Eucharist, for example.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah!

Fr. Stephen: Right? Like, I’m looking at you, Lutherans and Calvinists!

Fr. Andrew: Ohh!

Fr. Stephen: And your debate.

Fr. Andrew: Well, let’s talk about… I mean, maybe we’ll get to that. I mean, we should talk about that, because we say it’s the body of Christ. We use this phrase, “body of Christ,” not only to refer to what we would think of as the Person of Christ, but the Church and the Eucharist. So what’s going on there? Why…? In what sense is the Eucharist the body of Christ according to this kind of language?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. Both. This is a ¿Por qué no los dos? situation. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: “Why not both?” Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: That the Eucharist is both Christ’s body in the sense of being his body—and in our soon-to-be-forthcoming episodes on sacrifice we’ll be talking about that—and his blood, which is… The fact that his blood is involved very clearly means that that sense is real, that physical sense is real, because “blood” is not used the way we’ve been talking about “body.” But it is also true that the Eucharist is the body of Christ in this sense, in the sense that the Eucharist—and all of the material sacraments, and all the sacraments have these material elements—are the instruments through which Christ’s power enters into the world to transform us, to change us the way he acts upon us. This is what we mean when we say God’s grace, his energies, his working in the world, is mediated through sacramentality, through the mysteries. We mean that Christ works through them! So they’re also his body in this ancient sense; the Eucharist is also his body in this ancient sense.

So, yeah. So both. I was more going after the Calvinists arguing that it can’t be Christ’s body in the Eucharist because his body is in heaven at the right hand of God, like that’s a place where it’s located, and then the Lutherans essentially arguing… It’s hard to pin them down.

Fr. Andrew: “In, with, and under.” But if you say “consubstantial,” then… or “consubstantiation,” they’re like: No, no, no, no, no!

Fr. Stephen: Using this weird incarnational analogy that is definitely not Orthodox, that somehow, like, Christ takes a third nature of bread or something? Like it’s hypostatically united to him?

Fr. Andrew: Instead of Incarnation, it’s im-pan-ation.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. So, anyway, enough picking on Protestants.

Fr. Andrew: Okay.

Fr. Stephen: But that whole debate kind of doesn’t make a lot of sense if we understand Christ’s body in this biblical sense that we derive from St. Paul on the resurrection body and of Christ’s resurrection appearances in the gospels. That whole Eucharistic debate kind of doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Right. I think it’s an attempt to take these kinds of Aristotelian categories of things and what makes a thing a thing and apply it to the God-man. I can’t believe I said that sentence, but do you know what I mean?

Fr. Stephen: Right. Yeah, and it wasn’t the Protestants who did that first; we’ll spread the blame around to everybody in the West for getting that all mixed up and confusing everyone.

Fr. Andrew: There we go. How many of our listeners have we alienated in the last 20 seconds or so?

Fr. Stephen: Probably a lot. They’re our friends.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, we do love you.

Fr. Stephen: I’m just saying they’re confused, and it’s not their fault they’re confused. They have this historical trajectory that has led them to a confusing place. So, yeah, it’s not blame-worthy that they’re confused.

But the other key thing—and the people I’m going to bash a little now I don’t even consider Protestants—is that when Christ is incarnate and he takes on human nature and he takes on these human powers, he’s taking on something else. He’s not getting rid of or substituting anything.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Right, okay, so I’ve heard this view, and it’s… There’s that word, kenosis, or “kenosis” as it sometimes gets Anglicized, the self-emptying of God in Christ. I’ve even heard it as he set aside being God so he could be man for a while, or something like that, which is just… I mean…

Fr. Stephen: Awful?

Fr. Andrew: It… Yeah, right. It’s… to use that wonderful phrase: “It’s not even wrong.” It’s so incoherent, it’s not even incorrect.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. It’s fractally wrong, meaning the whole thing is wrong, and if you zoom in on any particular part of it, it is just as wrong as the whole thing is wrong.

Fr. Andrew: Right. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: So that is not the idea at all. I mean, this is why the Fathers were so clear that Christ becomes man without change or alteration.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, he’s still fully God in all that it means to be God.

Fr. Stephen: He has added to himself human powers, the human nature, the human body in this ancient sense, which includes human body in the modern sense. He’s added that. And so the limitations that Christ takes upon himself are each and always—he takes them upon himself voluntarily.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. I’m reminded, for instance, of… in Anglo-Saxon Christian literature, it often depicts Christ as, like, a warrior who climbs up on the cross. Like, “Now it’s my time to die. I’m going to go do it.” And it’s not suicidal, but it’s voluntary. He is conquering death; death is not… He’s not a victim in the sense of “Okay, I’m going to let them overpower me.” And it’s illustrated in Scripture. I can’t remember who I read that explicated this, but I just thought it was such an amazing piece of attention to a really important detail, where it says that he bows his head and then gives up the spirit, in that order, which is exactly the opposite order of the way that most of us die, which is that we die and then we slump over because we don’t have any control over our bodies any more. He’s in control: he bows his head and then gives up his spirit. The moment that he himself dies is his choice. It’s not that the Romans successfully killed him.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and that’s especially a them in St. John’s gospel, over and over and over again. There are all these times where they try to kill Jesus during his ministry, and it doesn’t say, “But Jesus was clever and escaped.”

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Right. “He got away again!”

Fr. Stephen: It says, “But they could not kill him, because it wasn’t his time yet.” And that gets summed up by Christ himself saying, “No one takes my life from me. I am able to lay it down, and I am able to take it up again.” So Christ chooses to die; he’s not even subject to death, let alone any of the other things. So Christ chooses to become tired; he chooses to become hungry; he chooses to undertake what are called by the Fathers the blameless passions, the things we suffer that aren’t the direct result of us being sinners and our domination by sin.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and when a human being is taken hold of by circumstances and then suffers it valiantly and without complaining and maybe even self-sacrificing. That for us is extremely admirable. You see someone taken prisoner and then tortured and killed or whatever, which happens over and over again with the martyrs. And yet, Christ is the Lord of glory, at every moment in his whole life, in his passion, in his death. He could call down ten legions of angels. He could with a thought make them all dissolve faster than Thanos can snap his fingers. It’s… I don’t know. How do you even conceive of that? That he is so in control and chooses it all. It’s very, very deliberate on his part. We admire someone who is caught up by circumstances and bears them up well. He’s not even caught up by circumstances. We can’t say, “Well, they did it to him, but look at what he did.” It’s way beyond that. It’s choice every moment, that he enters into death in order to save us from death, and he chooses it. It wasn’t just a last, desperate kind of attempt. It’s his choice; he enters into it very, very deliberately, and there’s no point at which he loses control, ever, ever, throughout the whole timeline, not ever. Amazing.

Fr. Stephen: This isn’t something that we can construct a good enough series of philosophical categories to understand and explain.

Fr. Andrew: No.

Fr. Stephen: This is an incredible mystery that we write hymns and poetry and sing and pray and stand in awe at. I mean, that’s what Holy Week is. It’s a protracted period of standing in awe of this, before it, not trying to explain or comprehend it.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Well, let’s… I think maybe a good place to… Well, we’ve already kind of talked about this a little bit, but maybe we can meditate on this as our place to kind of wrap up. The Church is the body of Christ. The Church is the body of Christ. What does that mean?

Fr. Stephen: To understand this, you have to understand “body” in this ancient sense that we’ve been talking about this whole time; that when St. Paul talks about some people being God’s eyes and some people being his feet and some people being his hands, this isn’t just to randomly talk about body parts or do an analogy. He means it in this sense, so that the way in which people in this world experience being seen and being known by God is by being seen and known by us. The way in which the world hears Christ’s voice is when the Church speaks. The way in which Christ feeds the hungry, clothes the naked—we sit back in our modern world, and we look at poverty and hunger and disease and these horrible things happen in the world, and we have the gall to say, “Why doesn’t God do something about this? This is a philosophical problem of theodicy. Why doesn’t God…?” God sent someone…

Fr. Andrew: He sent you, buddy!

Fr. Stephen: God sent someone. It’s you, sitting on your couch, watching the Sally Struthers commercial.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] That’s a deep cut right there.

Fr. Stephen: You’re the one; you’re the one who’s supposed to be doing something about this—and you’re not. That’s what St. Paul means. There’s an urgency to St. Paul saying that, that not only do we each need to fulfill—God has given us the gifts to do what he’s called each of us to do, our small part of that, and it’s critically important that we not only each do it, but that we all cooperate together, as one whole body, to do this work together and to get it done in the world.

And there are no substitutes for direct action. And I’m going to be only slightly political now—fair warning. This is true across the board. Going and voting for someone who says he’s going to do something to help poor people is not fulfilling God’s calling to you to help those in need. And going and voting for someone who says they’re maybe going to somehow ban abortion is not fulfilling God’s call on you to go and help mothers who are pregnant and who are in distress and need help. There’s not a substitute for direct action. There’s not a substitute. There’s not something we can do to fulfill what God wants other than doing what God wants in the world.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. So I have some final thoughts, and then you can give your final thoughts.

Fr. Stephen: Sure.

Fr. Andrew: So for these last couple episodes, we’ve been talking about concepts that are really difficult, because they’re so different from the way we usually think. We tend to think of bodies as objects, as a material thing. And so then, again, this is the podcast of “Hey, it’s not just a metaphor.” So when we hear phrases like “the body of Christ,” whether it means the Eucharist or the Church, or we think about the resurrection, we think about what happens to Adam and Eve, we think about angels—all of these things. If we think about… If we just have a concept of bodies as objects, then it’s an atomized theology. It’s just: here’s a thing, here’s a thing, here’s a thing. And it tends towards kind of the magical and the talismanic, if I can say so. Like: here’s a thing that’s charged with superpowers.

But if we understand that God in Christ is making use of us, especially the Church, that we are his body, we are his nexus of powers, to use that kind of language, then it utterly vivifies the Christian life in a radically different way. You know, we have talked, for instance, about living an exorcistic life, casting out demons. Well, it’s not because I have a power of being an exorcist; it’s because Christ’s mission is casting out his enemies, the demons, and I can participate in that, or not. I can become truly his body in that sense, or not—it’s all voluntary; I have a choice.

What that means is that the thing that you do, listener, whatever it is—you said a prayer this morning for someone; you gave something that you didn’t have to give; you helped someone with something that they needed help with—whatever it is you did, when you did that, you were participating in the very power and action and love, the body of God himself. It’s not enough for us to just say, “God is everywhere, and he’s watching the things I do,” like the divine Santa Claus, making a list and checking it twice. “I hope I get in at the end.” It’s so much more than that. It’s so, so much more. He is present now, in this room where you are, and he’s acting, and he’s acting through you! You have become… St. John Chrysostom talks about the priesthood, and at one point he says Christ is the Priest, and the one that we call a priest, the presbyter, he gives his voice and his hands, and he participates in Christ’s priesthood.

So my prayer is, as you have listened to these two episodes, and probably had your mind blown ten or twelve times, which would be exactly half the number that I had, maybe, that you would again, not just say, “Wow, I learned some interesting ancient concepts today,” and so forth, but that this would vivify your life in Christ; that you would understand it’s not a metaphor: the Church is the body of Christ. He is present with us; he is in our midst. He’s working in our midst. It’s just like it says at the beginning of the Acts of the Apostles, where St. Luke says, “In the former treatise,” when he’s talking about his gospel text, “I wrote about all the things that Jesus began to do and say,” which means that what happens in the book of Acts is Jesus continuing to do all of those things.

And it’s not just the book of Acts, and it’s not just first-, second-, third-, fourth-, fifth-century Christianity. It’s now. It’s now as well. Christ is acting. He is healing his world. He is drawing all men to himself. He is forgiving sins. He is healing. He is doing all those things, and so our task is to join in and be faithful and to remain faithful, and when we fall over, to get back up and return to faithfulness and keep going forward, always with our eyes on that final day, when Christ is going to come to judge the living and the dead, and we will see him as he is.

Fr. Stephen: What I have to say is not unrelated. [Laughter] We got a question by email in which someone asked us how this relates to St. Paul teaching that our body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, and we kind of brushed over—I mean, there’s so much related to this, we couldn’t go into detail on everything—that St. John, both in his gospel and in the Apocalypse, the book of Revelation, says that Christ’s body, Christ’s humanity, is the temple, is the new temple. And how that relates to, then, our bodies being the temple of the Holy Spirit, and how that works, because we may think about that as, well, our body is sort of a physical space and the Holy Spirit lives inside it? Obviously, if you push on that even gently it gets kind of ridiculous, like, we’ve got internal organs in there; where’s…? Obviously, that’s not that kind of literal spatial kind of sense.

The presence of God in the Temple is what made it the Temple, his body being there, as we talked about in the previous episode: the Temple’s the place where God’s body is. And so the same is true with Christ: Christ’s body is God’s body. But St. Paul is saying the same thing when he says that our body is the temple of the Holy Spirit. He’s saying that our body is and is to be God’s body. That’s why in that same context he can say to someone, “How can you go and join the members of Christ to a prostitute?” We might take that primarily in a negative sense, and St. Paul clearly means that negative sense, but it’s also true in the positive sense. Over and over again in our liturgy, in the Divine Liturgy, we offer ourselves and our whole lives and each other to Christ. As St. Paul says, we offer ourselves as living sacrifices. We offer our bodies to God as instruments for him to use, and we’re making a commitment and we’re making a promise when we do that, that we are not going to use our bodies, our powers, our abilities, our gifts—we’re not going to use those as a means to gratify ourselves, as a means to seek pleasure for ourselves, but we’re going to give them to him to do his work.

The Christian religion is not an immaterial or ghostly religion. It is not about sitting in your house and purely repenting in contemplative prayer. It is not about avoiding the outside world and avoiding others. Even our great monastics who have done that have only done that for a certain period of time, and then have shared what God has done in them with others. So we work out our salvation every day in the material world, through our bodies, by showing love, showing compassion, doing good, cultivating life, putting things in order, and establishing justice and decency and good in the world, every day. That’s not an add-on; that’s not something that’s “good to do” in addition to our salvation; that’s not “a sign” that we’re really saved—that is the stuff of our salvation, because that is the stuff of our transformation. That’s how we grow, that’s how we change, that’s how we come to know Christ more deeply, that’s how we become sons of God, and that’s how we reach that maturity and completion and perfection that God created us to seek after and, by his grace, to attain.

Fr. Andrew: And that’s what we’ve got for today. Thank you very much, everyone, for listening. If your question didn’t get a chance to be addressed during this broadcast, we would love to hear from you either via email at lordofspirits@ancientfaith.com, or you can message us at our Lord of Spirits podcast Facebook page. We read everything, but we cannot respond to everything, unfortunately, and we do save what you send for possible use in future episodes.

Fr. Stephen: 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. Like our Facebook page and join our Facebook discussion group.

Fr. Andrew: Leave reviews and ratings, but, most importantly, share this show with a friend whom you know is going to love it.

Fr. Stephen: And finally, be sure to go to ancientfaith.com/support and help make sure we and a lot of other AFR podcasters stay on the air.

Fr. Andrew: Thank you very much, and God bless you.We’ll see you next time.