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

Before we get started, I have a little advertisement to share, and this time it’s not for somebody else’s thing. It is for our thing. On October 26-29, 2023—so that’s next year, assuming the world still exists at that time—at the Antiochian Village in western Pennsylvania, at the little town of Ligonier, we are going to be holding the first-ever Lord of Spirits Conference. Fr. Stephen and I are going to both be there, as well as Frs. David Subu and Lucas Christensen—maybe more. The schedule is still being worked on, but you can find all the current details, and you can register, by going to store.ancientfaith.com/events.

Fr. Stephen De Young: Burying the lede! [Laughter] There’s going to be a Dungeons & Dragons tournament.

Fr. Andrew: Probably.

Fr. Stephen: No, there will be. It’s in my writing. Don’t worry about the green jelly beans, but there will be a Dungeons & Dragons tournament. It may be me and eight attendees in the parking lot, but there will be one.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] It’s happening! Yeah. It’s going to be a lot of fun. There should be at least one person dressed as a bat—you know who you are. Okay, moving on.

We continue our series tonight on the sacraments of the Orthodox Church by looking at chrismation. So what is chrismation? What does it do? How is chrism used in the Old Testament? Where is chrismation in the New Testament? Is it even a thing? And what exactly does it have to do with the Holy Spirit? So that’s what we’re talking about. My first question, though, is how many accidental references to cremation are we going to make tonight? I’ve heard people call it that: “You’re going to be cremated.”

Fr. Stephen: Well, this is the shout-out to my niece, who more than 20 years ago, when I was preparing to be received into the Orthodox Church, asked, “When is Uncle Steve’s cremation?” [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: She was ready for it!

Fr. Stephen: Yes. She has since been chrismated, so—and survived the experience.

Fr. Andrew: Baptism by fire! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: So, yes, we’re going to try to avoid those. And they are not the same thing.

Fr. Andrew: It’s true. Yeah, so the first thing is: What exactly is chrismation? Because, especially if you’re not Orthodox, that word might not be familiar to you. Maybe it is! But it might not be, so what exactly is it? So, chrism is a special oil that is prepared by bishops. Depending on which church you belong to of the Orthodox Church, it might come from somewhere far away; it might also be more local. It’s got a lot of different elements in the recipe, but that’s not the important thing. The important thing is that this special oil is then distributed to the priests, and then they use that as part of baptism, as part of receiving someone into the Orthodox Church. It also gets used in some circumstances for receiving converts whose baptisms are already considered to be “workable.” So that’s what it is; it’s an oil—

Fr. Stephen: Whose baptisms are considered to be a baptism.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s considered to be a baptism, right. It’s an anointing oil, and it’s applied to the forehead, the eyes, the ears, the mouth, nose—I’m going to miss stuff—hands, feet, chest, back— Am I leaving anything out?

Fr. Stephen: That pretty much covers it.

Fr. Andrew: That pretty much covers it, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: It’s also used for consecrating a church.

Fr. Andrew: Also used for consecrating churches…

Fr. Stephen: Altars.

Fr. Andrew: ...altars. I’ve heard in some cases that initial house blessings can include chrism as well.

Fr. Stephen: They do, actually. You anoint the four corners.

Fr. Andrew: And we’ll get to all that—

Fr. Stephen: I know that one time I did an exorcism for a house, which I’d rather not describe, and just leave that tantalizingly there.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, absolutely. So that’s chrismation. In the West—

Fr. Stephen: It’s done normally as part of— It’s done to people, setting aside the consecrating a building— It’s done to people normally within the baptismal service.

Fr. Andrew: Right. It’s integral to the service.

Fr. Stephen: So within that, there are— We probably should have done this earlier in our series on sacraments, but in certain ways drawing out these as independent sacraments is a little artificial from an Orthodox perspective. There is in the West a whole ordered theology of what is a sacrament and what is a sacramental, and then, once you have that, once you get into the Reformation era, there are of course disputes.

Fr. Andrew: Yes. Is this a sacrament, is that not a sacrament?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, you get friend of the show John Calvin saying— If he ever actually comes on, that would be amazing.

Fr. Andrew: John Calvin? [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah.

Fr. Andrew: That would mean, uh, a whole lot of praying has been done for his soul for that to be possible!

Fr. Stephen: And/or necromancy, right?

Fr. Andrew: Oh! Yeah, I didn’t want to just throw that out there, but…

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] But, no. John Calvin, for example, talks about the five sacraments, “falsely so-called.”

Fr. Andrew: Nice.

Fr. Stephen: But that’s referring to the list of seven sacraments that became “official” within Roman Catholicism, with other things seen as sacramentals. There is not really such a list in the Orthodox Church.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, I think you can find lists, but it’s not a super agreed-upon thing that is dogmatically declared by the Church, etc., etc.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and the lists you find are usually lists in response to some Western interlocutor.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. One big difference that people would probably notice is sort of the parallel thing in the West is called confirmation, which usually is delayed until you’re a teenager. But early on in the Western Church’s history, it was not delayed. We don’t need to go into why all that is, but it became this separate thing that was separated out from baptism. But we don’t do that. It’s part of baptism for the Orthodox.

Fr. Stephen: Right. But because the lists don’t sort of arise within the Orthodox Church organically, you get all different lists. So you get lists with ten things, you get lists with five things, you get lists with all these different numbers.

Fr. Andrew: I think I’ve heard of one that has 20-something on it.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. But also, because there’s a Western interlocutor, there’s a tendency to sort of line them up with the person you’re talking to. So you’ll often see in contemporary Orthodox discussions of the sacraments or the mysteries that they’re laid out as basically seven, even though we have things that are kind of parallel to the ones in the Roman Catholic Church in a few instances, but that are not exactly parallel. And this is one of them, as you were just mentioning. So part of the reason why, even though naturally for us as Orthodox Christians, you have baptism, chrismation, and first Communion all together in one thing, because those have been split up in the West, we tend to talk about them separately, because of the Western interlocutor.

Fr. Andrew: And even baptism within itself as the service actually includes two separate anointings. It’s actually funny we don’t separate out that other one as another thing.

Fr. Stephen: Right, yeah. Well, and there’s tonsure in there. There’s a whole bunch of things that could also be pulled out as sacraments! But because those aren’t sacraments in the West, they tend not to make the list. But so all that is to say: I’m anticipating some potential questions and responses. [Laughter] Because they naturally go together, there’s not sort of this super firm line between “here’s what’s going on in baptism” and “here’s what’s going on in chrismation.” “The one does XYZ and the other one does ABC.” Because they’re not naturally thought of as separate for us. So there is a blurry edge between the two because of that. This is to save everybody time in typing, “Well, wait a minute. I thought that was baptism,” or “So chrismation does it but baptism doesn’t? So then what if somebody’s chrismated and not baptized?” Yadda yaddah. Relax. There’s not a firm line between the two. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: The important thing is if you want to become Orthodox, you do whatever your priest tells you to do.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. But so the core thing—and if you give the one-sentence definition of what chrismation is, it’s that a person is anointed with oil—this particular oil, but the person is anointed with oil—to receive the Holy Spirit. That’s the one-sentence thing of what chrismation is in the Orthodox Church. And so everything we’re going to say tonight now is going to be based on tracing the themes related to that to both the reception of the Holy Spirit and anointing with oil through the Scriptures to sort of show what that means.

Fr. Andrew: All right. So where shall we begin?

Fr. Stephen: We should begin at the beginning.

Fr. Andrew: It’s a very good place to start.

Fr. Stephen: Because, as Rodgers and Hammerstein told us, it’s a very good place to start. And when those two guys agree… All the way back in Genesis 1:2. So almost as far back as we can go in the Bible, that’s the first place where we see a direct reference to the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, from the beginning.

Fr. Stephen: And when we first see him, it is actually feminine imagery that’s used of him, because ruah in Hebrew is grammatically feminine. He is described as— In English, it’s usually translated as he’s “hovering” over the waters. That word for “hovering” in the Hebrew is actually a word that’s used to describe a mother bird brooding over its young, or potential young in the case of eggs, in the nest. St. Basil the Great actually makes this point about it. He doesn’t know Hebrew, but he gets it through Syriac.

Fr. Andrew: Oh. Does he know Syriac?

Fr. Stephen: He references the Syriac word.

Fr. Andrew: Oh interesting. Is this in the Hexameron?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. He references the Syriac word, which is available to him. And Syriac, for folks who don’t know, is a relatively late dialect of Aramaic. He makes that same point based on the Syriac cognate word.

But this imagery also becomes important in terms of where the imagery is coming from as the Holy Spirit descending “like a dove” at Christ’s baptism. As we’ve said on the show before, he did not turn into a bird. [Laughter] He did not incarnate as a bird.

Fr. Andrew: It’s a symbolic bird, you guys.

Fr. Stephen: He descends like a dove. His movement is like a dove. And this is also describing movement or activity. As we’ve talked about before, the creation before creation starts, which is where we are in Genesis 1:2, creation is described in Genesis 1 as “God putting things in order,” and so before that there is chaos. But this sort of primordial chaos, or what Aristotle calls “prime matter,” has the potential to be anything, but isn’t anything. So that’s partially contained in this bird imagery also, the brooding over the young.

Fr. Andrew: Sort of the potentiality thing, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: The potential: this is going to become something.

Fr. Andrew: It’s going to hatch!

Fr. Stephen: And that kind of language about the Spirit is all over the place, like in our matins service: of the Holy Spirit as the One who gives life and breath, and that kind of ongoing creative power of the Holy Spirit. We also see in Genesis 1, a couple verses later, God starts to speak. When St. John, at the beginning of his gospel, says that God created everything through his Word, that’s a fairly literal reading of Genesis 1.

Fr. Andrew: Right, that he talked.

Fr. Stephen: So you have here already at the beginning of Genesis 1—you have God, meaning the Father; you have the Logos, the Word; and you have the Spirit. The dynamic that’s described in creation already in Genesis is that the Logos—and so ultimately Christ—is the order into which creation is brought, as the Logos.

Fr. Andrew: He’s the principle that defines how it’s all supposed to be laid out.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And the Holy Spirit is the one who inhabits and enlivens that order. So creation happens through the Son, through the Logos, and then through the action of the Holy Spirit it is brought back to God the Creator. Yeah, we’re throwing everybody in the deep end right away in the first half, at the beginning, which we normally don’t do. We normally wait for this kind of thing, but this time we’re just going straight from the deep end. [Laughter] And that’s part of what, for example, St. Irenaeus is getting at, that dynamic in creation; that trinitarian dynamic in creation is part of what St. Irenaeus is getting at when he talks about the Logos and the Spirit as the right and left hands of God, that there is this continual dynamic in creation. The idea of Christ the Logos as the order into which creation is brought is not just connected to theosis, as we’ve talked about it on the show, but that’s where St. Maximus, when he talks about everything in creation having logia...

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there’s a cosmic scale at which all this is happening.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. Everything in creation has [logia]; that’s all part of the Logos. That’s where he’s getting that. So all kinds of things break down out of this, this understanding, this trinitarian understanding of creation.

But, important for us tonight—we’re not going to focus on all that because, you know… I don’t think— Well, my co-host and our engineer don’t want to stay here until three a.m.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] You’ve got nothing else to do!

Fr. Stephen: I would be happy to, dear listener. I would remain with you throughout the long, dark, cold night.

Fr. Andrew: Does it ever get cold in Louisiana?

Fr. Stephen: No. It was 82 today. [Laughter] It is dark. But for our purposes here, we want to get at, through this dynamic, what it means to be filled with the Spirit, what it means to be filled with the Holy Spirit. The idea that the Holy Spirit inhabits and enlivens the created order on a cosmic scale tells us what that means. From that we get what that means on, for example, a personal basis. First of all, that means to be truly alive is to be filled with the Holy Spirit; to be filled with life means to be filled with the Holy Spirit, who is the Lord, the Giver of life. It also means that when someone is filled, as we’ve talked about on the episode when we talked about what spirits are in general, that a spirit has agency, so a person who is filled with the Spirit then what they do has the potential at least to become God acting through them.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because there’s synergy.

Fr. Stephen: Right, God acting through them in a way that is transformative of them. God loves people through them, and that love transforms the person who is cooperating with that love, for example.

So when we move past creation and the creation of the world, we move down from the level of the cosmos in the Old Testament, and we move forward in the Old Testament a little further to where we have humans, we see that there are certain people, certain individuals in the Old Testament who are described as having been filled with the Holy Spirit on an at least potentially permanent basis.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that the Spirit is abiding in them or resting in them.

Fr. Stephen: Right, resting on them or in them or abiding in them or on them. An Exhibit A of that is of course Moses. Moses possesses the Spirit of God. This is one of the things that marks him out as a prophet. The people in the Old Testament who are described as being filled with the Spirit on this potentially permanent basis are, by and large, prophets.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because there’s this job that God is giving them to do, and so they need to be able to do it on an ongoing basis.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and they’ve been in the presence of God, so they’ve met Christ. [Laughter] So now they’ve been sent by him into the world with this mission. And that’s true to the point that, when we see other figures who possess the Holy Spirit on this potentially permanent basis, like David, who’s the king—he’s not a prophet per se—

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, he doesn’t live out in the woods and have this weird, sort of opposing lifestyle.

Fr. Stephen: And Samuel and Nathan are around at that time, and they’re prophets, depending on which point in David’s life we’re talking about. But David is still described as a prophet, and that’s even within the pages of the New Testament. It talks about David prophesying.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, the prophet king.

Fr. Stephen: And that’s because he is one of these who—in whom the Holy Spirit is dwelling. And, as Fr. Andrew mentioned, that is—what the Holy Spirit does in that prophet is enliven and empower him to fulfill the role he’s been sent to perform.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s not just a personal possession, like: “You’re powered up, dude. Now you’re a super hero.”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. It’s not going Super Saiyan. It’s a— It’s not even like the sun for Superman. [Laughter] The primary way in which, in fact, that sort of empowerment— What that concretely means is, as we were saying, God acting through you. It’s not that God is giving you super powers to perform your own mighty deeds; it’s that God is going to— You’ve been called to do these things, and God is going to act through that person, and that puts the person who has received the Holy Spirit into a particular relationship with God that is different than others who do not similarly—have not similarly received the Holy Spirit.

Fr. Andrew: They function as his agent. They have their own agency; it’s not— They’re not being taken over, but at the same time—

Fr. Stephen: Not in this case.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, not in this case, right. At the same time, God is being an agent in them as well, at the same time.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and this is why that relationship is often described in terms of sonship. So the king in ancient Israel and Judah is the son of God in this adopted sense.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because what do sons do? They have to be about the business of their father.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so the son represents the father for as long as the father is alive. Once the father is gone and the son becomes the head of the household, then his sons represent him. That’s the way ancient— We’ve got to think ancient extended families again.

And it’s important to emphasize, because even the language of “agent” can be kind of slippery— Because my agent can do things independently of me. There are different ways we talk about “agent.” So I can talk about someone as my agent in a way that means they’re going to do only what I tell them to do. We could talk about an agent as someone who has the freedom to act on my behalf and make their own decisions, but I’ll be bound to those decisions. Or we could talk about an agent as being the one sort of through whom I act, and the agent has to cooperate in that case. So it’s important that someone like this who has been called and sent on some particular mission, filled with the Holy Spirit to empower them in that mission, is not, then, a free agent—pardon the pun [Laughter]—in the sense that God is not binding himself to whatever they do, and God is not… But God also is not compelling. That agent can still do things other than what God wants them to do, although they’re able to do that still.

Fr. Andrew: Right, they’re stepping outside of that relationship if they do that.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so rather it is the person through whom God is going to act, and what they do is they cooperate with that—or they don’t. [Laughter] And, you know, you don’t have to read much of the Old Testament to see that folks often don’t.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it is possible to, as they say, quench the Spirit.

Fr. Stephen: And so this is why I said repeatedly as we got into this discussion, that it is potentially permanent. So King Saul, when he was anointed as king, was indwelt by the Holy Spirit, to empower him to be the king over God’s people. But then there’s a point in his life where the Holy Spirit departs from him.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it says that in the Scripture.

Fr. Stephen: And when we read Psalm 50 (or 51 in the Hebrew), David’s psalm of repentance, after his sin, he prays: “Do not take your Holy Spirit from me.”

Fr. Andrew: Because he knows that’s a thing.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] That’s what happened to Saul, and it could happen to him, and he probably deserves for it to happen to him after what he’s done. And so that’s part of his repentance is saying, “Please…” because he’s aware of his dependence on God. So that’s why I say it’s potentially permanent for these people in the Old Testament.

There are also instances in the Old Testament and people in the Old Testament whom we see the Holy Spirit abiding in or resting upon or filling on a sort of temporary basis. It still falls within empowering and enlivening for a particular task that God wants to perform through them, but that task is not an ongoing thing like being king or being God’s prophet; it is for a particular act in a particular time and place, a particular thing.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, for a mission.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And usually less than five years, this mission. [Laughter] An example of that, one example is in Numbers 11. We read this passage at great vespers before the feast of Pentecost, where the Spirit who rested upon Moses permanently, portions of the Spirit come to rest on the rest of the elders.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and they all began to prophesy.

Fr. Stephen: And they all begin to prophesy, and Joshua and some other Moses loyalists get kind of offended. They’re like: “No, Moses is the prophet. Tell them to stop.” And Moses said, “No, I wish that all of Israel could receive the Spirit and prophesy.”

Fr. Andrew: Is this the one where there are two guys in the camp that are…?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, they showed up late for church. I know that never happens now to anybody, especially in the Orthodox Church.

Fr. Andrew: No.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and so the reading actually ends right there with Moses saying that. “Would that all of Israel could receive the Spirit and prophesy.” Foreshadowing.

And then another example is in Exodus 31, when Bezalel and the other craftsmen are contracted to build all of the things.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, the ark of the covenant and all the other stuff.

Fr. Stephen: The second half of the book of Exodus is where everybody starts to kind of fall asleep and get bored when they try to read straight through the Bible.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because it’s sort of verbal blueprints.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, well, and you get them twice. So you get the full detail of the blueprints, and then you get the full details again as it describes them building the things from the blueprints, all the measurements all over again. But, within that, Exodus 31, those craftsmen who are doing the building from the blueprints are filled with the Spirit to enable and empower their work. While the tabernacle is made by human hands, it is— You can also say that it is divinely created. But there is nothing in the text to indicate, and everything to indicate otherwise, that this wasn’t a sort of permanent kind of gift that Bezalel had, so that sort of every chair he made for the rest of his life was holy.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] A divine chair. They didn’t become like a smith-god kind of figure.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. So it’s aimed at this one particular task. We also— I know we have mentioned at least briefly on the show before the very creepy sounding Holy Spirit possession.

Fr. Andrew: Dun dun dunn.

Fr. Stephen: And I think that term for it is purely based on people trying to clickbait you into reading their scholarly articles on the books of Joshua and Judges.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] The Holy Spirit possession!

Fr. Stephen: The phenomenon of Holy Spirit possession in ancient Israel!

Fr. Andrew: “You won’t believe what happens next!”

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] This is an even— Like the previous examples, it’s temporary, but it tends to be even more temporary. The reason it’s called Holy Spirit possession, the reason why you’d come up with another term for it, is in most of these, at least implicitly and sometimes explicitly, the idea of human agency is removed.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, almost against their will.

Fr. Stephen: Well, maybe not against. That might be a little strong.

Fr. Andrew: Well, without their cooperation.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And the idea here being that these are acts that God does through a person that are characterized as being purely God’s acts. It’s purely God who is doing this. And so, unsurprisingly, often these actions in terms of that phenomenon are things that would not normally be morally acceptable to people. [Laughter] What I mean by that is usually it involves smiting a whole lot of people.

Fr. Andrew: Like Judges 3:9-11, we have a smiting. It just says this:

But when the people of Israel cried out to the Lord, the Lord raised up a deliverer for the people of Israel who saved them, Othniel, the son of Kenaz, Caleb’s younger brother. The Spirit of the Lord was upon him, and he judged Israel. He went out to war, and the Lord gave Cushan Rishathaim, king of [Aram]-Naharaim, into his hand, and his hand prevailed over Cushan Rishathaim, so the land had rest 40 years. Then Othniel, the son of Kenaz, died.

You have to love the rhythm of those names, though. It makes me think of Rikki-tikki-tavi. It’s the same kind of rhythm. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Cushan Rishathaim of [Aram]-Naharaim. I would suggest someone name their child that, but it would be a bad idea, because he’s not a good dude.

Fr. Andrew: Because… Because it means what?

Fr. Stephen: [Aram]-Naharaim is the place, literally the place between the rivers. So it’s a reference to Mesopotamia, which means it’s a reference to Babylon, etc., etc. But Cushan Rishathaim is probably not the name his mama gave him.

Fr. Andrew: Because it means…

Fr. Stephen: It means that double-dark evil one.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: So, I mean, if you name your kid that, that’s a lot to live up to, or down to, as the case may be. [Laughter] So this was a bad dude.

But what we see here is that Caleb’s younger brother, Othniel, who’s the first of the judges of the book of Judges, is sort of seized by the Holy Spirit and then does a whole lot of killing. We use it as an example just because it’s the first of the judges, but all through the book of the Judges and several times in the book of Joshua this happens. Shamgar, who’s the next judge, ends up killing several hundred Philistines with an ox-goad, which is literally a pointy stick. [Laughter]

But the idea here is that these actions are being characterized as God’s direct judgment. This isn’t: “God gave this person permission to engage in mass slaughter.” This is: “God judged this people, and instead of using fire from heaven or the ground opening up and swallowing them or an invading army of a neighboring empire, he used Shamgar and his pointy stick.”

Fr. Andrew: Shamgar is a pretty great name, though.

Fr. Stephen: And Shamgar is something you could name your kid.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, yeah? What does that one mean? I don’t happen to know off the top of my head.

Fr. Stephen: Well, no, it’s just he could be Shamgar.

Fr. Andrew: Shamgar.

Fr. Stephen: I think that would mean “foreign name,” if “-gar” is from gur. Anyway! [Laughter] But, yeah, Shamgar: not a lot of Shamgars.

Fr. Andrew: No! I don’t think I’ve ever met one, actually.

Fr. Stephen: Othniel, okay, but Shamgar… That’s impressive. It sounds like a barbarian name.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right, probably because of that “-gar” ending, because in Old English, “gar” means “spear.”

Fr. Stephen: There you go.

Fr. Andrew: And is the origin of our word “garlic.”

Fr. Stephen: So maybe that’s a very primitive version of the name Shakespeare.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Wow.

Fr. Stephen: And this is, as we talk about this issue of agency and partially here and partially as a clarifier from our episode on spirits, that there is a difference between a spirit and an idea, and that difference is that a spirit has agency. That is the explicit difference. So when we’re talking about spirits—the spirit of a place, the spirit of a group, the whole spirits episode: you can go back and listen to it again—that has a nature and a will and an agency. An idea does not have that. Ideas arise at particular times in particular places for particular reasons, and ideas are used by agents, like humans or angels; ideas are used instrumentally. They’re used as instruments; they’re used as tools.

Fr. Andrew: They don’t have an independent existence. It’s like meaning. Meaning does not exist from those apart from those who mean.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and we’ve talked about the nous, that ideas, thoughts, present themselves to the nous. And so in the same way that color doesn’t exist without an observer that can see color— So if all the mantis shrimps die, 15 colors cease to exist, effectively.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, man! Well, we wouldn’t know the difference, though.

Fr. Stephen: We wouldn’t, but that’s part of the point, because those colors don’t exist apart from the vision of the mantis shrimp. That would be a great book title: The Vision of the Mantis Shrimp.

The Holy Spirit obviously is not a holy idea. We’re not saying that. But that’s also true of evil spirits. When we say that there are evil spirits motivating certain things happening in the world, we don’t just mean “people have some bad ideas.” In fact, we’re deliberately rejecting that interpretation, that it’s just a bunch of—

Fr. Andrew: It’s an actual interplay with other beings going on.

Fr. Stephen: Right, this is not just a bunch of individuals who just happen to have accepted bad ideas and agree with each other, and those ideas are making them do something horrible—because ideas can’t make you do anything. This is: there are actual spiritual forces that have agency that motivate these things, and one of the things that they use as like a lever, as an instrument, to move human persons is ideas. They bring those ideas to the fore. They tempt, they offer passions, they inflame passions. They do those things to get humans to use their agency in the world to do those things. But the ideas themselves can’t do that; they’re just ideas. And in fact those ideas would not even arise if it weren’t for those evil spiritual beings. The thought would not appear to a person to commit abominations and atrocities if it were not—

So, yeah, that’s a clarification. It’ll also relate to some of the stuff we’ll get into later this evening. So it was not totally just a random rabbit-trail and interjection. Just mostly.

This brings us— So we’ve talked about now in the Old Testament these sort of three levels of people being filled with the Holy Spirit, the sort of potentially permanent, the temporary, and then sort of Holy Spirit possession as this particular phenomenon. That, of course, changes in the New Testament specifically at Pentecost.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, man. Can we just jump right to the New Testament in the first half? Is that a thing?

Fr. Stephen: Well, we’re going to jump back to the Old Testament two more times.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, okay. [Laughter] Just not used to talking about the New Testament this early on in the show.

Fr. Stephen: So this is— We have departed from our usual structure—

Fr. Andrew: I know! We’re just throwing stuff left and right, here!

Fr. Stephen: Yes. Our usual structure is more like the synoptic gospels, where we start someplace and take you on a journey. This is a journey into sound… But tonight this more of a Johannine structure in that it’s kind of a spiral.

Fr. Andrew: Ah, the spiral. Yes, yes.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] It’s a series of cycles, moving ever forward. So, yes, we are now segueing into the New Testament—but don’t worry! We’ll be going back again.

Fr. Andrew: We’ll go back.

Fr. Stephen: But Pentecost, in order to correctly understand what’s going on at Pentecost, we not only have to have in mind what we just talked about, but also we need to talk about how Pentecost was spoken of prophetically in the Old Testament.

Fr. Andrew: Right, yes. So before we get to the New Testament, let’s stay in the Old Testament for just a second! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: We’re still in mid-segue!

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, exactly. So Joel 2: this is the classic bit, and we read this at Pentecost, verses 28-29.

And it shall come to pass afterward that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh. Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy; your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions. Even on the male and female servants in those days, I will pour out my Spirit.

And this is a difference from the way it works in the Old Testament, right?

Fr. Stephen: Right, and we actually read this twice at Pentecost, because we read from Joel at vespers the night before, and then this gets quoted in Acts, so we end up reading it again. [Laughter] But, yeah, this is that primary locus, and there’s a big shift here, because in all three of those levels of phenomena that we talked about, the one thing that was consistent was that we were always talking about individuals or small groups of individuals.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, just certain special people.

Fr. Stephen: But over against. And this is— Joel is already emphasizing this difference, that it’s all flesh, sons and daughters, young, old, and even on male and female servants—it’s actually slaves—but they’re saying everyone, everybody. And so you have these male, female; you have old, young; and then implied already is that, well, yeah, kings would have it, but also slaves, which would be at the other end of the sort of social hierarchy, the socio-political hierarchy.

Fr. Andrew: And this is not only different from the way that it functions prior to this in the Old Testament, it’s also going to be clearly different from the way that pagan religions understand enlightenment or interaction with the gods and so forth. It’s that suddenly now it’s available to every single person, and it’s not just this esoteric elite.

Fr. Stephen: Right, but also, a key difference all the way through—this is part of why we were harping so much on agency—is that in those other cultures, these “special people”—the kings, the heroes, the culture heroes, these people—had a divine identity. It was a question of identity, not of relationship.

Fr. Andrew: They were gods.

Fr. Stephen: That’s a fundamental difference. It’s a fundamental difference. So a person filled with the Holy Spirit is not, like, the neutral good version of a neutral evil giant. [Laughter] These are different, fundamentally different relationships with the spirits in question, because the person filled with the Holy Spirit, again, that is not just a possession of power that can be used how the person sees fit, and that does not identify all of their actions as divine actions. Quite the opposite: there is a heightened potential for judgment is what we see play out in the Old Testament, and even in the New Testament. I’m looking at you, Ananias and Sapphira. [Laughter] And so that’s a fundamental difference. It’s a fundamental difference, and that’s the difference between what happens with a nephilim and what happens with a saint who experiences theosis. Again, they’re not just flip-sides of the coin; they’re fundamentally different things.

We read from Joel because this is what gets quoted at Pentecost in the Acts of the Apostles, but this idea of the Spirit coming to dwell within everyone is fundamental to the—all of the passages that talk about the new covenant, like in Jeremiah 31 and in parts of Ezekiel. This is one of the marks of the new covenant being issued from the perspective of the prophets during and after the exile in particular, that when the new covenant comes, there’s going to be this shift, and the Holy Spirit is going to come to dwell in everyone.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s a sea change.

Fr. Stephen: And we see that take place on Pentecost with the apostles, with the people who hear the preaching of the apostles, on the day of Pentecost in Jerusalem. But then that plays out in a very particular way through the rest of the book of Acts in terms of people receiving the Holy Spirit. So there are exceptional instances, but the normal pattern—and you see this, for example, in Acts 8:17-19, in Acts 9:17, in 19:6—is that someone has been baptized and then the apostles—an apostle lays hands upon him.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and that gives that person the Holy Spirit. That’s the means through which that happens.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and then the Holy Spirit comes into the person, right after baptism, usually right after. Not in the case of the people who were baptized by St. John the Forerunner and didn’t know who Jesus was, but, for the most part—there’s a little more time lag for those folks. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: And it’s not an anointing at this point; it’s just hands: hands being put on people by the apostles.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And when you see an exception to that, that exception is there to make a point. For example, one of the exceptions in the book of Acts is Cornelius the centurion. Cornelius the centurion receives the Holy Spirit before he is baptized, and without the laying-on of hands. But why is that? Well, if you’re reading Acts, the whole build-up of that is God sending St. Peter to go see Cornelius, and St. Peter’s like: “Uh… the Gentile guy?”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so this is a sign for Peter.

Fr. Stephen: “Uh… the Roman soldier?” [Laughter] He has the whole vision with the animals and everything, and even when he gets there, he’s kind of tentative. And so everybody— When he sees that Cornelius and his household has received the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God has come to dwell in them, then he’s sort of like: “Pff. Well. For Pete’s sake!” [Laughter] Pun intended. [Laughter] “We need to go ahead and baptize you, because, clearly, this is the thing to do.” It removes all doubts for him. And then in Acts 15 he testifies to that, and he uses that in Acts 15, talking to the other apostles to say, “Hey, they received the Holy Spirit. If the Spirit of God comes to dwell in them, how could I not baptize them? So clearly God has chosen to do this among Gentiles as well.” So those are sort of exceptions that prove the rule or that point to the rule and help us understand the rule.

So the biggest question, I think, surrounding this is: Okay, we’ve talked about it like a theological level, we’ve talked about it on a huge scope level in terms of the cosmos, then on a smaller level with individual persons in the Old Testament, now we’re getting “well, this is potentially everyone who comes to Christ, who’s baptized, in the new covenant,” but what does this concretely do? A lot of the time, when that question is asked… And it’s not just asked historically. It’ll be asked about chrismation now.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. “Should I feel different? Should I expect something to happen?”

Fr. Stephen: “Will I feel the whammy?” [Laughter] “Is all of a sudden everything going to glow?” I mean, there certainly are people who, when they’re baptized, when they’re chrismated, have various kinds of spiritual experiences, and this isn’t to make fun of that.

Fr. Andrew: Right. It’s a thing.

Fr. Stephen: But that is not primarily what happens, meaning we don’t chrismate people to give them the experience of receiving the Holy Spirit.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, as an experience.

Fr. Stephen: Right. So that’s not the aim; that’s not the purpose. That’s something that sometimes accompanies it.

What are the things that this is actually doing, according to the Scriptures? Well, probably the first and most obvious is that the person begins to manifest the fruit of the Spirit.

Fr. Andrew: Love, joy, peace, etc.

Fr. Stephen: Patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

Fr. Andrew: There you go!

Fr. Stephen: I also know Sleepy, Happy, Grumpy, Sneezy, Dopey, Bashful, and Doc.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Wow! Dori, Nori, Ori… [Laughter] Some real dwarf names…

Fr. Stephen: And that’s sort of obvious: they’re called the fruit of the Spirit. That’s why they’re called the fruit of the Spirit.

Fr. Andrew: You’ll know them by their fruits. It’s funny. I think sometimes it’s so—I don’t know if “assumed” is the right word, but I’ve seen this sometimes, that if you say, “Well, is this person showing the fruit of the Spirit?” they’re like, “Well, that doesn’t matter. What matters is that they’re right about this,” or something like that. Well, the Scripture kind of says you’ll know them by their fruits, so it’s okay to look at the fruits.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. There’s an interesting— I won’t go too far down this rabbit-hole, but there’s an interesting moment that happens when you really get into the writings of St. Augustine, as we all do. [Laughter] But when he’s involved in the Donatist controversy and he actually goes and meets some Donatists, just individuals who are part of Donatist churches, I should say, these schismatic churches, and he sees this love between the members of these communities, even though they’re schismatic communities, and you can tell as he writes about it that it’s kind of thrown his whole ecclesiology up in the air.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, because he expected to see that they were just all wicked and stuff.

Fr. Stephen: Right! Because he’s saying, “How can these people, if they’re cut off from the Church—they’ve schismed from the Church; they’ve cut themselves off from the Church—how can they possibly be manifesting the fruit of the Spirit? How can the Holy Spirit possibly be acting within them collectively within a schismatic community?” And so it’s to— I’m not going further down this rabbit-hole, because I don’t want to get into all of St. Augustine’s early and late ecclesiology, because that’s off-topic, but it is interesting. So that he still had that understanding, that, of the fruit of the Spirit: when you see these, that means the Holy Spirit is there within a person and working within a community.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because there’s nothing good that doesn’t come from God. There’s no independent good. That’s the thing: there’s no independent good. I’ll just say— I know this is a bit of a rabbit-trail, but I think it’s worth pointing this out, because, especially those of us who have a cultural and theological inheritance from the Reformation, which probably everyone listening to this does on some level or another, whether they—

Fr. Stephen: Culturally at least.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, culturally, at least. There’s this emphasis, where they’ll take this “all your righteousness is as filthy rags” and this kind of thing, and they’ll basically say, “Well, someone might seem like they’re doing good things or whatever, but it’s actually just demonic garbage.” Like, well, no, it’s not. All good things come from God! [Laughter] All good things come from God.

Fr. Stephen: And—I’m going to wrap it around and make it not completely off-topic—one question I get when I’m talking to people who have been in other Christian communities, not the Orthodox Church, for a long period of time, and they’re coming into the Church and they’re going to be chrismated, and I say, “Well, this is chrismation to receive the Holy Spirit,” a very common question I get is: “So you’re saying I haven’t yet. So you’re saying I didn’t before, that the Holy Spirit has not been acting in my life until I get chrismated?” And the answer to that is, “No, that is not what we’re saying.”

Fr. Andrew: You wouldn’t even be here if the Holy Spirit had not been acting in your life.

Fr. Stephen: Right. That’s why I said it threw St. Augustine’s ecclesiology up in the air. He didn’t go and become a Donatist, and he still thought that Donatists were dead wrong and that the schism needed to end and that they needed to repent—at least their bishops did. But you can still acknowledge—and this isn’t just, “Oh, hey, there are good people”; that’s not what we’re talking about: they’re “good” or “nice” or something. The Holy Spirit is at work in the world all over the place. The most obvious example of this would be, from my perspective, obviously, as an Orthodox priest, I believe that the Holy Spirit brings people to the Orthodox Church. Well, when he brings them to the Orthodox Church, they’re outside the Orthodox Church. [Laughter] So if the Holy Spirit only worked within the Orthodox Church, no one would ever come from outside.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, we’d be one of those little sects where you have to be born into it.

Fr. Stephen: We’d be like the Protestant Reformed. Cheap Dutch shot, but they’re not listening to this anyway. [Laughter] So, yeah, it’s not completely off-topic. So that isn’t what we’re saying, but the fruits of the Spirit are the evidence of that. Why? Because those things aren’t a human working. Human love, like what we call love today, which is at best romantic love—I won’t go too far down the rabbit-trail either of love, but there— Historically, when people talk about love, there’s actually a Christian period. Love meant a certain thing in the pre-Christian world. Then there is Christian love, and then, once you get to the high Middle Ages, that starts giving way to romantic love.

Fr. Andrew: Where you get “Baby, Don’t Hurt Me.”

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] And then you get Freud. It becomes desire.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] That’s just the worst!

Fr. Stephen: It becomes desire, and now it’s not even that. Now it’s some kind of debased thing. So at best you get romantic love out of humans. But actual Christian love, the kind of peace that comes from Christ, not just, “Hey, that dude’s real mellow; he’s from California.” [Laughter] The fruits of the Spirit are God working; a human can’t really do those things. That’s God doing that, in and through a person, and that’s how we know the Holy Spirit is there.

And this is also over against—not to be mean, but I’ve got to point it out—our more Pentecostal friends, who see certain kinds of miraculous and quasi-miraculous manifestations as being evidence of the presence of the Holy Spirit. And I don’t think that’s biblical. I think biblically St. Paul tells us that the manifestations of the Holy Spirit are the fruit of the Spirit. And in fact he explicitly says, and he mentions some of those other things, that if he has those and he doesn’t have love, which is the first of the fruits of the Spirit, then it’s all worthless. I think that’s because, if he doesn’t have the fruit of the Spirit, then that shows that those other things are coming from a different spirit, not from the Holy Spirit. Rather than judging the presence of the Holy Spirit by those manifestations, I think biblically you would judge those manifestations by the presence of the Holy Spirit.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s a miracle, sure, but is there love and repentance and all that other stuff that we actually expect to see from the Holy Spirit?

Fr. Stephen: And the Scriptures are also really explicit that there are going to be lying signs and false miracles and all sorts of things.

So fruit of the Spirit is one big piece of this. There’s another, I think equally big, piece, tied directly to it by St. Paul, but that gets, because of the Protestant cultural influence you mentioned, I think, vastly underplayed, and that is that when you go back and read those new covenant passages in Joel and in Jeremiah and in Ezekiel, what you find is the other thing that the Holy Spirit is going to do is going to be to write the Torah on the hearts of those whom he indwells.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and the reason why that’s especially important is that Pentecost, as an Old Testament feast, because it was, is the feast of the giving of the Law.

Fr. Stephen: Right. That’s when the covenant was given at Mount Sinai. And so the new Pentecost in Acts is when the new covenant is given, and the new covenant isn’t “toss the Torah in the trash; we’ve got this new thing now—which is a little more ephemeral so you can get away with more.” This is the opposite. And that this is tied directly to the fruit of the Spirit is made clear. The way that’s usually interpreted is after the list it says, “against such things there is no law.” There is no commandment of the Torah against those things, meaning the reverse, that those things keep Torah, keep the Law, keep the commandments.

And so this is— If you read, this’ll strike you immediately, if you go—and don’t use the Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture for this, because everything’s chopped up. Grab St. John Chrysostom’s Homilies on Romans, some afternoon that you have to kill, and go through the passages where St. Paul is talking about the Torah, is talking about the Law and its relationship to the Spirit. And what you will find is that St. John Chrysostom says over and over and over again that the Holy Spirit empowers the Christian to keep the Law. The Holy Spirit empowers the Christian to keep Torah. That’s what he says.

Fr. Andrew: Well, that’s— Yes, pretty straightforward. I mean, there’s— I can’t remember, is it in Ephesians that Paul says that you’re saved for good works?

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: Meaning that the point of your— That salvation has an actual goal, and it’s not to be saved.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and it is impossible— And this is, in those new covenant passages, that’s the importance of this idea of the Torah being written on people’s hearts. The importance of it is, and the no man having to teach his brother, that in their position— Jeremiah, the exile’s happening. Everything is coming crashing down. The Temple’s on fire. Jerusalem is being sacked. People are being taken as slaves. As Ezekiel is writing, they’re in exile. They can look at their own history and say, “Hey, this whole ‘us trying to keep Torah’ thing didn’t work out so well.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Didn’t have what it takes.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Right? “We didn’t pull it off, and we’re not going to make an excuse and say: We couldn’t; what did you expect? We’re going to accept the consequences of our own actions, and we’re going to repent.” But the promises—the promise of the Spirit coming and indwelling in people—is that God is going to keep the Torah. He’s going to keep his commandments in and through us, because God can do it.

For folks out there who are really well-versed in Protestant Reformation theology, I know this undermines everything, but do the readings in the Scriptures on this, and look at what it says, and look at how the earliest Fathers read and understood it, which is just this way. That this isn’t a thing where Christ keeps the Law—keeps the Torah, keeps the Law, keeps the commandments—so we don’t have to. It’s the Spirit comes to dwell in us so that God keeps the commandments in and through us. And keeping those commandments doesn’t earn us eternal life; you can’t earn eternal life, not because we’re humans and we’re not powerful enough, not because there’s some standard and we can’t meet it. You can’t do it. It is not a possible thing.

Fr. Andrew: That’s not how it works.

Fr. Stephen: It’s like flying into space under your own power. You can’t do it.

Fr. Andrew: Keeping the Torah doesn’t give you eternal life. It never was designed for that.

Fr. Stephen: Right. That’s not what it does. There’s nowhere in the Scripture that says, “Hey, if you keep the whole Torah, you will have earned eternal life.” And to even think that way, you have to ignore the fact that there’s the whole sacrificial system and everything that’s in there for when you break commandments. So there’s actually a whole bunch of people, in Scripture, who the Scriptures say kept the Torah, the whole thing.

Fr. Andrew: It doesn’t mean they lived sinless lives.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, and one of them is St. Paul. St. Paul says that he himself, as a Pharisee, before becoming a Christian, was blameless in terms of the Torah. Kind of throws a monkey wrench into a bunch of things. [Laughter] But that was never what the Torah was for, was earning eternal life. It’s about, as we’ve talked about many times—you can go back to this episode, “Blessings and Curses” and that kind of thing.

Those are the two core things, and they’re not unrelated. The fruits of the Spirit are the manifestation of the presence of the Holy Spirit, and they are how the Holy Spirit empowers the Christian to keep the commandments of God, which include—one of the commandments, one of the primary commandments—it’s actually one of Luther’s 95 Theses, believe it or not—is that we’re commanded to repent! You can’t keep that commandment if you never sin. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Oh no! Torah paradox! [Laughter] That could be a t-shirt.

Fr. Stephen: Torah paradox. That could actually be the opening act for Theophanic Glory Cloud.

Fr. Andrew: That’s right! They’re the band that’s just started out a little bit, you know. They’re getting their feet wet. Yeah. All right, well, all that said, we’re going to go ahead and take a break, and we’ll be right back.

Fr. Andrew: You get your Christmas cards sent out yet, Fr. Stephen? I’m going to take that as a no. [Laughter] Anyway. Hey, Father, you there? Did we lose you? I think we must have! Oh, man! I can do this all by myself now! [Laughter]

All right, well, while we wait for Fr. Stephen to come back, I just wanted to make sure that everybody pays attention to the fact that we have a conference that we’re going to be doing next October 26-29, 2023, at the Antiochian Village. It is the Lord of Spirits Conference. He and I are both going to be speaking, and we’ve got our friends—and I don’t want to call them friends of the show, because that’s not always a positive thing—

Fr. Stephen: What!?

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] It’s true!

Fr. Stephen: I love Bart Ehrman with all my heart.

Fr. Andrew: Do you? Are you, like, actual buds?

Fr. Stephen: I wish.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, well, yeah. I don’t know.

Fr. Stephen: He doesn’t even know I exist.

Fr. Andrew: He may not. But, yeah, we’re going to have our friends, Fr. Lucas Christensen, Fr. David Subu; they’re going to be speaking, and possibly some more. It’s going to be a lot of fun. Go to store.ancientfaith.com/events, and you can sign up, and you can see us in person and discover that we are in fact, as we said on the very first episode, two separate persons.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. You will see us in the same room at the same time.

Fr. Andrew: That’s right, absolutely.

Fr. Stephen: I also, before we continue, want to do my own commercial. Are you ready?

Fr. Andrew: I’m ready.

Fr. Stephen: Okay. [Laughter] So. If you are a big fan of this program, and if you hear this live or in the next couple days, you need to go to Kickstarter. You need to search for “Historic Vampire Debate.”

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Okay?

Fr. Stephen: And there you will be hold a magnificent project, which you will want to back.

Fr. Andrew: Are you involved in this somehow?

Fr. Stephen: No, other than thinking it’s awesome.

Fr. Andrew: You’re just a fan. Oh, wow!

Fr. Stephen: And so, to those of you who might want me to do a commercial for your project, you can also go look—it has to be at least this cool for me to do it.

Fr. Andrew: Wow. Wow, I’m seeing it. Who knows what this is about? But anyway… [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Go check that out in the next couple of days. Be astonished.

Fr. Andrew: Man.

Fr. Stephen: But back to the topic at hand.

Fr. Andrew: And, hey, everybody, you can give us a call! 855-AFRADIO.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. Is it still “AFRAIDIO” now that we’re out of October?

Fr. Andrew: I don’t know. I mean, it’s always Halloween somewhere, right?

Fr. Stephen: Could we temporarily change the number to, like, HO-HO-HO-HODIO or something?

Fr. Andrew: Um… I’ll have to look into that.

Fr. Stephen: Okay. Well, you’re the guy who works for the company. You’re the company man. You need to…

Fr. Andrew: That’s true; I am. But I don’t… I’m not really— I don’t do the telephony.

Fr. Stephen: Well, send a memo. Send a memo around.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: “Did you get that memo?”

Fr. Andrew: Trudi, get right on that, please.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. The memo. Get on making the memo. Yeah. [Laughter]

So in this second half of the program, we’re going to—as we said, we have a sort of Johannine structure here—we’re going to circle back around. We talked in the first half about the indwelling, the filling of persons with the Holy Spirit, and so now we’re going to come at this from sort of the other angle and talk about anointing with oil

Fr. Andrew: Oh! Funny you should say that, but we actually just got a call from someone who— Yeah, they want to ask about anointing.

Fr. Stephen: Good timing!

Fr. Andrew: William from Tennessee, I think. William, are you there?

William: I am, Fathers. Can you hear me?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, we hear you. Welcome, William, to The Lord of Spirits podcast. What is on your mind?

William: My question is about the anointing oil used in the tabernacle. I was researching the Genesis creation accounts as a Temple construction narrative, and I read that there is a parallel between the seven days of creation and the seven speeches that God gives to Moses for the tabernacle, but the article didn’t go into detail about those parallels, and I was curious in particular about the connection between day four’s creation of the sun, moon, and stars in Genesis and speech four of the tabernacle, where God instructs Moses on anointing oil. So, one, is there a connection? And hopefully that’s a monosyllabic answer. [Laughter] And, two, what is it?

Fr. Andrew: I’m just going to punt that right over to you, Fr. Stephen.

Fr. Stephen: You’re just going to punt?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, absolutely. I have no idea. [Laughter] I’m okay with that. I don’t need—

Fr. Stephen: So the monosyllabic answer is yes.

Fr. Andrew: Yes.

Fr. Stephen: And the longer is: yeessss. [Laughter] No, so this is a connection between— So the fourth day of creation, we have to understand—and if you’re a Lord of Spirits listener, you probably already do—the sun, moon, and stars in terms of heavenly beings, angelic beings. And so this is referring to the coming into being of spirits. The oil, the idea of anointing, is connected— You will see some people who will try to make this argument, that there is some connection between the Greek word for olive oil—

Fr. Andrew: Oh, I know where you’re going with this one. [Laughter] I know this one!

Fr. Stephen: —and the Greek word for mercy. That is bogus. [Laughter] They’re taking a particular conjugation of mercy—a particular conjugation for have mercy, for the verb—and a particular declension of the noun for oil that kind of looks similar to an English reader. But the two roots of those two words have no connection, going back to Linear B. I verified this.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there’s no etymological connection between them. They just happen to sound similar, which is okay if you’re making puns. Like, that’s fine. It’s okay to do theological comments based on puns, but just don’t claim it for etymology.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, wordplay. Wordplay and stuff is fine. But there is a direct connection between oil and the concept of grace. One of the places where this connection is made explicit in the Orthodox Church is in the prayer that a priest prays when he puts on his stole or his epitrahelion, that talks about God’s grace upon the priest being like the oil that was used to anoint Aaron, the high priest. It makes that connection. And grace, in our understanding, is divine action. Grace for us is not like a created substance, as Orthodox Christians. It’s not just God’s mercy; it’s not just his favor, but it is God actually acting in the way that we’ve been describing, talking about the Holy Spirit. So you may see where this is going now.

Divine grace is really the acting of the Holy Spirit, and a connection is being made there with spiritual agency. So this has been a very long, circuitous road to get to the point of: when the objects are being anointed for the tabernacle, they are being removed from the world outside, where those objects even had spirits associated with them that were, because they’re in the fallen world, not good. And by being brought in, they are now having spirits associated with them, the spirits who serve in the heavenly tabernacle, the angelic hosts, who worship along with us and participate in worship, are being associated with them, and the marker of that new association is the anointing of the elements of the tabernacle. So that would be what I see is the connection between the two.

Fr. Andrew: Does that answer your question, William?

William: It does, yes. Thank you.

Fr. Andrew: Awesome. Well, thank you very much for calling. All right.

Fr. Stephen: So tell me the truth, halfway through that, did you have any idea where I was going?

Fr. Andrew: No. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Okay.

Fr. Andrew: This is all new to me. I may need you to repeat it to me later, actually.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] I think we recorded it, so…

Fr. Andrew: We did record it! Hey, that’s cool.

Fr. Stephen: That’ll make it easier.

Fr. Andrew: I could go back and listen to podcasts. Who listens to podcasts?

Fr. Stephen: I don’t listen to my own. I do occasionally listen to other people’s. But only those programs—

Fr. Andrew: I used to listen to my own to kind of go back and, you know, critique what I was doing, but now it’s just too much, and I’ve got to listen to other stuff. Yeah. The Shatner rule, right? He never watches any of his own stuff.

Fr. Stephen: No. He’s never watched a single episode of Star Trek. The only movie he watched is V, and he had to watch, because he directed it.

Fr. Andrew: Oh!

Fr. Stephen: He might have wanted to watch it a little closer.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Whoa! What does God need with a starship?

Fr. Stephen: You’ve got to be honest. No one’s perfect, even Shatner.

Fr. Andrew: I have a warm, weird spot in my heart for Star Trek V. I don’t know. I’m not saying it’s good—

Fr. Stephen: It’s not good.

Fr. Andrew: —but there’s something in me that kind of likes it.

Fr. Stephen: Well, part of it, too, is that there’s been worse since…

Fr. Andrew: That’s true. That’s true. And then we’ve got Star Trek VI, which is the greatest of them all, in my opinion.

Fr. Stephen: It’s like the Star Wars prequels were terrible; then they came out with that sequel trilogy, and it’s kind of like, enh… I can put my thumb in front of Jar-Jar, you know?

Fr. Andrew: It’s true. [Laughter] Well, we’re going to lose a few more listeners if we keep going on about Star Trek and Star Wars for too long. But that’s okay.

Fr. Stephen: Or gain some.

Fr. Andrew: We’ll gain some new ones, yeah, that’s true. Right.

Fr. Stephen: So, yeah, as I was saying, we’re going to— In this second half, we’re going to come back at this from the perspective of anointing, the anointing of people in this half. And then once we complete this circle, we’ll see how those connect with the circle we made last half.

When you think about anointed ones, when you hear the word “anointed one,” most folks, at least from a Christian background, immediately think: Oh, okay, anointed One. Messiah. Mashiach in Hebrew. Christos in Greek. The anointed One. The Messiah, this sort of singular figure. But, in the Old Testament, there are actually a number of different figures who are anointed. The king is anointed when he’s made king. So this happens to Saul, happens to David, happens to Samuel. The prophet comes and anoints the king. As we mentioned when we were talking about this, after the— Historically, after the Western Roman Empire collapsed, in western Europe, the only thing really providing any kind of overarching social order was the Western Church. As the Western Church and a beleaguered populace is trying to figure out how to create new social structures with the various tribes of our barbarian ancestors, they took some socio-political cues from the Old Testament. You pretty quickly have the anointing of kings. Some of these tribal chiefs and leaders are made kings by anointing by a bishop, by the bishop of Rome, sort of as the way of “well, we’ll default to the Bible in terms of forms of government here.” But that brings with it that anointed status, that anointing ritual.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. I think in just a few months here, we’ll get to see Charles, King of England, anointed. This is still a thing.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. He was already— not quite an anointing, but there was that fellow who threw eggs at him. Did you hear about that?

Fr. Andrew: No, but what spirit did that grant him? I’m not sure.

Fr. Stephen: So he’s throwing eggs at him—and this is absolutely true—he was sentenced with a ban from the possession of eggs in a public place.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Wow.

Fr. Stephen: Which is just the most British thing. “You, sir, may now never possess eggs in a public place.”

Fr. Andrew: I mean, that really feels like it’s a Python sketch.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yeah, but it is absolutely true. He cannot be trusted with eggs.

Fr. Andrew: Wow. Well, he had his chance.

Fr. Stephen: Well, so that is not an anointing.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] No!

Fr. Stephen: But that’s where it comes from in terms of European kingship. So, in a sense, every king was an anointed one. That’s probably pretty familiar in thinking, again, to most people from a Christian background, because the Messiah is, of course— We’re familiar of thinking the Messiah is going to be the King, the King of Israel, the Davidic King in particular.

But priests were also anointed, as part of the ordination rite. Priests and the high priest at any given time were anointed. In our next episode, two weeks from today, shortly before Christmas, we’re going to be talking about ordination and holy orders and that kind of thing. And so we’ll talk more about that there, but for now, priests are also anointed, and prophets were also anointed in some cases, particularly when we see sort of prophetic succession in the Old Testament, when we see there are communities of prophets or we see one prophet sort of initiate or hand over the prophetic ministry to another prophet. That’s often explicitly accompanied by anointing.

Even though we’re not necessarily as Christians used to thinking about it this way, in Second Temple Judaism, for example, in the Second Temple Period, there is an idea of messiahs, that there are different ways in which the coming Messiah, the coming Anointed One, is thought of. So the one we’re used to is one of those. The one we’re used to is: This is the Messiah, the Son of David, the King descended from David, as God had promised to David. That’s slightly different in Chronicles and in 1 Samuel (or 1 Kingdoms), but the promise was either a child of yours—a son of yours will always reign on your throne, or a son of yours will always reign on my throne—“my” being God’s throne.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, and this is definitely a ¿Por qué no los dos?

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Right! And David, then, was both a model of the kind of person or the kind of king that the Messiah would be—David was presented as the ideal king, especially in 1 and 2 Chronicles, which doesn’t talk about the whole Bathsheba thing—but it’s also then the sort of fulfillment of the Davidic monarchy, of that institution or that continuity leading from David himself. Yeah, again, we’re all used to that. Christ is born in Bethlehem, royal David’s city, all that.

But what’s less well-known to us today, probably, is that there are also a lot of Second Temple texts that talk about a messiah who is a priestly messiah. So a messiah who’s a son of Levi rather than a son of David, a Levitical messiah. One of those, sort of Exhibit A of this tradition, is a text called the Testament of Levi.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, so what’s that? Probably most people have not read that one.

Fr. Stephen: Right. Well, it’s part of the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs. So “Testament” in this case isn’t like the Old Testament or the New Testament. “Testament” is a genre of Second Temple Jewish literature, and it’s based around Genesis 48 and 49, where Jacob, Israel the person, is on his deathbed, and he sort of gives these prophetic words to each of his sons. That becomes a genre in the Second Temple period, where all of these figures—there’s a Testament of Adam, there’s a Testament of Abraham, there’s a Testament of Isaac: everybody gets testaments. So there’s a collection called the Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs, and those are Joseph and his brothers. Each of them has a testament; each of them has sort of a subdocument that’s part of this larger text, but it seems pretty clear that the individual testaments that are now in the Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs also circulated separately, because we’ve found individual ones in different places.

The Testament of Levi in particular— Levi, of course, is one of those twelve brothers; he’s the one from whom the Levites descend, who are going to be priests. And so these are always written as if— So it’s written as— The frame is: this is Levi giving his parting words to his son, but of course it’s portrayed as prophetic; it’s portrayed as Levi is prophesying these things in advance, but of course this is being written post-exile and return! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Long, long after, so it’s a literary thing.

Fr. Stephen: Right, right, and so it includes things that happened in the intervening time and then things that are still future.

Fr. Andrew: Still to happen, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: From the time it was written. We found the Testament of Levi on Mount Athos, where all twelve Testaments are preserved. We also found it in the Dead Sea Scrolls, so this pre-Christian, Jewish, kind of schismatic community also had copies of the Testament of Levi. So, pretty widespread thing, and something that’s been preserved by Christians.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, good providence!

Fr. Stephen: And we also have a lot of— Because of that providence, we can compare. If anything’s a kind of later change or addition, we can kind of figure it out. As one might expect, in the Testament of Levi, it’s talking about the priesthood and how the priesthood was going to not go so well over the course of the history of Israel and Judah. But it then prophesies a restoration of the priesthood and the Temple. And this is going to come— Now, at this point that it’s being written, the Second Temple was there—we’ll talk about that a little bit more in the third half—so this isn’t restoration as in rebuilding, but there’s going to be a restoration of the priesthood and the Temple.

It has, in the Testament of Levi—and this is reflected in several other of the Testaments of the Patriarchs, too—there are two different messianic figures. There is a messiah, a messianic king, who’s descended from Judah; and there’s a Levitical messiah, a priestly messiah, who is descended from Levi. From the perspective of the Testament of Levi, the Levitical, the priestly messiah, is the more important one.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right. Well, of course!

Fr. Stephen: So at one point it presents the priestly messiah as being like the sun, and the kingly messiah as being like the moon, to give you an idea. So both very important, but one more than the other.

So this idea that there are these two messiahs with two different characters actually gets reflected in a couple different places in the New Testament. A good example of that is there’s this episode where, after St. John the Forerunner has been imprisoned by Herod, he sends messengers to Jesus, who ask him, “Are you the one, or should we expect another?” And a lot of times people read that as… Well, St. John, at the beginning of all four gospels makes this really strong testimony that Jesus is the Messiah, and so it’s often read as if he was doubting himself now that he was in prison. But that’s because people don’t understand that this tradition was out there. What St. John was really asking was: Is there a second messiah coming? He was not taking back his identification of Jesus as the messiah; he was asking for a clarification. “Are you one of two messiahs? How is this going to work, now that you are the messiah and you have come?” Because that was not immediately obvious; there were different traditions at that time, this being one of them.

And then we’re probably at least generally familiar with the idea that—that’s king and priest—the idea with prophet, that there was this strong tradition of Elijah returning, and that that was directly related to the coming of the Messiah. Again, this would be in at least— This would mean at least two kind of messianic figures, one of whom was Elijah, one of whom was a prophet. So we see this reflected in the New Testament when Christ asks his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?” And one of the immediate answers is: “Some say Elijah!”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, “Some say you’re Elijah.”

Fr. Stephen: And also the questions regarding the identity of St. John the Forerunner. “It is said Elijah will come.” Christ says, “Elijah is already come,” and points to St. John the Forerunner. So there are potentially up to three messiahs?

There is also a fourth messianic figure who kind of emerges in Judaism—this is my take on this. So the reason I’m couching this as my take is I think I can defend my take on this, but I’m not going to take all the time now it would take to defend my take on this.

Fr. Andrew: Okay. Future blog post.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, listeners: Citations needed. [Laughter] So I’m not fully going to go into this, but for the sake of covering the ground, we need to mention it. So there is another messianic figure that goes very far back in rabbinic Judaism, and I think actually emerges in the Second Temple period, although this messianic figure becomes more clearly defined as you move forward in time, within Jewish communities. And this is not a thing that you see in Christian communities, and that’s part of the reason for my take. This is sometimes called the Messiah ben Ephraim, meaning the messiah who’s the son of Ephraim, as opposed to the son of Levi or the son of David. And so this is a figure… To understand this figure, you have to understand the tradition—and I know we’ve talked about this on the show, and I’ve talked about it other places— There is this prophecy—not just a prophecy; it’s a theme in several of the prophets, in the Hebrew Bible or the Old Testament—in which Ephraim, meaning Israel, the northern kingdom—

Fr. Andrew: The northern tribes.

Fr. Stephen: —the ten tribes—are going to be reconstituted; that when God finally delivers Israel, when the Messiah comes, new covenant, when all this goes down, all of Israel will be regathered, meaning all twelve tribes, because Judah or Judea is like two and a half. So the rest of these tribes will be regathered. That is, like, materially impossible if you’re thinking of this in an ethnic sense.

Fr. Andrew: “What could that mean?”

Fr. Andrew: Because those tribes get resettled by the Assyrians, they intermarry over the course of a few generations: they disappear as distinct entities. And so there comes to be a very strong tradition in Second Temple Judaism that the way this is going to happen is through the Gentiles coming into some kind of covenant relationship with the Judeans, with the Jewish people, that will cause them to take the place of those lost tribes and be part of the reconstitution of Israel.

One of the other testaments in the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, the Testament of Naphtali—everybody’s favorite tribe, because nobody can remember who or what it is—but the Testament of Naphtali, which was one of the lost tribes—that’s why it comes up here—in I believe it’s chapter five, verse eight, but I might be reversing that and it might be [chapter] eight, verse five, just explicitly says that the Assyrians, the Babylonians, a whole list of foreign nations, will receive a part in Israel, through the exile of the northern kingdom, or through the captivity of the northern kingdom. So there’s this tradition.

And so there comes to be, the later you go—and the first place I know of where you see this clearly is in 2 Enoch—which is sometimes called Slavonic Enoch, because we have it preserved for us in Slavonic—that clearly seems to describe this figure: a messianic figure, a messiah figure, who is going to bring about this reconstitution, meaning who is going to bring these Gentiles in, to sort of reconstitute those tribes. And so 2 Enoch is written probably between 70 and 80 AD, somewhere in there, so first century AD, so Christians are around.

Fr. Stephen: But not in Slavonic, obviously.

Fr. Andrew: No, not in Slavonic.

Fr. Stephen: Wanted to get that point.

Fr. Stephen: It’s preserved in Slavonic.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, we don’t have the, what, probably Greek original.

Fr. Stephen: Ah, we actually think it’s Aramaic.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, okay.

Fr. Stephen: Because there are some Aramaic words that are transliterated.

Fr. Andrew: Oh!

Fr. Stephen: But it’s written in the first century AD, so it’s written while there are Christians around. And the albeit general description of this messianic figure, who’s not referred to as the son of Ephraim here in 2 Enoch, but is referred to as just “the man”—“the man who comes”—sounds a whole lot like Jesus in terms of being rejected by his own people, going out to the Gentiles, bringing them to worship the God of Israel.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, but the text is probably not written by Christians, right?

Fr. Stephen: It is not written by Christians.

Fr. Andrew: Not written by Christians, so these are non-Christian Jews who have an opinion about Jesus having some…

Fr. Stephen: Right. That’s my take on it, and so—

Fr. Andrew: Maybe having some kind of messianic role.

Fr. Stephen: Right. So there is— And my take— Like I said, if I was going to take another three, four hours, I could lay this all out. [Laughter] But my take is that that tradition emerges within Judaism as a tradition of non-Christian Jewish people who are looking at Jesus and at Christianity and at Gentile Christians and, even from the point of 2 Enoch, seeing this as, number one, beneficial to the Jewish people—because it decreases the hostility of those Gentiles toward Jewish people—as turning them from idolatry, as turning them from sexual immorality. So they’re seeing these positive things from their Jewish perspective.

Fr. Andrew: These are all net goods. How could you object to that?

Fr. Stephen: Right, right. So: See these good things! It’s like St. Augustine, seeing the fruit of the Spirit in the Donatists. [Laughter] They’re looking at it. They’re not ready to accept Jesus as the Messiah, but they’re seeing these things happen with the Gentiles.

Fr. Andrew: “Maybe he’s their messiah.”

Fr. Stephen: I think that’s what the tradition is. “Maybe he’s the Gentile messiah, and our messiah is still coming.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, interesting.

Fr. Stephen: So that is a real thing, and I have talked to an Orthodox Jewish friend, who has told me that that is still a live concern within Judaism. That’s not just an early tradition from before Judaism and Christianity completely separated; through history, that has been an element of Jewish tradition, and a perspective.

Fr. Andrew: What do you do with Jesus? Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: But, back to our main thrust here, what connects sort of the idea of the kingly messiah, the idea of the priestly messiah, the idea of the prophetic messiah is the idea of restoration. So the Davidic messiah is the one who is going to return the kingdom to Israel, who’s going to restore the Davidic monarchy, who’s going to restore sort of socio-political Judea, Judah, Israel. The way, for example, the Testament of Levi sees the priestly messiah: the priestly messiah’s going to come and restore the priesthood, reconsecrate the Temple, restore the priesthood to what it should have been. And Elijah is going to come to restore prophecy.

Each of these messiahs, however these different messiahs are conceived, they’re coming to restore the job or the task or the purpose of that office, but also, then, through exercising it, there is going to be this transformation of the world. Through the messiah being the king, that’s going to bring about this transformation of the social order and the spiritual order. Through the messiah being the priest, this is going to transform worship in a positive direction, connected to that restoration. So it’s not just about restoring institutions, but it’s restoring institutions, and then, through those restored institutions, transforming the world, bringing about a new messianic age.

Fr. Andrew: It’s the same dynamic, then, as being saved for good works, or not saved to be saved.

Fr. Stephen: Right.

Fr. Andrew: We’re saved to be effective.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And, yeah, folks who have managed to stay awake for the whole episode so far—hopefully all of you who are driving—are probably seeing connections here in terms of what we were talking about with the Holy Spirit filling people, and now what we’re talking about with the idea of being anointed, being the anointed one. Those two are not something that gets put together in later Christian theology. The idea of being filled with the Spirit or the Spirit coming to abide in someone and being anointed is there right from the beginning. Exhibit A, you can look at 1 Samuel (or 1 Kingdoms) 16:13. Samuel anoints David; he’s filled with the Holy Spirit.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, these things just go together and they always did.

Fr. Stephen: So this isn’t just sort of an “oh, these things are sort of similar”; these things are connected. And they’re so connected that when we get to the New Testament—so, for example, in St. John’s gospel, in John 1:32-34—the sign that’s given to St. John the Forerunner to identify Jesus as the Messiah, as the Christ, is that the Holy Spirit comes and rests upon him and abides on him. St. John has been told: “The One whom you see that happen—that’s him.” So the Holy Spirit is this messianic marker.

And so that connection isn’t just a connection for these Old Testament figures who are anointed, which is, again, some certain individuals for particular tasks—and it’s not just Christ who is the Anointed One, the Christ, the Messiah par excellence who does all this—this is part of why Hebrews spends so much time pointing out that Christ is both King and High Priest, by the way, and the One who restores the priesthood and restores worship—but, in the same way as what we talked about in the first half with the Holy Spirit, now all Christians are anointed, not just literally with chrism after their baptism, but—that’s what “Christian” means.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right: an anointed person! It’s interesting, you know, in certain sectors of, I don’t know, especially Pentecostalism, anointing becomes largely a metaphorical term. Like, “he’s got an anointing to preach”: this idea that anointing has something to do with a particular function is good, right, but—

Fr. Stephen: Being empowered by the Holy Spirit for some function, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it becomes: “Well, this person has an ability to do this thing, so that means they have an anointing from God.” It’s like: “Well, did they get anointed?” It’s just pointed as being a kind of spiritual experience rather than any oil actually being transferred onto the person.

Fr. Stephen: Right, where it’s disassociated from the material and the community. So David wasn’t just— didn’t receive a kingly anointing in a spiritual sense, but an actual prophet walked up with oil and anointed him.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, put oil actually on him.

Fr. Stephen: So these things are connected. Yeah, I think that’s… I’m trying to be winsome and irenic.

Fr. Andrew: You are so winsome, though!

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] I think this is a difficulty not confined to our charismatic friends, but I think this is an across-the-board issue in a lot of—not all, but a lot of—I mean, this gets back to something we were talking about in the last episode about the Eucharist— Part of the reason why it’s so hard to number the sacraments and decide what is and isn’t a sacrament or what is and isn’t a mystery in the Orthodox Church is that, fundamentally for us, when we’re talking about sacraments or mysteries, we’re talking about God acting through—because that’s what grace is—and within and permeating and transforming the material. And that’s something God does throughout the world all the time, so it’s not that it’s hard for us to identify things as sacraments; it’s hard for us to identify things as not sacraments. [Laughter] Other than sin. Sin is very clearly not a sacrament.

Fr. Andrew: It’s just like—and I know I’ve mentioned this before on the show, in one of his homilies, St. Nikolai Velimirovic says, “What is a miracle? A miracle is just a gift of God at which men marvel.” But everything— Everything is a gift from God. Everything therefore that comes from God is a miracle, but we just use that word to describe certain miracles.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And so there’s not that firm distinction. So again, other than sin—sin can never be a sacrament, contra certain Jesuit universities. But, yeah, almost everything else is. Whereas in a lot of, but not all, Protestantism, when these terms are used, they’re used in ways that do the exact opposite. They’re used in ways that separate the spiritual from the material rather than seeing them as united. So before a baptism, baptismal regeneration needs to be firmly denied, that this is doing anything. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I remember in my Evangelical upbringing, before almost every baptism I witnessed, there would be a little sermon about how baptism doesn’t actually do anything. Almost every time.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yeah, so they’re divided. So it’s not just the concept of anointing without there being someone there, actually anointing someone, but it’s across the board with a lot of these things.

Fr. Andrew: [Baptism] obviously.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so that is a reaction to—and we talked about this a little bit last time—a woodenly literal identification of those things. On one hand, you have someone who says—we know whom I’m talking about—if someone hasn’t been baptized and they die, even an infant, that they go to hell for eternity. So it’s the actual sacrament. That’s it. If you’ve had it, you’re good; if you haven’t, [Tongue click] that’s it. The sort of terror that strikes into people, for obvious reasons, to the point where you’ve got folks trying to do baptisms on miscarried children—

Fr. Andrew: Oh, man.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. So you’ve got that. So you can understand reacting against that.

Fr. Andrew: Right, right.

Fr. Stephen: And saying, “Look, God’s not legalistic like that! God’s not bound by that.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that’s the “magical…” That’s magic. You have to have the perfect formula and technique.

Fr. Stephen: And, to be fair to them, the folks who take that view strongly would say, “Well, God has bound himself to that, by choice, voluntarily.” So we’ve got to be fair, but you see reacting to that, strongly, and saying, “No, God’s not bound by that. God’s not restricted by that. God’s love is bigger than that”—that doesn’t work. But then you move too far in the other direction, of “Well, don’t even worry about that.” [Laughter] Like that’s sort of generally unimportant.

Fr. Andrew: Ethereal. Yeah. I recall—correct me if I get this wrong, but I recall reading one time a critique of an ecclesiology that starts with the Holy Spirit as being an ecclesiology that is excarnated, because it doesn’t— it’s not an ecclesiology that involves the material world, which because of Christ’s incarnation is material; that the self-anointed prophet, the self-ordained bishop or whatever, someone who doesn’t actually have to have a connection to anybody else, is this kind of pneumatological ecclesiology. This reaction is extremely in the other direction, like you were saying.

Fr. Stephen: Right, or, you know, you have an “invisible church” that has literally nothing to do with the visible Church.

Fr. Andrew: Right!

Fr. Stephen: They’re literally two different things. And nobody has the power to excommunicate someone from the invisible church.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and this is what—

Fr. Stephen: So there’s no discipline; no Church discipline.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly. In the Reformation, you get a lot of anti-bishop stuff, and, weirdly, that pops up every so often. Anti-bishop stuff: it’s really pretty convenient not to actually be accountable to anybody.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. So that, I think, is a general trend. Like I said, that’s not every Protestant person, that’s not every Protestant group, but it’s a lot, especially in America. A lot of especially American Evangelicalism in that category of being very— There’s a big disconnect between the spiritual and the material in that regard, rather than them being brought together. So that’s the primary thing we’re actually saying in chrismation when we say you’re anointed to receive the Holy Spirit, is that we’re bringing those two things together at a point in time.

And so Christ goes beyond, fulfills, fills full—he doesn’t just restore the monarchy; he doesn’t just restore the kingdom; he doesn’t just restore the priesthood; he doesn’t just restore the Temple and worship; he doesn’t just restore prophecy—Christ restores humanity, through the Incarnation. And so Christians, as anointed ones, are, in being baptized and chrismated—become part of this new, restored and transformed humanity in Christ that he brought about with his Incarnation, first and foremost. But so this is what—I’m sure I’ve said it on this show; I forget where I say things, and there’s things I say all the time, but I’m sure I’ve said it at some point on the show—that the idea of justification originally, like in St. Paul, has nothing to do with courts; it’s much more like justification in a word processor.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, line it up.

Fr. Stephen: Left-justified, lined up on the left; right-justified, lined up on the right; full-justified, lined up on both sides. Put back in order; justice restored, that order restored. And so when humanity is restored, we are put back in order, as a person, as a created being. And then, once put back in order—and repentance is the ongoing nature of this—we also receive a calling, and we can also, then, be correctly described as “the elect, the chosen,” the way the New Testament actually uses those terms—sorry, Calvinists—because the concept of being called and being chosen in the Scriptures is always transitive, meaning “called” is not a status; “chosen” is not a status. It’s not like USDA choice meat: “You’re the best; you’re the one God loves the most.” It’s always transitive. You’re always called to something, called to do something, called to be something, chosen for something.

It’s true across the board. Israel, God’s chosen people: that doesn’t mean they were the ones he loved the most in the Old Testament. They were chosen for a purpose: to be a light to the nations, to the other nations, the 70 nations; to be the nation through which he would bring forth the Messiah. So they were chosen—Israel was chosen for purposes, for particular purposes. For things. And the same is true for us. If you are a Christian, if you are an anointed one, that means God is putting you back in order, and he has called you and chosen you for particular things. And in St. John’s gospel, lo and behold, Christ says to his disciples that they had been chosen to bear much fruit. We’re right back where we ended the first half.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly. All right. We’re going to take another little break, and we’ll be back with the third half!

Fr. Andrew: Thanks, Voice of Steve! We’re back now with the third half. It’s always weird to me to hear those promos with my own voice on them.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, I wish you’d brought me in on that one.

Fr. Andrew: Oh. Really?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, because first of all, background music, I know we’ve got to keep it public domain, right, but—okay, a beat, but you can’t dance to it, though. It needs a little more bass; too much treble.

Fr. Andrew: This could be exciting, yeah. Well, we could, you know…

Fr. Stephen: And second, most importantly, if I had been there so there were two of us, you could’ve tweaked the ending a little and done the “Thank you for your support” a la Bartles & Jaymes.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, that’s true.

Fr. Stephen: Which would have really sold it right there.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] That’s true. Man, that brings me back! Wow. “Thank you for your support!”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And I admit, though Die Hard is a great Christmas movie, I admit that I preferred those Bartles & Jaymes commercials to Bruce Willis singing about Seagram’s golden wine cooler. [Laughter] I have to say.

Fr. Andrew: Up until this moment, I had never considered comparing those two things.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And I don’t know to this day which one was Bartles and which one was Jaymes.

Fr. Andrew: That’s a good question. I don’t know that either.

Fr. Stephen: And if they were the actual people, or actors playing Bartles and Jaymes.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I know. Look up! Write in! I’ll read all your emails.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, yes. Someone listening right now who’s not driving, go ye to Wikipedia and find these answers.

Fr. Andrew: Yes. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: You’ve been called to a very pointless purpose.

Fr. Andrew: Is there even a Bartles and Jaymes?

Fr. Stephen: Well, there must have been a Bartles and Jaymes at some point.

Fr. Andrew: I don’t know. It could just be names that they pulled out…

Fr. Stephen: It could be, or it could be some kind of 18th-century raconteurs or something that started a company and then…

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] All right! Let’s talk about the tabernacle. What do you think?

Fr. Stephen: Okay. Yeah, so in this third half, we’re going to be moving to the other element, which, thanks to our caller in the second half, which was William, I believe… right?

Fr. Andrew: Yes, William of Tennessee.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. William of Tennessee, like it’s his official title.

Fr. Andrew: Not to be confused with Tennessee Williams. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Are you preparing him for sainthood? St. William of Tennessee?

Fr. Andrew: If we really did have Tennessee Williams, though, that would be amazing.

Fr. Stephen: That would be amazing.

Fr. Andrew: We’d have to make him just sing into the phone.

Fr. Stephen: Or Jack Daniels from Tennessee. We’re just talking about liquor in this half, I guess. [Laughter] We already got into this a little, talking about the anointing of the elements of the tabernacle, but, within the dedication of the tabernacle and the dedication of the Temple, we see some of the same things in terms of anointing and, we’re going to see, in terms of filling with the Holy Spirit—the presence of God, the Spirit of God—that we saw with people in the first two halves. And so here’s cycle three; hopefully we’ll connect this third spiral to the other two.

Fr. Andrew: By the way, I just had to say, I couldn’t help myself. I looked it up. Bartles and Jaymes are just fictional characters!

Fr. Stephen: What!?

Fr. Andrew: They’re not even real. Yeah. They’re based on Ernest and Julio Gallo, but they’re fictional characters.

Fr. Stephen: 99% of my life I was lied to.

Fr. Andrew: I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.

Fr. Stephen: I’ll recover.

Fr. Andrew: I didn’t mean to demoralize you here at the end of the show! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: I’ll soldier on through this final half. So the first one of these, obviously, as we already talked about a little, is the tabernacle, which gets dedicated in Leviticus 8-9, after the construction is finished, from which we have a couple of excerpts. We’re not going to read you the whole of both chapters, because they’re very involved. If you want to go read them, great stuff about waving parts of animals in the air and all kinds of cool stuff.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah!

Fr. Stephen: But we’ll keep it short and to the point now.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Okay. Yeah, so Leviticus 8:10-11:

Then Moses took the anointing oil and anointed the tabernacle and all that was in it and consecrated them. And he sprinkled some of it on the altar seven times and anointed the altar and all its utensils and the basin and its stand to consecrate them.

Okay now, skipping ahead to chapter nine, verses 22-24:

Then Aaron lifted up his hands toward the people and blessed them, and he came down from offering the sin-offering and the burnt-offering and the peace-offerings. And Moses and Aaron went into the tent of meeting, and when they came out they blessed the people, and the glory of the Lord appeared to all the people, and fire came out from before the Lord and consumed the burnt-offering and the pieces of fat on the altar. And when all the people saw it, they shouted and fell on their faces.

That’s what I’d do if I saw that! [Laughter] In response.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah! In the next chapter, fire again comes out before the Lord, and gets Nadab and Abihu, Aaron’s two sons from here.

But so you see this same kind of pattern. There is this dedication, which includes anointing—it includes other things, too, but so does our baptismal service—and then that is followed by being filled with the presence of God, with the Holy Spirit manifesting himself in this visible and glorious way, the theophanic glory cloud. And so the Holy Spirit is present in the tabernacle. We see this at several points through the rest of the Torah: the cloud, how Moses would go into the tent of meeting to meet with the Lord, and the cloud would descend, and no one could enter.

And so, when the time comes to dedicate the Temple, there are a number of differences between the building of the tabernacle and the building of the Temple. The biggest and most obvious one is that, as we already mentioned in Exodus, you get laid out twice in quick succession all the detailed measurements of everything, what the tent curtains are supposed to be made out of, what’s supposed to be on them, the recipe for the incense—everything in all of this detail. And then in the Temple, you get kind of nothing. There’s no detailed instructions, or non-detailed instructions, or any of that. It’s sort of David gets all the stuff and has a plan, isn’t allowed to execute the plan. Solomon, we think, executed the plan according to what David did? It’s kind of iffy, when you compare Chronicles and 1 Kings (or 3 Kingdoms).

But, all that aside— Well, and I’ll add, when Solomon goes and prays his prayer of dedication, there’s a certain discontinuity between his prayer and Yahweh the God of Israel’s response. [Laughter] So Solomon’s prayer is stuff like: “Grant all the requests of those who pray toward this building,” which reflects one view of what a temple is. And we talked about this when we talked about the view in the ancient world, that the temple itself was the body of a god. And then when God responds, he basically says, “Well, look, I don’t live in a building made by human hands, and I’m not contained by this, and you can’t use this to control me.” [Laughter] He makes that all very explicit, and then says, “But—” And then God sort of condescends to come and be present in the Temple, once he’s made those important clarifications.

We see going forward, especially in the book of Jeremiah, that those clarifications did not necessarily sink into all the people and their descendants. But, nonetheless, God does consent to come and be present in the Temple for worship in Jerusalem. And you can read the dedication in 1 Kings (or 3 Kingdoms) 8, in 2 Chronicles 7; it talks about this same kind of glorious theophanic glory cloud manifestation, as the Holy Spirit, the presence of God, comes and fills the Temple. And so this is this very powerful—we know: look, it happened.

And Ezekiel, of course, from exile in Babylon—he was deported early; there were several deportations to Babylon from Judah—he in his visions sees Yahweh the God of Israel leaving the Temple before it gets destroyed, departing. But so then an interesting thing happens, because 70 years after the first Temple is destroyed, the people of Judah are allowed to go back, and they end up founding what becomes the Persian province and then the Greek province and then the Roman province of Judea, briefly the independent kingdom of Judea. And of course they rebuild the Temple and rededicate it. But when they do that in Ezra, there’s something that’s notably absent from the description when you compare these descriptions to each other.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so in Ezra 3:10-13, we read this:

And when the builders laid the foundation of the temple of the Lord, the priests in their vestments came forward with trumpets, and the Levites, the sons of Asaph, with cymbals to praise the Lord, according to the directions of David, king of Israel. And they say responsively, praising and giving thanks to the Lord, for he is good; for his steadfast love endures forever toward Israel. And all the people shouted with a great shout when they praised the Lord, because the foundation of the house of the Lord was laid. But many of the priests and Levites and heads of fathers’ houses, old men who had seen the first house, wept with a loud voice when they saw the foundation of this house being laid, though many shouted aloud for joy, so that the people could not distinguish the sound of the joyful shout from the sound of the people’s weeping. For the people shouted with a great shout, and the sound was heard far away.

Fr. Stephen: So there’s joy, there’s sorrow over the loss of the first Temple, there’s worship… but at least no visible sign of anything happening.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, unlike last time.

Fr. Stephen: Right. Nobody falling on their face, nobody unable to enter because of the cloud of glory, nothing. And of course, then as we go forward in history, you can also look at Nehemiah 2:11-20—as we go forward in history, that Temple, the second Temple in its first form gets desecrated by Antiochus IV Epiphanes. After he lost a war with the Ptolemaic ruler of Egypt, he blamed his loss on the fact that the Judeans refused to worship the Greek gods, and so that’s why the gods hadn’t favored him with victory. So he went and sacrificed pigs on the altar in the Temple in Jerusalem to Zeus. So this obviously desecrated the Temple, and it wasn’t restored until during the Maccabean revolt, when Judah the Hammer and his brothers came and were able to liberate at least a good chunk of Judea from the Greek overlords and rededicate the Temple. That’s described in 1 Maccabees.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. This is in chapter four; this is verses 52-59.

Early in the morning of the 25th day of the ninth month, which is the month of Chislev, in the 148th year, they rose and offered sacrifice as the law directs on the new altar of burnt-offering which they had built. At the very season and on the very day that the Gentiles had profaned it, it was dedicated with songs and harps and lutes and cymbals. All the people fell on their faces and worshiped and blessed heaven, who had prospered them. So they celebrated the dedication of the altar for eight days, and offered burnt-offerings with gladness. They offered a sacrifice of deliverance and praise. They decorated the front of the temple with golden crowns and small shields. They restored the gates and the chambers for the priests, and furnished them with doors. There was very great gladness among the people, and the reproach of the Gentiles was removed.

Then Judas and his brothers and all the assembly of Israel determined that every year, at that season, the days of the dedication of the altar should be observed with gladness and joy for eight days, beginning with the 25th day of the month of Chislev.

Fr. Stephen: And so that’s the origin of Hanukkah, which— Has it started yet? I know it’s soon if it hasn’t started yet.

Fr. Andrew: I am not sure.

Fr. Stephen: But, right, so this is where the feast of Hanukkah comes from. And you notice everyone’s happy, it’s good, they offer the sacrifices, Temple’s up and running again. It says they did things according to the Torah; people fell on their faces in worship… but there’s no record of— Nothing about the presence of God.

Fr. Andrew: No theophanic glory cloud.

Fr. Stephen: Right. No expression of God’s glory. And so that Temple goes on to get built out and added onto, in particular by Herod; Herod the Great starts the process and spends decades building up around it, building the whole sort of platform with the embankments to support it so he can keep expanding it. It’s one of many building projects in Roman Judea. But there’s never any record of any kind of manifestation of God’s presence, and in fact you start getting evidence to the direct contrary. A big piece of that evidence, for example, would be when the Roman general, Pompey, comes to “annex” Judea, because those same Maccabees we were just reading about, the Hasmoneans, made a treaty with the Romans to help keep the Greeks away, and that didn’t work out so swell.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, basically they sold Judea to the Romans.

Fr. Stephen: Essentially, that’s what happened. And so the Romans came and annexed it. But they sent the general, Pompey, to do that, and when he arrived, he insisted on going into the holy of holies, because no one was allowed to go back there, and the Romans considered it a great mystery: What was back there? And so he, using the Roman legions, plowed past the priests, went into the Temple, went into the holy of holies, not only saw nothing there when he went in, but nothing happened to him.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which I’m sure if people noticed—

Fr. Stephen: He didn’t fall over dead, wasn’t slain in the Spirit… [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Literally.

Fr. Stephen: No death by holiness. None of these things happened. He just walked back out and told all the Romans, “Wow, that’s weird. Nothing’s there in the Temple.” [Laughter] “I don’t know why they didn’t want anybody to see that there was nothing there.”

So all of this in the popular mind of Judean people, they’re aware that there’s something wrong. This created for a wide swath of different Jewish groups in the Second Temple period, different levels of ambivalence and sometimes outright rejection of that Temple. So, like, the folks at Qumran who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls rejected it completely, said it was not a legitimate Temple at all. The Sadducees, of course, embraced it because they controlled it, the high priesthood: that was their source of wealth, so they were great with it.

But so there were these different theories as to what the problem was. There were folks like, as we saw in the Testament of Levi, reflected there, who thought: The problem is the priesthood, that these were to be the Zadokite priests: the sons of Zadok were to be the high priests of the new Temple, and these are not them, even though they call themselves Sadducees, Sadokee, Zadokites—they’re not, really. And they’re corrupt, incredibly corrupt. So that’s the problem. They saw— This is part of what they understood, as we mentioned in the second half, that this Levitical messiah, this priestly messiah, would fix the priesthood and, by restoring the priesthood and purifying the priesthood, would thereby restore and purify the Temple. And that one of the signs that that had happened would be the presence of God, the glory of the Lord, returning to the Temple.

The Pharisees likewise had this ambivalent relationship. They thought, “Well, this is really the Temple”—they didn’t reject it completely—but the problem was that sort of the land, the area around the Temple, Jerusalem—they weren’t fond of the Sadducees either—they were defiled because of the sins of the people, the uncleanness of the people.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which is why they’re obsessed with trying to get everybody to keep the Law perfectly, and then God can come back.

Fr. Stephen: The strictness of the Torah was, hey— And there’s a certain logic to it. “We got sent into exile in the first place because of our sins, our unrepentant sin. So if we want God to come back and dwell among us, we all need to get our acts together and repent and keep the commandments.” And that is part—that ambivalent relationship is part of why the party of the Pharisees was able to survive the destruction of the Temple and become Rabbinic Judaism is that they were already kind of detached from that Temple, and so it was not as great a loss. The Sadducees cease to exist, once the Temple’s gone, because that’s all they had, but the Pharisees are able to keep moving.

But in general we could say that in some way, when the Messiah comes, he’ll fix this, whether it’s priestly version, whether it’s— That that would be the fix. That would be the thing that would restore God’s presence dwelling among the people. So the perspective that the earliest Christians—meaning the apostles—take in the New Testament is that that is, in Jerusalem, certainly a temple, but that the new Temple—the promised new Temple, the new Temple of the new covenant—is actually Jesus; it’s actually Christ himself is the Temple. And they’re drawing on what was already a pretty strong current in Second Temple Jewish thought, and that is that the Temple described by Ezekiel—back to Ezekiel in exile— The last probably about a third of the book of Ezekiel is his description of this Temple, this new Temple, and part of that description is about the glory of the Lord entering into that Temple, by the way. I mean, that was an explicit part of— And so that’s also a piece: “Well, this certainly isn’t Ezekiel’s Temple, because the glory hasn’t entered into it.”

But there already was, within Second Temple Judaism— There was never an attempt at any of these stages—and maybe with Ezra and Nehemiah they couldn’t do it; they didn’t have the resources, but the Maccabees probably did, and Herod definitely had the resources to build whatever he wanted to—but none of them tried to actually follow the measurements and build Ezekiel’s Temple.

Fr. Andrew: Mm. So there’s this sense that you’re not supposed to do that.

Fr. Stephen: There was no attempt. Because there was already this idea in Second Temple Judaism that Ezekiel’s Temple, this final Temple, this sort of eschatological Temple, is a Temple not made with human hands. Not that humanity somehow sullies it— And as we saw, the tabernacle was sort of made by God with human cooperation, because the Holy Spirit was involved. But human hands: not involved. That’s what this new Temple will be. So that means it’s not any physical Temple that anyone’s going to build in the city of Jerusalem. That idea was already there.

And so St. John does this in particular, but it’s really a theme through most of the New Testament: that Christ is—his body, in particular—this is the place where the Holy Spirit— This is the place where God comes to dwell among his people eternally. [This] is in the Person of Jesus Christ. And St. John is the one who— In all the gospels, you get the saying of Jesus, “Destroy this temple, and I will rebuild it in three days.” You get it in various forms, but St. John is the one who adds the parenthetical note: “He was speaking about the temple that is his body,” just in case you weren’t— it didn’t click for you. [Laughter] “Let’s hammer this home: he’s talking about his body.”

And this is also why, sticking with St. John, at the end of the book of Revelation, he makes the point that in the new heavens and the new earth, there is no Temple, because God and the Lamb dwell among them. So Christ is the Temple, so there’s not a literal Ezekiel’s physical Temple that shows up at the end, that Christ is that Temple.

So Christ is both the messianic Person, the Person who is the Anointed One; he is also the Temple, which was also anointed. So he restores the Temple himself. And so, again, for those still awake—hopefully all of you driving—at this point in the episode, we end up in a very similar place to where we ended up at the last two halves, because, of course, Christ is the fulfillment of this, but Christians—every Christian is also described as the temple of the Holy Spirit, as very directly by St. Paul in 1 Corinthians 6:19. “Your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit.” And so Christians’ bodies are anointed to become the temple of the Holy Spirit, to be filled with the Holy Spirit. And the Temple—the tabernacle and then the Temple—they’re the place where the presence of God is in the world in a unique way, because—

Fr. Andrew: Because God is present everywhere, but not in the same way everywhere.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so he’s not in the Temple as opposed to everywhere else. [Laughter] But he’s there in a unique way. And so the presence of God is in the world in a unique way in his people, in Christians.

So we’ve talked about—we’re looping around back to Genesis; we’re ending where we began— We’ve talked about before how the calling, the thing for which Adam and Eve were chosen, was to go out of paradise into the world and take paradise, the temple which was paradise, with them; to go and continue putting the world in order and filling it with life, to turn the whole of creation into a garden, to a well-tended garden that is abundant in life. And so the way that this happens now is that anointed Christians, as the Temple, as paradise, in whom God dwells, are sent out into the world, to bring God and to bring paradise, the place where God dwells, with them.

And we made this big deal in this half about this contrast between the dedication of the tabernacle and the first Temple, and then the dedications and re-dedications of the second Temple, and, to quote at least the King James translation of the long ending of Mark, “the signs attending” when that happened. So earlier we took a little bit away from our charismatic friends; now we’re going to give a little back. [Laughter] This is part of the function of what’s going on with all of the signs and miracles that we see in the gospels and Acts. Why all this? These are the indicators that, just as the lack of any kind of signs pointed to the lack of God’s presence in the rebuilt Temple, the presence of these signs surrounding Christ, who is the new Temple with the presence of God, and Christians, who are the temple of the Holy Spirit, is an identification and an indicator that these people are the place; that Christ is the Temple, the fulfillment of the Temple, and that Christians, these people, are the place where God is dwelling, are the place where interaction with God happens, through these people.

And so these signs are not limited to exorcisms, healings, raising the dead, etc., etc.; they do, however, include those. So, charismatic friends, compared to us Orthodox, you’re cessationists. We still have saints raising the dead and stuff.

Fr. Andrew: Well, you know, there is—what was the guy’s name—Wigglesworth claimed he could raise the dead.

Fr. Stephen: Oh, okay.

Fr. Andrew: I don’t know if he did or not.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] So all that is still part of it to this day. And it especially happens when you look at Church history. Those things become the most frequent during times when the Gospel—and through the Gospel, Christ—is coming to a new part of the world. That’s when those kind of identifying signs become the most frequent. You can go and just do a quick— It would be interesting to do this detail for somebody, actually. Go and study how many enlighteners of different places were also wonderworkers.

So it includes that, but it’s not limited to that, and sometimes we limit miracles to that. But repentance is a miracle; salvation is a miracle. Someone who is deeply lost in sin repenting and coming to Christ and having their life transformed is actually a much, much greater miracle than someone being healed physically, of a physical disease, or even somebody being physically raised from the dead.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. I mean, we have saints that say that.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yeah. So those are also miracles that accompany this. And the fruits of the Spirit in their full embodiment, as we’ve talked about, to wrap this all up together, are miraculous. The kind of love, the kind of joy, the kind of peace that is had in Christ, that is not of human origin, is likewise miraculous. So hopefully, through these three cycles—I don’t know if we’ll ever structure an episode like this again, but through these three cycles we’ve connected some of these things for folks.

Fr. Andrew: Amen.

Fr. Stephen: Or just made them dizzy, one of the two.

Fr. Andrew: Hey. Hopefully no one ran off the side of the road.

Fr. Stephen: Spun them right round like a record.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Like a record. Well, I don’t have a lot of voice left, but the couple of things that I wanted to point to at the end… Especially when we’re talking about sacraments, there can be, because of our cultural theological inheritance, a desire to ask the “What?” question a lot. I mean, I get it. We want to know what: What is this? And someone who’s been chrismated: What is he? And asking what exactly chrismation is, and all that sort of thing. But I think if we leave our questions there and that’s the most important thing to us—I’m not saying it’s not important; it’s important, sure! But if that’s the most important thing, then we have a problem, because there’s a purpose to these sacraments. They’re for something.

We see— Occasionally we get questions that are like this about a lot of things, like the perennial question of what exactly is a giant. [Laughter] The most important thing that you should know about a giant is not what he is but rather what he does and how he functions in the world, just like saints: What’s really important about them is not what they are or how exactly they got to be a saint or the canonization process or that kind of stuff, as important as those things are. The most important thing about a saint is the way he shows forth the presence of God in the world.

And chrismation is exactly this. We’re chrismated for something. When you’re chrismated in the Orthodox Church, it’s not to make you a member of an institution; it’s to make you a member of Christ, which is not a membership in the sense of having a card. It’s like being the members of a body. We’ve talked about bodies a lot on this podcast, that a body is this collection of powers and potentialities through which a person operates. And the body of Christ is that through which Christ operates in this world. We are his body. We are his members. And the purpose of chrismation is to do the things we’ve been describing for the past few hours. We’re chrismated for something. We’re chrismated in order to receive a commission. It’s not a possession or a status; it’s a task. It’s an empowerment for something.

And Christian life is much more about that for, what it’s for, than it is about the precise means or definitions of how you get to that “for.” It doesn’t mean those things don’t matter, but when we become extremists in one direction or another, by saying, “Oh, it all just doesn’t matter at all. I feel the Spirit, so it doesn’t matter,” or we become an extremist in the other direction, and say, “Well, only through the following very precise sort of formuli does this work”—in both cases we’re kind of becoming magical thinkers, and that’s idolatrous! As we’ve said many times, that’s idolatrous! That’s the problem.

So we’re saved for something. We’re not saved so that we can be saved. We’re saved so that we can be holy in this world, so that we can show forth the works, the presence, the love of God in this world, so that the world can be healed and so that, through him, the world might be saved. Father?

Fr. Stephen: So a catechumen in my parish—who is an adult who is a couple decades younger than [I am], making me feel very old, so I secretly despise him for that, but otherwise is a good kid—asked me for some clarification about something we talk about a lot on this show, which is— For example, on the episode about spirits, we talked about how there are spirits active in groups, in communities, in places, in workplaces, in institutions; and we talked about sort of there being an exorcism, a replacing one that is dedicated to human destruction and evil with one that is good and leading to salvation. He’s sort of asking me what that concretely looks like for a person, who’s going to work at a job, or going to school at a school, or who is part of some other kind of community. What does that mean?

And I think one of the major foci of what we’ve been talking about tonight is that every one of us as a Christian, as an anointed one, as someone who has the Holy Spirit working within us and through us, carries the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God, with us wherever we go. And a lot of times this gets expressed negatively, when it’s talked about in popular circles. This is “The Holy Spirit dwells in you. Are you going to go into a movie theater at an R-rated movie!?” or “Are you going to hang out with these ne’er-do-wells? Are you going to smoke and chew and dance with girls who do?” And there is precedent for that. I say that obviously with some levity, but St. Paul comes out and asks, “Will you join the members of Christ to a prostitute?” so there is biblical warrant for that kind of negative approach to that.

But I think very neglected and more important is the positive element of that, that bringing the Spirit of God with us out into the world, out of paradise and out into the world—the world where there is chaos, the world where there is death, the world where there is darkness—is like carrying a candle with us out into the darkness, like carrying a torch with us out into the darkness. This is what I think St. John is getting at in 1 John 4:4, when he says, “Greater is he who is in me than he who is in the world.” There’s a lot of spirits out there in the world, but the one who is within us is greater and more powerful infinitely than any of them.

So on a very practical level, when we come into a place, into a community, into our families, into our workplaces, into our school communities, whatever it is—when we come there and we bring the Holy Spirit with us, not just sort of de facto because we identify as Christians, but in the sense that we’re working in repentance and faith to bring out and bring to maturity the fruit of the Spirit in our life, that that presence and activity of the Holy Spirit begins to transform the communities and the world around us, in precisely this way: by driving out those other spirits, by driving out those other agencies, those other principalities and powers, those other things that are acting upon us and the people we love and the people we work with and the people we spend time with. It pushes them out and replaces them with the presence of God himself.

When we bring love into a situation where there is hatred and bitterness and anger, and it’s real love—it’s not us saying platitudes, it’s not us saying, “Hey, can’t we all just love each other? Don’t worry, be happy,” but manifesting the love of God toward people, the real, deep love and compassion and kindness and care of God toward people; when we bring a real sense of peace and we make peace between people, then the spirit that’s been there, putting people at odds with each other, spirits of dissension and bitterness, they’re driven out. Then, behold how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity. And this is the concrete way— It is concrete. We can’t change the world in the sense that I can point my finger by magic at a chair and turn it into a table, but, as we’ve talked about, the world we all live in is made up more of our perceptions and intuitions and experiences than it is those hard and fast things that we can’t change.

So through just one person who’s honestly striving every day to follow Christ, both in keeping commandments and in repenting when not— One of the most powerful ways to completely transform a social dynamic is to apologize, to actually accept the blame for our failures, to actually be honest about them and apologize. So repentance is a big part of this, too. But one person doing that can transform a whole system, can transform a whole workplace, can transform a whole dynamic. And it’s when we do that that people see Christ in us. It’s when we do that, not win arguments, that people are drawn to find Christ in his Church, and as they do that they start to become Christians as well, and they start to make an honest effort to follow Christ. And some of us who have been Christians our whole lives but maybe aren’t making an honest effort right now are inspired by seeing those who do to start making further efforts ourselves.

And slowly, slowly, piece by piece, big systems can be transformed. If you don’t believe that’s true, I will once again point you to history, where a bunch of peasants and fishermen, in a backwater of the Roman Empire—it took them 300 years, but—completely transformed society, culture, politics, everything, just by each one of them being willing to follow Christ, whether that meant life or death, whether that meant glory or dishonor, but they made that honest effort every day. And through them the Spirit—the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God—came to fill a whole empire and change it. And it can do that again, but we don’t start by trying to stage some kind of Christian revolution. We’ve seen how that goes. We do that by each of us, in our place, in the place where God has put us—in the family he’s put us in, in the occupation he’s put us in, in the church community he’s put us in—making these everyday, day-to-day efforts to love, to be at peace, to experience real joy, to be kind, to be good, to be gentle, to be faithful, to exercise self-control. So those are my final thoughts.

Fr. Andrew: Amen. Well, that is our show for tonight. Thank you for listening, everyone. If you didn’t get through to us live this time, we’d still like to hear from you. You can email us at lordofspirits@ancientfaith.com; you can message us at our Facebook page; or you can leave us a voicemail at speakpipe.com/lordofspirits.

Fr. Stephen: And join us for our live broadcasts on the second and fourth Thursdays of the month at 7:00 p.m. Eastern, 4:00 p.m. Pacific. Next time, holy orders.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] And if you’re on Facebook, you can like our page, join our discussion group—it might be the only redeemable thing on Facebook—leave reviews and ratings everywhere you listen, but, most importantly, share this show with a friend who is going to benefit from it.

Fr. Stephen: And finally, be sure to go to ancientfaith.com/support and help make sure we and lots of other AFR podcasters stay on the air. Historic vampire debate: Kickstarter.com.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Thank you, good night, and may God bless you always.