Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick: Good evening, giant-killers, dragon-slayers, scorpion-stunners. 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. Tonight we’re not taking any calls, because this is a pre-recorded episode.

Fr. Stephen De Young: Unless you happen to call in while we’re recording.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which… Hey, call us! See, it’s not working. When this does air live, though, Fr. Stephen will be in Canada, or something like that, which honestly sounds to me like the best place to be in July, definitely not Phoenix. I’ve done a lot of driving, though, on the roads of America, so far visiting 44 of our 50 states. Probably my favorite highway road signs I’ve seen out there are the ones that read: “Prepare to meet thy doom.” And it’s not just because of the early modern English pronoun, I promise you.

This is the next installment in our eschatology series, and it’s doom we’re talking about: the final judgment, Doomsday itself. What exactly is this? Is the end of days about everyone going to heaven or hell, or is it just a Schwarzenegger action-horror flick? What do you think, Father?

Fr. Stephen: Well, it’s not just a Schwarzenegger action-horror flick. I mean, it is that, with Gabriel Byrne as the devil.

Fr. Andrew: Amazing! Again, I say: amazing. Gabriel Byrne—

Fr. Stephen: It is great. It is great: spiritual warfare with a grenade launcher.

Fr. Andrew: That’s how I always do it.

Fr. Stephen: Top that. So that’s… Yeah, that’s groovy, but I mean when I first started to put together notes… Episode title: “Doomsday,” I’m typing out: “Doomsday is a Kryptonian bio-weapon that was made to evolve upon its death and regenerate, that killed Superman.” Then you corrected me. [Laughter] I was like: Oh, bummer.

There’s also the Legion of Doom.

Fr. Andrew: Yep. Dr. Doom.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, Dr. Doom, Victor Von Doom.

Fr. Andrew: Doom, simply Doom. We all remember that game.

Fr. Stephen: Thulsa Doom, as played in Conan the Barbarian by my nemesis, James Earl Jones.

Fr. Andrew: How’s that going?

Fr. Stephen: I’m telling you, I’ll dance on his grave, don’t worry. And I’ll record it.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] There’s a professional wrestling tag-team named Doom, featuring Ron Simmons and Butch Reed.

Fr. Stephen: Well… Yeah, that was a long time ago. Legion of Doom was another name for the Road Warriors, also professional wrestling. Hawk and Animal. And then there was a revived Legion of Doom 2000.

Anyway, we digress. As much as people love our digressions…

Fr. Andrew: There is a Dr. Doom that either heads up or is associated with the Eighth Day Institute out in Kansas. Actual—

Fr. Stephen: That’s just his real name so Disney can’t sue him?

Fr. Andrew: That is his real name. He is actually named Doom. His last name is Doom, and he has a doctorate of some kind. I don’t know what it is, but…

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. Yeah, he didn’t go to seven years of medical school to be called “Mr. Doom.”

Fr. Andrew: Right!? [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: But, yeah, no. We’re talking about the end of days, the end of the world, the day of judgment. So you use the phrase, “end of days,” not primarily so we could bring up the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, because I don’t think you’ve actually seen it yet.

Fr. Andrew: I have not.

Fr. Stephen: Which is a huge hole…

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] It’s a doom-sized hole, as it were!

Fr. Stephen: …in your cultural knowledge. I saw it in the theater twice. Not once, but twice.

Fr. Andrew: In the same week?

Fr. Stephen: I think it was different weeks.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, well, all right.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. But I didn’t get it on video. It was in that later stage of the Arnold Schwarzenegger action career. It was around the time of, like, The Sixth Day, which, despite the title, does not really have a biblical theme.

Fr. Andrew: Disappointing.

Fr. Stephen: No, he just gets cloned in it and has to fight himself.

Fr. Andrew: Is this before he started doing all those just silly comedy things?

Fr. Stephen: Right, that’s when he went into comedy.

Fr. Andrew: “It’s not a tumah.”

Fr. Stephen: He’s had a late-career renaissance that a lot of people are not aware of. He made a movie called Aftermath that is sort of the antithesis of his movies. It’s like repentance for his former life as a film star.

Fr. Andrew: Ah, so his retractions, as it were, like Augustine or Aquinas.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, it’s about the consequences of violence.

Fr. Andrew: Good for him.

Fr. Stephen: It has a little bit more of a realistic take.

Fr. Andrew: I mean, if I were a governor of California, I would have a lot of repentance to engage in myself.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Eh, you know, it was him or Gary Coleman.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] There’s my wheezy laugh! All right. End of days!

Fr. Stephen: End of days, that phrase, “end of days,” which Arnie picked up for that movie’s title, is a phrase that starts being used in Second Temple Jewish literature and is still used in a lot of Jewish circles to refer to the last day, the day of judgment, even though that phrase does not appear in and of itself, “end of days,” that exact phrase—does not occur anywhere in the Hebrew Bible or the Christian Bible, but it is biblically derived, and the concept is even kind of referenced in the New Testament. The most obvious biblical derivation that Genesis 1, in describing the creation of the world, we have the separation of light from darkness, and then: Day One. You have a progression of days. And after Noah’s flood, when the promise is made and the rainbow is given as a sign of it, God sets down his bow, like bow and arrow, in the clouds and promises that the various cycles—day and night, springtime and harvest, the flow of the days and seasons and times and years—will continue until the end. So there you have: there’s going to be days; there’s going to be a regular succession of days until those days end. So you can see “end of days” kind of coming naturally from that idea.

Fr. Andrew: There’s a beginning; there’s going to be an end.

Fr. Stephen: And of course it’s sort of implied by the language of the “last days”: “in these last days,” which gets picked up by several biblical authors. Just a couple of examples out of many possible ones: Hebrews 1:2, James 5:3. The idea that these are the last days implies, obviously, that there’s going to be an end of days, which is approaching, and that you are in the final days; you are in that last period.

Fr. Andrew: Which is kind of funny because, especially since—particular since I think the 1970s where you get Hal Lindsey and some of these guys saying, “These are the last days,” but it’s like: Well… They were saying it was “these last days” back in the New Testament. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Because we talked about “ages,” I think the last episode, we’re in the last one. [Laughter] Until, before the end of the age.

We’re in such a Christian context in our thought that this doesn’t strike us as weird, the idea that the world’s going to have an end. But if you go back to the rest of the ancient world, outside of Israel, in general—I mean, people have heard of Ragnarok, the twilight of the gods, and all this, but most nations didn’t actually have that.

Fr. Andrew: No. Yeah, there’s no— Most of them are not—don’t have a story about their gods all dying and the world ending.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, it was— In fact, they believed the world had always been here and it kind of always would, that there were just these cycles that would repeat. We’ve talked before in terms of the gods that they worshiped— We’ve talked before about the succession myth. Those cycles included the succession of gods, that, yeah, Zeus may not be the highest god forever. Someone could displace him in the future.

Fr. Andrew: As has happened in the past.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, as has happened in the past. We just move on, right? [Laughter] Every generation, you get a new Flash; you get a new Green Lantern. [Laughter] This can just keep happening in perpetuity forever, and all this has happened before and all this will happen again.

Fr. Andrew: Nice.

Fr. Stephen: But this gets transformed. And we can see that in the Hebrew Scriptures, that, no, there is going to be an end. There was a beginning, and there will be an end.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, in a real sense, history is a biblical creation.

Fr. Stephen: Right, the idea of history as having some kind of trajectory, having some kind of arc, being some kind of finite playing-out of things. Yeah. I mean, there are certainly people who recorded events that happened without that concept, but they were just recording events that happened. Herodotus doesn’t say— Herodotus certainly thought there were things you could learn from things that had happened—there was sort of wisdom or lessons to be derived from it—but he didn’t think that the Persian Wars were part of this story, were sort of an act of a play that had started somewhere and was leading somewhere in particular. In fact, the way he understood meaning in history was based on the idea that this is just cyclical and it’s all going to come around again, so next time it comes around, here are the things we can learn from what happened last time.

This idea of a through-line was a new thing and is different [from] what has typically been considered. Ultimately, even modern science… Of course, the big bang is an idea that a Catholic priest came up with, literally.

Fr. Andrew: It is.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Because he was trying to prove that the universe had a beginning, for exactly this reason. Even that, the idea of the big bang and the big crunch, or the idea… doesn’t get away from this. It hasn’t actually gone back to paganism. And even your most die-hard evolutionary theorist, if you watch any of these documentaries where they try to re-create the pre-historic world or whatever, they’re presenting it as a story. They’re presenting it in this narrative of life on earth that started somewhere and is going to culminate in humanity, which in and of itself kind of makes no sense from their own perspective, from their own atheistic perspective. Why would humanity be any different? Why is that the culmination of the story? Why is it a story at all? Why isn’t it just a series of random events? [Laughter] Why is there any kind of through-line superimposed on it?

But so the reason why that’s important is that in order to understand judgment, like the last one, the last judgment, we have to obviously talk about justice. The concept of justice biblically is completely inseparable from the idea of order; that’s simply what it is, that mishpat in Hebrew, justice is the state of everything being in its proper place and functioning the way it’s meant to. Everything is correctly related to everything else, whether you’re talking about society, like human society, whether you’re talking about nature, whether you’re talking about the cosmos as a whole, whether you’re talking about the angelic world—it doesn’t matter: that everything is in its proper place and everything is functioning properly.

Of course, in order for that to be true, in order for there to be an order, in order for there to be any meaningful concept of justice in the world, understood as a proper order, that implies that there has to be some kind of order to creation which could be reflected in that in or not reflected in that. What do I mean by that? Well, if the world really had no beginning and no end—let’s take Aristotle’s presupposition, say—then any particular, say, ordering of society would be an ordering of society, but how could you say whether it was just or unjust? From what perspective?

Now, a variety of perspectives are possible. You could say, “Well, I think the best ordering of society is one in which the people who are lowest, who are at the low end of the society are as high as possible, so you can’t really fall that low.” Another person could say, “Well, no, I think the right ordering of society is the one that gives people the most opportunities, whether they successfully take advantage of them or not.” Another person could say, “I think the best ordering of society is the one that produces the most human flourishing.” Another person could say, “I think the best ordering of society is the one that allows great men and women to be great, and to dominate the society, and doesn’t let the weak take control of the mechanisms of power.”

And you could judge, then, any given ordering, social ordering, from that perspective, to say, “Well, this is good from that perspective, and this is bad from that perspective,” but there’s no way to mediate between those perspectives. There’s no way to say, “No, this is the correct way to evaluate a social order,” because every one of them is accidental, so it’s just going to be the person’s interest.

So the idea that there is some kind of objective justice, that something can truly be just or unjust, in an objective way, that we could all come to agree upon, implies that there is some kind of order, some kind of existing order, with which that societal ordering has to be consonant, has to correctly relate itself to; that this way of people relating to each other is correct.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, this is the basic idea behind, also not necessarily working out in the details of, the concept of natural law.

Fr. Stephen: Sort of, yeah. That’s one of the things that’s derived from this.

Fr. Andrew: That’s the basis.

Fr. Stephen: That can be grounded in different things. It can be built into the nature of things in and of themselves, it can be built into the laws of logic, it can be—God. [Laughter] You can ground that different ways, but it has to be grounded somewhere, or you can’t really have a meaningful concept of justice and injustice in any kind of objective sense.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, something absolute that everyone has to be obedient to, not that we just all agree on.

Fr. Stephen: Right. So what we see, as we’ve talked about many times on the show, in the account of God’s creation of the world is… We’ve talked about two steps, but the first step, and one of the key steps in creation, is putting things in order. So God’s act of creation, in ordering things, in putting things in order, entails automatically a concept of justice, that his ordering of things then constitutes, once he pronounces it good and beautiful at the end of each day—that his ordering of things is the ordering of things, is the just ordering of things, and any deviation of that, then, represents injustice.

When we look at descriptions of the last judgment—I know we’ve talked about justice and judgment before on the show, but particularly with what we’re talking about tonight with the last judgment, the final judgment, we have to understand a particular aspect of this in order to understand some of the language that’s used in talking about the last judgment. That’s related to, again, this understanding of creation. The two steps that we’ve talked about before—God puts things in order, as on the first three days of creation; then on the second set of three days, he fills things with life.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and then he gives that command to Adam and Eve, to basically: “Go thou and do likewise,” essentially. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Right, to continue that. So there is this sort of perfect balance that’s reflected in the image of a garden. A garden is both orderly and an order that produces and fosters life. You can divert from that in one of two directions. You can divert from that away from life, like Livy’s famous quote about the Roman Empire: “They created a wasteland and called it peace.” You can expunge all the life; you can have a very orderly parking lot, but there’s no life there.

On the other side, you can abandon order. And while that can be seen as letting life take over—you abandon a building, you abandon a town, and it becomes overgrown: you can see that as: “Oh! Well, life has come back in. Life has come and thrived there”—but that kind of disordered abundance of life, of biological life, actually becomes very dangerous, and very quickly can turn into death. For example, if I decide to go swimming in my local bayou here in southern Louisiana, especially if I’m skinny-dipping, things will not go well for me.

Fr. Andrew: But it’s nature! It’s beautiful. It’s… [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: I may avoid the gators. I may avoid the snakes. I probably will not be able to avoid the mosquitoes for sure, that will give me who-knows-what, not to mention everything else that’s in the water—the poisonous algae…

Fr. Andrew: But cranberries!

Fr. Stephen: There’s tons of life there! [Laughter] But there’s no order, and so it becomes dangerous, because it becomes chaos. It lapses back into chaos.

This is why we get certain metaphors for the last judgment, some of them related to gardening directly—we’re going to talk about a couple of those—but also why you get, and maybe especially in the Hebrew prophets you get descriptions of judgment day that seem to involve a whole lot of people dying and sort of seem to involve depopulation. That language is being used there to counter this idea of sort of overgrowing life turning into chaos. But for a couple of those metaphors… We have a couple of metaphors from the gospels, from Christ himself. The first one of these is sometimes called the parable of the weeds, but I’m sure it’s called 20 different things.

Fr. Andrew: The Wheat and the Tares, for all you King James people out there.

Fr. Stephen: Well, there’s another one that sometimes called the Wheat and the Tares, though, sometimes, too.

Fr. Andrew: That’s true, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: There’s a lot of similar para— That’s why we’re going to read it here, because there’s a bunch of similar ones we need to disambiguate.

Fr. Andrew: I know. I wish we still used the word “tare,” but it’s probably because it’s a homophone that we kind of dropped it a long time ago.

Fr. Stephen: I mean, maybe wheat farmers still do. I don’t know.

Fr. Andrew: If there are any wheat farmers listening, send us an email. Let us know if you still use the word “tare” in this way.

Fr. Stephen: Let us know if you still use the word “tares.”

Fr. Andrew: Matthew 13, starting with verse 24:

He put another parable before them, saying:

The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a man who sowed good seed in his field, but while his men were sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat and went away. So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared also. And the servants of the master of the house came and said to him, “Master, did you not sow good seed in your field? How then does it have weeds?” He said to them, “An enemy has done this.” So the servants said to him, “Then do you want us to gather them?” But he said, “No, lest in gathering the weeds you root up the wheat along with them. Let both grow together until the harvest, and at harvest-time I will tell the reapers: Gather the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.

Fr. Stephen: I mean, this is pretty directly that imagery, that this disorder comes into the otherwise orderly fields of crops that are ordered in order to bring forth life. And weeds, by the way, don’t just live peacefully alongside other plants.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, they’re sucking the life out of them.

Fr. Stephen: Yes! [Laughter] They’re actually harming the other plants. But there is not this sort of immediate judgment. There’s not an immediate judgment. There’s not: “Okay, the second there’s this injustice, immediately justice must be restored.” Rather, this time is given: But then there comes a day—eventually there comes a day—when everything is harvested. The reason for the delay is for the purpose of the wheat, the salvation of the wheat.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there’s some weeds that if you pull them up, you’ll kill everything around them. Other weeds, you can pull them out and that’s what you need to do, but in some cases if you pull up the weeds then you’re going to ruin your actual good stuff.

Fr. Stephen: And so this shows us what we might call the macrocosmic concept of judgment, because what Christ is clearly talking about here is the day of judgment, the judgment of the whole world, the separation of one type of person from another type of person, to have different fates.

But there’s another type of judgment that he uses a not totally dissimilar example to describe.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, another good agricultural metaphor. So John 15:1-2:

I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinedresser. Every branch in me that does not bear fruit, he takes away; and every branch that does bear fruit, he prunes, that it may bear more fruit.

This is the image of cutting off bits in order to make things better. Rather than weeding, this is pruning. Now, I’ve never…

Fr. Stephen: So you do have the element of branches being taken away.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that’s part of it, too, exactly.

Fr. Stephen: You still have this, but there’s still this other level here.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. I mean, actually I very briefly had a grapevine. The grapes it made did not taste good, so we didn’t keep it. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: I heard it. Through the grapevine.

Fr. Andrew: They were grapes purely of wrath. But I do have some experience. I’m not going to say I’m an expert or even a journeyman, but I do have experience pruning fruit trees. In my backyard… Thank God, I actually have about a third of an acre that my house is on, and so the back end of it, we have six fruit trees. Over the last ten years, I’ve been planting trees back there and pruning them, because you have to prune them if you want good fruit, if you want the tree to do well. Fruit trees take a lot of work to make sure that they thrive. Some of the basic principles are: If a branch is kind of heading toward the middle of the tree, you cut that one out. If it’s pointing downwards, you cut that. And you look and you see when it comes time for the fruit, you notice which branches have fruit, and you privilege them, and the ones that don’t do that, you take those off. The idea is ultimately to try to, by privileging certain branches, then, they get bigger and bigger and bigger, because fruit trees often like to just make a million little branches, but if you take off a lot of the little ones, they put their energy into making bigger branches. And then that can actually support the fruit when it comes, because otherwise it can pull down the branches and break them off.

So the general idea is that, by making some cutting, by removing some things, then it makes it stronger and healthier. There’s a million sermons you could preach out of that. I’ve preached probably one or two in my time. But the idea— This is really pointing at repentance, is what’s going on: God giving chastening, God giving lessons that might not be super comfortable. But with the pruning then comes strength. They become better branches.

Fr. Stephen: And so this could be— We could describe this as judgment at the microcosm level, like within a person. This is what’s being referred to with “If we judge ourselves, we will not be judged.” The idea of putting the person in order, which, at least in my case, needs to happen repeatedly. [Laughter] And that’s why this has this ongoing nature of pruning. It’s not just like: “Okay, one time you go through and straighten up the tree, and now it’s okay forever.”

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] No, you have to… I have to prune my trees two or three times a year. Sometimes it doesn’t work… Actually, there was this one tree—I had one apple that, for years it was… It was just a mess! But I kept going at it, I kept going at it, and finally now this year it’s got some height to it, it’s actually producing some apples. Again, that’s like human beings: sometimes it takes a long time before it… A lot of care and a lot of love before a person finally gets in order.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And so not every judgment is just a complete cutting-off. Judgment is not all negative, and even when it is kind of negative, it’s not all condemnation. It’s often aimed at correcting, disciplining, pruning here, not at completely cutting off and throwing away.

So we see sort of examples of that, if you look at incidents of judgment that we see, for example, in the Old Testament. So there’s some obvious ones: Sodom and Gomorrah, clearly they get cut off. [Laughter] Like, that’s… They get nuked from orbit! So they’re gone. The giant clans, they reach a point: they’re cut off entirely. Those—we can call them nations, because Sodom and Gomorrah were city-states with kings, and the giant clans were clans—those nations were sort of cut off.

Well, what about, though, Judah? Judah gets taken into exile. The first Temple gets destroyed utterly. The land gets taken over by the Babylonians. They’re in exile for 70 years. They get to come back, but they’re still a Persian province. They aren’t independent. That’s a nation that undergoes the other type of judgment, the kind of corrective judgment. There are certain practices of Judah that God is correcting—not all that different [from] the practices for which he destroyed other nations, by the way! But, as St. Paul says, speaking in part historically, God disciplines every son whom he loves, so Judah gets corrected.

We say that now. We have this long reach of history, where we say, “Well, yeah, that’s corrective. That’s corrective judgment; that’s not like those other ones.” But if you were one of the people getting run through with a Babylonian sword in 587, if you were one of the ones getting deported into slavery, if you were one of the ones watching everything burn, if your children were being taken as slaves, that didn’t look all that different to you on the ground than the other ones. So sometimes we let the distance of history turn these things into statistics and numbers. The judgment here, this is a real judgment. It’s not a different type of thing. What’s different tends to be the result. The difference is the result. And the result is usually the result of the people, but we’re talk about that more as we go forward.

But with that in mind, how about the northern kingdom of Israel?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, were they just thrown into the fire along with the tares?

Fr. Stephen: On one level, you could say that. You could say, “Yeah, there’s this contrast between what happens to Israel, the northern kingdom, and what happens to Judah, the southern kingdom.” And there are various reasons for that: the promises made to David, Judah’s where the Temple was, etc., etc.; the northern kingdom of Israel not so on those things. So you could say, “Well, okay, yeah, they get cut off and Judah gets disciplined,” but that’s not really how, for example, St. Paul sees it, and St. Paul didn’t just come up with this: St. Paul is getting this from a lot of Second Temple Jewish literature like the Testament of Naphtali and stuff that already understood this this way, that saw what happened to Israel when they get dispersed among the nations, the northern kingdom, as being not them being cut off and thrown into the fire, but them being scattered like seeds, like the fruit that falls to the ground and dies; and that the eventual inclusion of the nations who come to worship Israel’s God, which St. Paul of course believed was happening in his lifetime through his ministry…

Fr. Andrew: And that gets prophesied in the Old Testament, so you don’t have to look at Second Temple Jewish literature for that.

Fr. Stephen: Well, yeah, but then that is the harvest, the produce of those seeds. So when you look at it from this perspective of the result, then what happens to the northern kingdom starts looking less like a total cutting-off than it might at first blush, before giving it more thought.

Well, those are all examples with nations, but you can find those same examples of those two types with individual people in the Old Testament. Just one example, out of many, many, many, many possible examples: Saul, the first king of Israel, gets cut off, ultimately, for his disobedience, and he doesn’t get a lack of tries. It’s kind of hard to discern, when you’re reading the Saul narrative, when exactly he was cut off completely. There’s not killing the Amalekites, there’s going to the witch of Endor, there’s a whole— trying to murder David. There’s a whole series of things!

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, at a certain point you do get the idea that the Holy Spirit has left him and that there’s an evil spirit that follows him around now.

Fr. Stephen: Right, but even then… And part of the reason why it’s hard to nail down is of course he could have repented at any point until he was dead. So there wasn’t actually a point of zero return. But he ends up being cut off. The way he dies is definitely a judgment, and his household is mostly wiped out, whereas David— David faces judgment: Nathan the Prophet shows up to render judgment against David. Or actually, in that case, to turn David’s own judgment around on him, because David is king, orders the man who did the horrible thing to be put to death. He issues a judgment… [Laughter] Nathan says, “Good. He’s you!”

Fr. Andrew: My, have the turn tables have… Oh, wait. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: But David ends up repenting. David repents. And so that judgment ends up becoming for him this kind of disciplinary corrective judgment because of how he receives it and what he does in terms of repentance.

So with those kind of ideas of judgment, these sort of two senses of, two kinds of judgment, we can kind of go— And I know this is kind of uncharacteristic for us, in the first half, to actually talk about the topic, but, brace yourselves: we’re in it!

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Oh no!

Fr. Stephen: We can now move to talk about what’s called— Well, “end of days” as a phrase doesn’t occur. What is usually used in the Hebrew Bible to refer to that day is the day of Yahweh. As we’ve said before, sometimes it’s spelled out “Day of Yahweh,” translated “Day of the Lord” in English Bibles, with “Lord” in all caps; sometimes just referred to as “the Day,” as we’ve said before, like in the last episode. But usually it’s “the Day of Yahweh” that is coming and represents judgment.

One of the more full, complete sort of descriptions and depictions of the Day of Yahweh comes in Isaiah, as you might expect. Most of these are going to be from the Prophets, announcing the Day of Yahweh.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, this is killer stuff. It’s a little long, but—

Fr. Stephen: All killer, no filler.

Fr. Andrew: What’s that?

Fr. Stephen: All killer, no filler.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] That’s right. Yeah, and a little long to put on a billboard, this particular passage, but… yeah. So Isaiah 13, starting with verse four.

The sound of a tumult is on the mountains, as of a great multitude. The sound of an uproar of kingdoms, of nations gathering together. The Lord of hosts is mustering a host for battle. They come from a distant land, from end of the heavens, the Lord and the weapons of his indignation, to destroy the whole land. Wail, for the Day of the Lord is near. As destruction from the Almighty it will come. Therefore, all hands will be feeble, and every human heart will melt. They will be dismayed. Pangs and agony will seize them. They will be in anguish, like a woman in labor. They will look aghast at one another; their faces will be aflame. Behold, the Day of the Lord comes, cruel with wrath and fierce anger, to make the land a desolation and to destroy its sinners from it. For the stars of the heavens in their constellations will not give their light. The sun will be dark at its rising, and the moon will not shed its light.

I will punish the world for its evil and the wicked for their iniquity. I will put an end to the pomp of the arrogant and lay low the pompous pride of the ruthless. I will make people more rare than fine gold, and mankind than the gold of Ophir. Therefore, I will make the heavens tremble, and the earth will be shaken out of its place at the wrath of the Lord of hosts, at the Day of his fierce anger. And like a hunted gazelle or like sheep with none to gather them, each will turn to his own people and each will flee to his own land. Whoever is found will be thrust through and whoever is caught will be felled by the sword. Their infants will be dashed in pieces before their eyes. Their houses will be plundered and their wives ravished.

That’s pretty rough!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah! [Laughter] Not something to look forward to. And you notice that sort of depopulation language that we mentioned, too, making humanity rare. But notice the rareness is then contrasted with gold. So there’s a bit of a wordplay on the word that’s translated “rare” there, in that it can mean both, like, there’s not a lot of humans left, and it can mean that humanity kind of gets rarefied, like humanity gets refined like gold.

Yeah, this is a description of the Day of the Lord. This is apocalyptic—in the contemporary usage—kind of stuff. This is end-timesy stuff. Here’s the thing, though: we didn’t read the first three verses of the chapter. Isaiah is saying this to Babylon.

Fr. Andrew: Hmm. Which, you know, to our day, is long, long, long, long, long gone.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And so what he’s describing as the Day of the Lord, as the Day of Yahweh, as the last day, is— What he’s detailed describing is the invasion of the Medes and the Persians to destroy the Neo-Babylonian Empire.

Fr. Andrew: So this kind of language, which seems very end-of-the-world kind of stuff, is, in terms of the here-and-now of Isaiah, an actual historical set of events that we can point to, that happened long in the past for us.

Fr. Stephen: Right. So when he says the day is near, he’s not saying the end of the world is about to happen. He’s not making a Jack Van Impe-style end times prediction. He’s saying that that day, the Day of the Lord, is near, is drawing near to Babylon.

We’ve talked before, when we talked about ritual participation, we’ve talked about it primarily—not entirely, but primarily—in terms of participation in past events. So we’ve pointed out the Passover is: “This is the night on which God delivered us from Egypt,” even when it’s celebrated in 2023, and it’s a participation in that day. And we’ve talked about how that extends to the Eucharist, to Holy Week, to different things in the life of the Church.

So this is also true vis-à-vis the future, but one of the differences here in the way that Scripture talks about judgment and talks about the Day of the Lord is that this isn’t sort of a deliberate participation. This isn’t like the Medes and the Persians went and did a religious ritual to participate in the Day of Judgment and render judgment against Babylon and take it over.

Fr. Andrew: No.

Fr. Stephen: This is the Day itself—judgment itself, the judgment of God, the wrath of God, the Day of Judgment itself—being portrayed as having agency, that it’s sort of sneaking up on Babylon. It’s drawing close to them. It’s about to pounce. Judgment is coming.

And that call, what that call is aimed at doing is bringing about repentance. Repentance will not stop that judgment from happening necessarily, but it’ll mean that judgment will be different. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, the book of Jonah is the counter-example. Well, not— It doesn’t counter it, but as an example of how it could go. [Laughter] You notice Jonah’s prophecy against Nineveh is just simply: “Nineveh’s going to be overthrown. Bad things are happening. They’re going to happen.” And the people repent, and then God does not do those bad things.

Fr. Stephen: At least at that time.

Fr. Andrew: At that time, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Nineveh did get destroyed! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Later.

Fr. Stephen: By Nebuchadnezzar, who’s the one who Isaiah is warning. [Laughter] So, yeah. It’s not necessar— You’re not going to necessarily avoid the whole— Judgment is not in and of itself an evil, because it can be corrective, as we’ve said.

Fr. Andrew: It only seems evil if you’re out of order.

Fr. Stephen: If you’re on the wrong end of it. So this language… And that’s what St. John the Forerunner is saying when he’s saying, “The axe is at the root of the tree”: This is it. Judgment is coming for you, Judeans. And it did, starting especially in 70 AD, not beginning, ending everything in AD 70, but beginning there. That judgment from God came. They were warned in a prophet in advance why so that they could repent. That was his baptism. So judgment sort of comes back. Instead of us moving back through time to participate, this is judgment comes back through time and lays hold of nations.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and the purpose is… especially if you get a prophet announcing it beforehand, is to encourage repentance, but also if they don’t repent, it’s to limit their evil, because they’ve become too harmful for everyone else. To use the biblical language, the cup of their iniquity is full.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, that scale— I know I’ve talked about it before on this show. The scale between the outcry of the victims of violence and God’s patience and mercy toward the perpetrators of sin eventually shifts the other way and judgment comes. And so there’s a bunch of other examples—we’ll read just a few here—from the Prophets of this same thing.

Fr. Andrew: You get this sense of the Day of the Lord arriving, lots of bad things happening. Jeremiah 46:10:

That day is the Day of the Lord God of hosts, a day of vengeance, to avenge himself on his foes. The sword shall devour and be sated and drink its fill of their blood. For the Lord God of hosts holds a sacrifice in the north country by the river Euphrates.

Fr. Stephen: So that’s very clearly talking about Babylon. There’s a geographical locator. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Babylon doesn’t come out well if you read the whole Bible. [Laughter] Or any random part that mentions, it actually, just about!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, I don’t think there’s anything really super good said about Babylon.

Fr. Andrew: No! [Laughter] Ezekiel 30:3-4:

For the day is near; the Day of the Lord is near. It will be a day of clouds, a time of doom for the nations. A sword shall come upon Egypt, and anguish shall be in Cush, when the slain fall in Egypt and her wealth is carried away, and her foundations are torn down.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so again the Day of the Lord is near Egypt. It’s near for Egypt. That doesn’t mean he’s saying the end of days is next Tuesday, but it’s coming for Egypt soon is what he’s saying.

Fr. Andrew: Obadiah 1:15:

For the Day of the Lord is near upon all the nations. As you have done, it shall be done to you; your deeds shall return on your own head.

Fr. Stephen: So that’s everybody.

Fr. Andrew: Yep, all the nations.

Fr. Stephen: All of you nations.

Fr. Andrew: All y’all. Joel 2:31:

The sun shall be turned to darkness and the moon to blood before the great and awesome Day of the Lord comes.

Fr. Stephen: And that’s… I think we talked about this last time, last episode, this prophecy from Joel that gets quoted on Pentecost. But you notice the language there that’s attached to the death of Christ. St. Peter when he preaches this is interpreting this as Christ’s death, is followed by the pouring out of the Spirit on all flesh, but that’s also a sign of judgment that’s coming upon Judea by way of the Romans as instrument.

Again, there’s this kind of agency, where judgment, justice, comes back sort of through time and finds some nation. And its judgment happens that day; that day becomes the Day of Yahweh, the Day of the Lord, for that nation at that time.

We can say that about going forward, too, if we have a Christian understanding of history. So St. Augustine understood in City of God that that’s what was happening to Rome, to old Rome, in his day, that judgment was coming. When you read what especially monastic Fathers living at the time of the fall of Constantinople said, they mourned the fall of Constantinople just like the book of Lamentations mourns the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians, but there was also an awareness among them that there were reasons why this happened and this was judgment from God that had come upon the city.

As we were talking about before, those are all examples with nations. Those are macrocosm examples. But the same dynamic is true in the microcosmic level, the level of a human person. The Scriptures will talk about judgment in terms of the death of an individual human person. Again, judgment is not always negative; it’s not always being cut off. This doesn’t mean that a person dies: this a judgment in the negative sense always.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, in some ways it might be easier if we use the word “discernment”: God’s discernment.

Fr. Stephen: Ehh.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] You’re not so much into that?

Fr. Stephen: I’m not a fan. Too wimpy.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. [Laughter] Well, and there’s the whole discernment blogging thing, which is just… Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Ehh.

Fr. Andrew: I wish it was just blogs these days. [Laughter] But, you know, that’s the idea of God turning his eye on the situation and sizing it up. This is how it is. So you can pass a test. You don’t always fail a test!

Fr. Stephen: There is also contained an idea of consequences.

Fr. Andrew: Right, right.

Fr. Stephen: Not that God is actively punishing, but that he’s no longer mercifully restraining the consequences. And so this is why Hebrews 9:27 says that it’s appointed for man once to die and then the judgment—

Fr. Andrew: And then the judgment.

Fr. Stephen: I know the old King James Version. I think it’s: “And thence the judgment,” actually.

But this relates to, of course—and we’ve talked about this before—our understanding of prayers for the dead and how that relates to judgment. So one of the things people who haven’t come— People who have come out of a tradition that rejects the idea of praying for the departed—I’ll put it that way—because… Let me just say there are plenty of Protestants who, though on paper they don’t believe in praying for departed people, who do pray for their departed loved ones.

Fr. Andrew: I mean, I literally was at a dinner last night where a Protestant pastor told the assembled who were there about how he led one of his parishioners in prayer for her departed mother.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. So there are certain folks who come from a tradition that rejects it, and so they have an issue with it. One of the, shall we say, objections that is raised is: Well, if the person’s dead, they’re dead. Once to die, then the judgment, right? So they’ve already experienced the Day of the Lord; they will already have experienced the day of judgment. The problem with that, of course, as we’ve talked about a bunch of times on this show, is how we experience time is not absolute. So, yes, insofar as we’re able to understand what it would be like to be a disembodied person—which is not much—we understand that they are in some way, from their perspective, participating in that judgment, participating in the Day of the Lord, that they’re not sitting around in a waiting room, because they don’t have a body to sit or to take up room. [Laughter]

From what we do know, from what we’re intimately familiar with, is our own experience of time and our own world. And from my perspective and my experience of time, the Day of the Lord is in the future. For me, it is in the future. And so when I pray, I’m praying from my perspective, as an individual human subject. I’m not making a universal, cosmic prayer. There may be someone who can do that, but it’s not me; I’m trying to put some words together to talk to God! [Laughter] And so from my perspective, day of judgment is not yet here. It’s in my future, and on that future day I will be standing beside this person whom I’m praying for—but that’s in the future for me, so I pray about it. That has nothing to do with the idea that that person has some agency to repent, as we’ve talked about before. It has to do with me offering my prayers to God, and God, who does not exist in time or experience a succession of moments, can choose to use my prayers as part of how he saves that person, if he wants to, just like he could choose to use my prayers, if I pray for someone to be healed, he can choose to use my prayers as one of the things by which he heals that person, if God so chooses. Doesn’t need them, but he can graciously choose to work through them if he wants to.

Fr. Andrew: All right, well, that’s the first half of this episode of Lord of Spirits on Doomsday. We’re going to take a short break, and we’ll be right back in a moment.

Fr. Andrew: Welcome back. It’s the second half of this episode of The Lord of Spirits. We’re talking about the judgment day, Doomsday, the end of the world. Yeah, we talked about the Day, the Day of the Lord, in the last half, and this one we’re going to continue on our conversation and especially look at some stuff in the New Testament, talking about that moment and what it means to be judged and all that kind of stuff.

It’s my understanding that the New Testament teaches that you’re judged according to a little list of doctrines you agree with. Is that right?

Fr. Stephen: Absolutely correct.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Good night, everybody!

Fr. Stephen: There’s a quiz; there’s a theology quiz. It’s true/false, though. Even if you don’t know what you’re doing, you have a 50/50 shot. [Laughter] So, yeah. No cheating.

In actuality— This may be shocking to some people. In fact, this whole half may be shocking to a whole ton of people. Every place in Scripture that talks about the day of judgment, the Day of Yahweh, that talks about the basis for that judgment—what it is, on what is it that people are judged—

Fr. Andrew: Criteria.

Fr. Stephen: —when they’re separated out, that macrocosmic judgment we were talking about. Every single one, including every single one in the New Testament, says that we’re judged according to our works.

Fr. Andrew: Things you do.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. You do.

Fr. Andrew: And don’t do.

Fr. Stephen: Or left undone, yes. That is the basis.

Fr. Andrew: That sounds like works righteousness, Uncle Steve!

Fr. Stephen: Yes, well… Get ready for it! [Laughter] So this is the only positive teaching on this found in the New Testament. We’re talking mainly in this half, this second half, about the New Testament, because I know we’ve got some folks out there who are like: “Well, yeah, that works righteousness is there in the Old Testament, them Pharisees, but not in the New Testament. That’s where it all changed.” Unfortunately, no.

In the New Testament, everywhere, it is positively taught that we are judged according to our works: according to what we have done in this life, or left undone. That is a teaching of the whole New Testament, without exception. Without exception.

Do you hear that buzzing? We may have to edit this. Seriously, do you hear it or no?

Fr. Andrew: No, no.

Fr. Stephen: Oh. I have a loud buzzing. There we go. It went away for me. Okay, snip! [Laughter]

This is what’s taught everywhere. There’s no exception. There’s no “This is what happens if you’re not in Christ.” There’s no “This is how it works for non-Christians.”

Fr. Andrew: “Get out of jail free” card…

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. This is how it works for every human. And we’re not just going to assert that; let’s give some examples. The first one is the one time that Christ addresses this, where Christ explicitly says, “When the judgment…” He references the judgment; we’ve already quoted, for example, the parable of the weeds. That’s talking about the judgment—wheat goes in the barn; weeds go in the fire—but it doesn’t say what the basis is for deciding who’s wheat and who’s weeds. So the one place where he lays out “Okay, here’s the difference between the two” is in what’s often referred to as the parable of the sheep and the goats, which we read on the Sunday of the Last Judgment in the Orthodox Church, as we get ready for Lent.

Fr. Andrew: Matthew 25.

Fr. Stephen: So here he describes, not just “Hey, goats and sheep are going to get separated: sheep go to heaven; goats go to hell,” but what makes someone a sheep and what makes someone a goat. This is in— We’re not going to read the whole thing, because this is fairly familiar. It’s Matthew 25:31-46, so you can…

Fr. Andrew: This is the bit where Jesus says to those on his right hand, “When I was hungry, you fed me; when I was thirsty, you gave me drink; when I was sick and in prison, you visited me; when I was naked, you clothed me.” And to those on his left he says, “I was those things, and you did not help me.”

Fr. Stephen: Right, and both groups say, “When did we see you?” And he said, “When you did it to the least of these, so you did it to me.” So this is very clearly— It’s not even one group did good things and the other group did evil things; it’s one group did good things and the other group did no things. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, just didn’t do those things. It’s interesting. Some people have this sense: “I’ll be okay in the judgment because I did not do this list of bad things,” but when, as you said, when Jesus specifically addresses this, he didn’t say, “Well, you goats, you’re out of here because you murdered, you raped, you pillaged, you stole”; it’s: “You didn’t do the good that was presented to you.” That’s what he says.

Fr. Stephen: As St. James says in his epistle, “He who knows the good he ought to do, and doesn’t do it, sins.”

Fr. Andrew: That’s pretty unambiguous.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah! [Laughter] But so this is it. There’s no way to read this parable… Both groups refer to him as “Lord,” by the way, in the parable. The goats say, “Lord, when did we see you like this?” So it’s not that one group acknowledges Jesus as Lord and the other one doesn’t. There’s no way to read this parable and get anything else out of it other than this is a judgment by works. There just isn’t. There’s not even special pleading possible.

The other big important piece here, of course, is how this works, as a basis, because of course if Christ is going to tell us, “Hey, when that final judgment comes, when the day comes when you stand before my judgment seat, here’s the standard by which you’re going to be judged,” why is he telling us that? So that we know how to order our lives in preparation for that. I mean, that’s the obvious context. He’s not just saying this for general interest. “Oh, by the way, for those of you who were wondering how the last judgment works, here’s how it works.” No, this is pointed. He’s telling it as a parable to people so that they can live accordingly, so that they can do accordingly.

This means that he’s not just describing the basis of that judgment, but he’s also describing the basis of the Christian life, of Christian ethics, of the way Christians are to live in the world. Inseparable— I mean, the basis of that for him here is the idea of the veneration of the image of God in other human persons. It’s again inescapable here. The whole idea is that if I give a cup of water to someone who is thirsty, I am giving that cup of water to Christ. That act that I perform ultimately—that respect, that honor that I give to that person, that good thing that I do for that person—is a good thing I’m doing for Christ. It’s honor and respect I’m giving to Christ, by giving it to that human person, even the least human person. And vice-versa: the disrespect, the dishonor also is dishonor and disrespect going to Christ.

This is the basis of our Christian ethic toward each other according to Christ; this is the basis of how we live. So if you’re someone who is of an iconoclastic bent, who rejects this principle, who rejects the idea that the honor bestowed on the image passes to the prototype, you’ve got a real problem not just with this parable but with Christian ethics, because if the honor I give to another human person doesn’t pass from them as the image of God to God himself, then that means if I do something good for another human, I’m doing it for them as opposed to doing it for Christ.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, instead of Christ. They get in the way! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Right! If you deny that it passes. So if you’re going to say me honoring an icon, showing honor to an icon or reverence to an icon of Christ, is somehow idolatry, or if you don’t want to drop the idolatry word, in some way distancing me from Christ, the same would be true when I do good for a person. The same would be true when a servant obeys their master, contra what St. Paul says, that you should obey them “as the Lord.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, why not just obey the Lord directly? [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: That would be instead. So if you’re going to go down that road, if you’re going to be a consistent iconoclast, you have to go down the Christian anarchist road—no king but Christ, where you give no honor to the government, the civil authorities, contra St. Paul, because that would be instead of Christ. You’re going to have to— How can you divide your time? You’re going to have to become some proto-monastic hermit, because time you spend with your wife and kids is time you’re not spending with Christ—if you take that iconoclastic argument seriously.

Now, of course, people don’t. People only apply that argument to Orthodox icons in apologetics against Orthodox people, but as Christians they have to acknowledge that principle everywhere else, ethically, or Christian ethics falls apart, because it’s based in this principle. And by the way—

Fr. Andrew: I was just going to say, it’s not just a series of commands, of things you’re supposed to be doing. Jesus gives a reason for it.

Fr. Stephen: Right, like: I don’t love my brother just because God told me to. I love my brother because, in loving my brother, I am actually loving God.

Fr. Andrew: Right, that’s what he says!

Fr. Stephen: But, by the way, just to further complicate this, the doctrine of the Holy Trinity is based on this principle, too. Most people don’t actually understand the doctrine of the Holy Trinity well enough to understand why iconoclasm wrecks it, but if you read… The place where that principle I’ve been referring to, that the honor, veneration, worship given to an object passes to the prototype—given to an image passes to the prototype—the place where that principle first gets laid out in those terms is not any argument about iconography. It’s St. Basil the Great talking about the Holy Trinity in terms of why we as Christians aren’t tritheists, why we don’t worship three gods, because the worship we give to Christ passes to God the Father, and that’s why we’re monotheists, monolatrists.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. I was going to say, there’s other places where— It’s not just that the worship of Christ is the worship of the Father, but Christ himself says things like, “If you’ve seen me, you’ve seen the Father. They hated both me and my Father.” There’s always this sense that the way you treat Jesus—

Fr. Stephen: He does not speak on his own authority; he speaks the words of his Father.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. “I must be about my Father’s business.” However you treat Jesus is how you’re treating the Father.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And so it’s not just all of Christian ethics that falls apart if you’re an iconoclast, it’s the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, and Christology. So it’s not just a question of… I get that some folks, especially in US kind of phobic culture of touching things and kissing things— Other cultures, men walk up and kiss each other on either cheek all the time to say hi. We don’t do that in the US. I know you think kissing pictures or kissing anything is kind of icky and weird, but the correct response to that, being kind of icked out by that, is not to deny the fundamental principle of Christian theology. Let me just suggest that. [Laughter] Let me just throw that out there, Gavin Ortlund! Oh, sorry, I didn’t mean anyone in particular. [Laughter] Yeah.

So if anyone is actually consistent with that, they won’t end up being a Christian. Fortunately, people are completely inconsistent about that. They just want to apply it to iconography. But this is why Orthodox Christians have been saying, ever since iconoclasm first reared its ugly head—iconoclasm was a fairly late development in Church history—since iconoclasm first reared its ugly head, this is why Orthodox Christians have defended the principles of iconography so strictly is because we’re defending this principle, because if you let go of this principle, your Christology falls apart, your view of Christian life falls apart, the doctrine of the Holy Trinity falls apart. And so this isn’t just some ancillary thing that just has to do with your church décor or whether you should just look at the iconography or kiss it. This is of critical importance to Christianity. So, yeah, people who haven’t understood how that works yet shouldn’t start pulling out Jenga blocks when they don’t know how the tower is built. [Laughter] Anyway.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, all that said. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: That was not off-topic, right?

Fr. Andrew: No, right. These are some of the—

Fr. Stephen: It’s critically important here to understand what Christ is saying.

Fr. Andrew: The works that we’re going to be judged on, deeds.

Fr. Stephen: It’s also important that if someone were wanting to argue with us and say, “Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait! This judgment-by-works stuff, ah, bad! This works righteousness stuff bad!” their go-to is probably going to be St. Paul.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and probably Romans especially.

Fr. Stephen: Right, that’s whom they’re going to go to; that’s the perspective from which they’re going to try to come back at us. But what does St. Paul say, starting in Romans, when St. Paul talks about the basis on which we are going to be judged?

Fr. Andrew: Here we go! Romans 2, starting with verse five and going through eleven.

But because of your hard and impenitent (or unrepentant) heart, you are storing up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath when God’s righteous judgment will be revealed. He will render to each one according to his works. To those who, by patience and well doing, seek for glory and honor and immortality, he will give eternal life; but for those who are self-seeking and do not obey the truth but obey unrighteousness, there will be wrath and fury. There will be tribulation and distress for every human being who does evil, the Jew first and also the Greek; but glory and honor and peace for everyone who does good, the Jew first and also the Greek. For God chose no partiality.

Fr. Stephen: So there’s not really a way to get around this one, either. Someone might say, “Well, St. Paul isn’t talking about the final judgment, like who goes to heaven and who goes to hell,” not that that’s our eschatology as Christians anyway. “This isn’t talking about eternal life and eternal condemnation; this is talking about rewards or something. Yeah, there’s a judgment of works, but that’s like you get jewels in your crown or something.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I’ve heard literally that. “Well, whether you get in or out is one question, but how big your mansion is or how nice your heavenly Rolls Royce is is what this is about.”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. “And some people are going to end up in the heaven slum…” The problem with that is he says he’ll render to each one according to his works, “To those who, by patience and well doing, seek for glory and honor and immortality, he will give eternal life.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. It’s about eternal life. I mean, immortality…

Fr. Stephen: “And for those who do not obey righteousness, there will be wrath and fury.” It’s patience in doing good, is literally what he says. Those who seek for glory and honor and immortality by patience in doing good receive eternal life at the day of judgment, according to St. Paul.

Fr. Andrew: And tribulation and distress for every human being who does evil.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and this isn’t— He’s not talking about— This isn’t a place where St. Paul is doing this rhetorical thing. He’s not saying, “Oh, well, this is the way it worked in the old covenant, but now we’re going to to something new,” because notice he says, “The Jew first and also for the Greek.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it applies to Gentiles.

Fr. Stephen: Greeks weren’t included in the old covenant.

Fr. Andrew: Yep. And not just Greek Greeks. “The Greek” is “the nations”; it’s sort of everybody else in addition to the Judeans, in St. Paul.

Fr. Stephen: Right, he’s talking about Gentiles: Jews and Gentiles. So this is talking about Christ’s judgment seat. There’s not a place— And this isn’t St. Paul sort of problematizing to then give you a way out. Because you notice he doesn’t say here, “Therefore, everyone stands condemned. There’s going to be wrath and fury for everyone.” He most definitely doesn’t say that.

Fr. Andrew: There’s no sense of “If you do—”

Fr. Stephen: “But now you’re off the hook.”

Fr. Andrew: Or even “If you do good, you get honor and immortality, but, you know, no one does good, so…”

Fr. Stephen: “Yeah, but you can’t.” [Laughter] He doesn’t! He doesn’t. And it’s important. Verse five—we didn’t include verse five just because he talks about the day of wrath when God’s righteous judgment is revealed, just to locate this on the day of judgment. But why is it that the people he’s speaking to—or how is it—that they’re storing up wrath for themselves on the day of judgment? Because they have a heart that is hard and unrepentant. The word that’s translated “unrepentant” there is ametanoiton. You may hear metanoia in there.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, “without repentance.”

Fr. Stephen: It’s got an alpha on the front. A-repentance: your lack of repentance.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and that’s about what you do; it’s not about what you think or what you feel. It’s about what you do.

Fr. Stephen: Right. So the answer to this, from what St. Paul says here— The answer for this is not for these people he’s talking to to believe something, think something, change their mind in terms of their thoughts about something; it’s to repent of the evil they’ve done and to begin to patiently seek to do good. That’s what he presents the solution as. Which— What St. Paul says here [is] not really any different [from] what St. John the Forerunner is saying, or what Christ was saying in the parable of the sheep and the goats. It’s a judgment about works, therefore repent and seek to do good.

It’s amazing… And I don’t— I’m not using “amazing” rhetorically. It does amaze me sometimes when I sit back and think that one of the most controversial things you can say in American Christian circles is that Christians ought to try not to commit sins and to go and do good things that are pleasing to God. Like, you would think… Like, yeah. But as someone who has said that publicly in mixed American Christian company, you get accused of teaching works righteousness. How dare you to tell people that. Like, you can’t swing a dead cat in the Bible—I don’t know why you’d be swinging a dead cat in a Bible, but you can’t swing a dead cat in the Bible without hitting that.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I mean, righteousness is… I mean, whenever righteousness is described, he or she is described by the way that he lives. That’s what it means to be righteous. I mean, some people might argue this and say, “We’ve got the righteousness of God and not our own. It’s just as filthy rags,” and blah blah blah, but that’s not about your good deeds are worth nothing, it’s…

Fr. Stephen: That’s a person repenting.

Fr. Andrew: Right, it’s “Did you…?” It’s not you came up with your own impressive things that you think are going to get you saved, like your own feats of heroism. That’s what’s being spoken against there; that’s the garbage. If you do the things that God has given you to do, that’s not filthy rags. That’s God’s works. But I don’t want to give too many spoilers.

Fr. Stephen: Loving your brother and killing your brother are not equally sinful! [Laughter] One of those is pleasing to God, and the other one is not! And, yes, I know, even when I love my brother, my motives are never pure and da-de-dah, and da-da-dee-dee-da-da-daa—it’s still more pleasing to God than me murdering him! [Laughter]

So we’ve gotten to this weird place, and I don’t think we’re in that weird place in the real world… Our Protestant friends who would get the most mad at me for the way I’m talking right now on the theoretical level, if you look at how they actually live their life, they try not to commit sins and they try to do good for people. And they functionally do it, but if you say it, it sounds wrong to them on this ideological level.

Fr. Andrew: “You think you’re adding something to your salvation!”

Fr. Stephen: Right, and of course not, and they don’t think that when they’re out doing good things for people to help people. But, again… So we need to get past this. If the Scriptures feel totally fine about talking this way, we can talk this way, too. And if the Scriptures talk this way consistently all the way through the New Testament, as we’re showing here, then maybe any idea we’ve come up with theologically that conflicts with that we should just dumpster it and go with the way the Bible talks about it.

Fr. Andrew: How about some more examples? [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yes, another example from St. Paul in 2 Corinthians.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah! So 2 Corinthians 5:6-10:

So we are always of good courage. We know that while we are at home in the body, we are away from the Lord, for we walk by faith, not by sight. Yes, we are of good courage, and we would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord. So, whether we are at home or away, we make it our aim to please him. For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive what is due for what he has done in the body, whether good or evil.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. So before the judgment seat of Christ, we are judged for what we have done!

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and it’s notable here that he says, “We all must appear before the judgment seat of Christ.” He doesn’t say, “But if you believe that Jesus is your Savior and accept him as Lord of your life, then you don’t have to appear before the judgment seat of Christ.”

Fr. Stephen: “Get out of judgment free” card.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. And he says we’re all going to appear and we’re all going to receive [according to] what we’ve done in the body. That’s pretty works-y! [Laughter] It’s about your body, about what you do with your body.

Fr. Stephen: And the reason we read those first few verses is… That “for” at the beginning of verse 10: “For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ,” that’s “because.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that’s why we walk by faith, not by sight.

Fr. Stephen: The effect of that, our knowledge that we’re going to have to appear before the judgment seat of Christ, to receive what is due, whether good or evil, for what we’ve done in this life is what causes us, in this life, to try to live our lives faithfully, in a way that is pleasing to Christ.

Fr. Andrew: Because it’s actually critical. What we do in this life is actually critical.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, in a way that’s pleasing to Christ.

Fr. Andrew: Not just bonus.

Fr. Stephen: Not just because you’ll be kind of embarrassed but get eternal life anyway. That’s not what St. Paul says.

Fr. Andrew: All right, next one.

Fr. Stephen: And other New Testament authors—should be no surprise—don’t disagree with him.

Fr. Andrew: St. Peter, for instance. 1 Peter 1:17, just one verse:

And if you call on him as Father who judges impartially, according to each one’s deeds, conduct yourself with fear throughout the time of your exile.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so God is going to judge you according to your deeds, according to your works. Therefore conduct yourself with fear, with the fear of God, with awe and reverence toward that judgment, throughout the time of your life in this world.

Fr. Andrew: All right. Well, back to St. Paul. Colossians 3:23-25:

Whatever you do, work heartily as for the Lord, and not for men, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as the reward. You are serving the Lord Christ. For the wrong-doer will be paid back for the wrong he has done, and there is no partiality.

Fr. Stephen: Once again, this isn’t St. Paul problematizing, like “This is what we face, but now just believe in Jesus and you avoid all this.” He never says that. He never says that.

Now, there is one place where Christ talks about judgment that some people might see as being slightly different.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so this is Matthew 12, where the Lord says:

Either make the tree good and its fruit good, or make the tree bad and its fruit bad, for the tree is known by its fruit. You brood of vipers, how can you speak good when you are evil? For out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks. The good person out of his good treasure brings forth good, and the evil person out of his evil treasure brings forth evil. I tell you, on the day of judgment, people will give account for every careless word they speak, for by your words you will be justified and by your words you will be condemned.

You can see how some people might take that, especially those last bits, as saying, “Well, it’s about the things you say you believe: your words are going to justify you or condemn you.” But he wasn’t just talking about believing!

Fr. Stephen: Right. He’s talking about a good person and a bad person, and that their acts of speaking, the things that come out of their mouth, those are actions. As Christ says, “The person who says to his brother, ‘You fool,’ has already murdered him in his heart.” That’s what he’s talking about here. So this is not a different standard; this is Christ clarifying that standard, that saying lewd things and engaging in sexual immorality are not two different things where one’s okay and the other one isn’t. Saying mean things to people but not actually putting your hands on them is not, like, okay.

And this is not… You know, sometimes this stuff gets this: “Oh, Christ is making the law more intense.” It’s like, that was already in the Torah; he’s just interpreting it for people who had been interpreting it incorrectly to justify their own behavior. He’s interpreting it to them correctly, because— Just to use the Ten Commandments, what is covetousness if not the thoughts that precede stealing? What is coveting a man’s wife if not the thoughts that precede adultery? Christ isn’t changing the Torah. It’s just he had a bunch of people he was talking to who were saying, “Well, you know, I thought about it, but I didn’t do it, so, you know…” He’s saying, “No, no, no, no. Thinking about it is doing something.” And that’s already there in the commandments. So that’s not really an outlier. It’s still works, but that includes the words that come out of your mouth, not just the things you do with your hands and the rest of your body.

And so then we started with Matthew, we said the whole New Testament…

Fr. Andrew: More or less.

Fr. Stephen: Ending up near the end of the book of Revelation…

Fr. Andrew: Well, we are talking about judgment, so we do need a little apocalypse, right? Revelation 20:12:

And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. Then another book was opened, which is the book of life, and the dead were judged by what was written in the books, according to what they had done.

That’s what’s in the book of life.

Fr. Stephen: And that is Revelation 20:12 because the world is coming to an end in 2012.

Fr. Andrew: I knew it! [Laughter] Because chapters and verses were written there by the apostles, right?

Fr. Stephen: Yes. They were authorized. It’s the authorized version! [Laughter]

So these books are opened. What books are those? We’ve talked about this a little bit on previous episodes of the show. These heavenly books: earlier than that in the Ancient Near East they’re heavenly tablets. Sometimes… So in some Second Temple Jewish sources, like the book of Jubilees, you’ve got an angelic being who sort of records everything that’s happening on earth, everything everybody does. Sometimes the books are just there; we don’t get an explicit description of who’s doing the writing or that kind of thing, but the books are there with everything everyone has done.

And we’ve also talked before about the book of life, the idea of a name being in the book of life, being related to divine memory, that this is— To be remembered by God means you can—because God is eternal—means eternal life. This is eternal life, to know you, the only true God. And this is why, of course, as we’ve said before, we sing, “Memory Eternal,” in the Orthodox Church at memorial services. May the person’s memory be eternal. If they’re remembered by God, their name is in the book of life.

But, of course, people can be blotted out of the book of life. We read about names being blotted out of the book of life repeatedly in the Scriptures. And that means the name’s erased; the name is gone. This person is forgotten and abandoned by God. This is an image of condemnation.

So, yes, once again, here’s the standard—it’s works. It’s what people have done. So are we on Lord of Spirits teaching works righteousness?

Fr. Andrew: Yes. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yes. In one sense.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because, again, to live, to be a righteous person is someone who lives the right way, and righteousness equals justice.

Fr. Stephen: It’s the same word in Greek. The idea is if a person is righteous, they are right; they are rightly ordered, not just internally, but rightly ordered in terms of their relations with God and other people. And that is not a different thing from how they live their life. It doesn’t mean they’re right with God and other people on the inside, but are degenerates in the way they live their life. [Laughter] That dog don’t hunt. You can’t be re-generate and a degenerate at the same time—sorry, Martin Luther.

So, yeah, when it says in Genesis 6 that Noah was righteous from his generation, that doesn’t mean he lived his life exactly like everybody else but he had had a foreign righteousness freely imputed to him. [Laughter] That’s not what that means!

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it means he lived differently.

Fr. Stephen: And you’re doing an unbelievable amount of eisegesis to say that’s what it means! [Laughter] It means the way he lived was fundamentally different [from] the way the other people in the world were living, “whose thoughts were always evil all the time,” we’re told in Genesis. His weren’t. That’s not…

But also, are we teaching on Lord of Spirits works righteousness? Also, no.

Fr. Andrew: No. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Because what people usually mean… Well, here’s the problem. I was going to say, “What people usually mean,” but I don’t think it’s clear, and I think that’s part of the problem.

Fr. Andrew: Right, I remember when I was being brought up in low-church Evangelical circles, this was talked about all the time, and it was constantly said, “There’s nothing you can do to earn your way to heaven. It’s a free gift from God. Your righteousness is as filthy rags before the Lord.” So there’s this idea: “Well, those Catholics”—they probably hadn’t heard of the Orthodox. “Those Catholics think they can earn their way to heaven with their good deeds!” Like, this was the whole matrix in which it was talked about, exactly like that. I must have heard a thousand sermons that that was basically the message.

So when people talk about works righteousness, that’s what they generally mean. “You think you can do enough good deeds and earn your way to heaven!”

Fr. Stephen: Right, but that’s not… The problem is I think that’s not sufficiently disambiguated in most people’s minds from just: “Hey, as a Christian, you ought to try to do good in the world.”

Fr. Andrew: Right.

Fr. Stephen: And I think at least some of the Reformers would have wanted to disambiguate that. The reason I say some of the Reformers is this is another one of the places—and this is a place where we’ve just got to go there, Protestant friends. This is one of the places where Protestantism in the 16th century and 17th century was understandably reactionary against Roman Catholicism, against Rome. But that reactionary stance has remained for another coming up on 400 years that it didn’t need to.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, they’re reacting against this Roman Catholic idea…

Fr. Stephen: Medieval Roman Catholic system.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, they’re reacting against this idea that there’s— And I think I’m going to mispronounce this, but I don’t mean to—supererogatory works or merit. [Laughter] Don’t “at” me, people!

Fr. Stephen: Now I’m going to make you explain the difference between condign and congruent.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, don’t do that! [Laughter] No, I mean, this idea… There’s this idea that the saints, they did everything that was required for them to get to heaven, but they did extra. And that extra can be repurposed for ordinary people, to help them. I mean, that’s basically kind of the idea, this sort of treasure-house of merit. I know, Roman Catholic friends, that I’m probably oversimplifying, but I’m just trying to simplify.

Fr. Stephen: Let’s just cut to the chase on that.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, okay.

Fr. Stephen: Roman Catholic friends, one of the memes out there is that Lord of Spirits is always misrepresenting Roman Catholicism. There’s a basic problem right now within the Church of Rome, and that is that it is unclear what the Church of Rome is on any topic.

Fr. Andrew: But, but, but! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Because I come on this show… I have literally quoted documents that have official standing in the Roman Catholic Church, and been accused of misrepresenting Roman Catholicism. I have… [Laughter] I have quoted cardinals who have been heads of Vatican congresses and been told I have been misrepresenting Roman Catholicism.

Fr. Andrew: Well, that’s because they’re misrepresenting Roman Catholicism!

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Exactly.

Fr. Andrew: I don’t know…

Fr. Stephen: And there’s a lot of Roman Catholics who think Pope Francis misrepresents Roman Catholicism! He’s the pope, right!?

Fr. Andrew: I know many that feel that way.

Fr. Stephen: So, look, right… [Laughter] The best we can do on this show is quote members of the Magisterium and official documents, okay? And if you think those are a misrepresentation, your issue is not with me or with Fr. Andrew; your issue is with the people issuing those documents and the people who said those quotes, because that’s all we have to go on! That’s all we have to go on.

Fr. Andrew: But, yeah, so the Reformation is reacting against this idea that—

Fr. Stephen: Historically, in the pre-counter-Reformation, it’s pretty darn clear and I think hard to argue with, that Roman Catholicism was teaching and this is what the Reformers are reacting against, that grace received in the lives of people through the sacraments enabled them to, in various ways, accrue merit by different means. So there’s condign merit, congruent merit—I’m not going to go into all that now; I do actually know the difference, but I’m not going to go into all that now. ...to accrue merit, which merit, when it reached a certain point, qualified one for eternal life. That is not—that is not—even that, that the Reformation objected to—even that is not Pelagianism. Pelagianism is the idea that you don’t need grace for salvation.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that you can really, truly do it all on your own.

Fr. Stephen: So that merit is always produced. Even in that medieval Roman Catholic system, that merit was always produced by the work of grace, although grace was seen as a quantifiable, created substance, and that’s a whole other debate—but was always produced by grace in the person’s life. So it’s not Pelagianism.

And that saints accrued more merit than was required for eternal life. That merit goes into the treasury. That treasury is accessible by the keys of St. Peter and can be given out; that merit can be given out in the form of grace by, in particular, the bishop of Rome, the pope of Rome. And that’s the system they’re reacting against.

So they saw that—the Reformers saw that and did not—this is why I say this is a reactionary position—they didn’t throw the whole thing out and start over from the Bible. They didn’t, and they don’t claim to. Many Evangelical Protestants today talk like they did, but Luther and Calvin would smack you upside the head if you said that, told them they threw everything out and started over.

Fr. Andrew: No one can actually do that, even if they’re trying really hard.

Fr. Stephen: But what they said was— They agreed, yes, there’s a certain amount of merit you need for eternal life, but Christ earned it all, and the whole thing gets imputed into your account, all at once, when you’re justified.

Fr. Andrew: Boom.

Fr. Stephen: That’s it. And so it’s not related to the things you do, it’s not even related to the sacraments. The Reformers did say the sacraments are a means of grace, but they mean that in another sense; it’s sanctifying grace—again, I’m not going to get into all of that now. I’m mentioning it because, again, we’d get “at”-ed by a bunch of people.

Fr. Andrew: I’m sure we will.

Fr. Stephen: We will anyway, right.

Fr. Andrew: I’m sure this segment will draw a little bit of that.

Fr. Stephen: Right, but so the reason why we’re not teaching any kind of works righteousness, even if you consider the medieval Roman system to be works righteousness—that’s not what we’re saying, because we don’t think there’s a threshold.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there’s not a certain amount that you need.

Fr. Stephen: There’s no merit coming into the equation here. We’re not talking about that at all. So there is a sense in which we could say salvation is by works, and that is in the sense of theurgy, which is today’s secret word.

Fr. Andrew: Everybody scream real loud every time Fr. Stephen says, “Theurgy.”

Fr. Stephen: Yes. Or if someone says it without having heard this episode, you could give him $100, I guess? That’s even more obscure reference, but… Right, “theurgy,” literally the works of God. That probably tells you where we’re going with this.

Fr. Andrew: In this case, the etymology works very well.

Fr. Stephen: Well, because it’s a coinage.

Fr. Andrew: They’re like, okay, let’s make up a word.

Fr. Stephen: Let’s make up a word, yeah. So we are saved by works, but it’s God’s works, not some independent works of ours.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so the point, then, of saying that we believe in works righteousness, that we teach that, is that—and that we’re going to be judged according to our works, because that’s everywhere in the New Testament—is that our works, the good things that we do, actually come from God. And so when we do those things—

Fr. Stephen: That God is doing them.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, God is doing them. When we do those things, then we are participating in the works of God. So if I give $100 to my church, it’s not just that God gave me that $100, it’s that God is giving $100 to the church, and I’m just participating in it.

Fr. Stephen: Ultimately, you’re giving that $100 to God.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and I’m giving it to God, right. And so when I do that, it also transforms me. It changes me. I actually become righteous; I’m not just imputed as righteous. I’m not just said to be righteous; I actually am righteous when I do righteous things.

Fr. Stephen: Right. You actually become righteous, not because you’ve earned that status…

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I didn’t earn it.

Fr. Stephen: But, with your co-operation, not against your will, but with your co-operation, God has made you more righteous. God has shared his righteousness with you. And righteousness and justice are the same word. He is putting you back in order and putting your relationships with him and with other people back in order. But that’s a process—pruning, remember?—that takes place over time. And so doing the works of God, participating in the works of God—God can look at those works when they’re done and call them good because they’re his!

Fr. Andrew: Because they’re his, yep.

Fr. Stephen: I can’t muster up enough love in me to love all the people I’m supposed to love and to love them the way I should, but God loves them that way already, and so when I show God’s love to them, which is ultimately showing God’s love to God—remember, the whole iconography thing, “thine own of thine own,” and all that—then that is transformative, for me and for the recipient of God’s love. And that is how God is transfiguring us and the world.

Part of the problem here, too, I think, is that—and I know I’ve mentioned this on the show before—we have the relationship between beliefs, thoughts, ideas—the things we believe, the ideas we hold to be true—and our life and the way we live.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, we tend to think, “Well, once I agree with this, once I understand this, then I’ll do it.”

Fr. Stephen: Right. We say people’s beliefs: if you believe the right things, so you have the right theology in your head, then you’ll live your life the correct way, because your beliefs affect the way you live—and that is false.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: If that were true, there would be no hypocrites. That is just patently not true! Read the end of Romans 7: “The good I want to do, I do not do!” [Laughter] “What I do not want to do, I do!”

Fr. Andrew: Yes, St. Paul knew it very, very well, believed it very, very well. And I’ve seen this, honestly… I mean, you and I have both seen this pastorally, where someone maybe doesn’t understand something or doesn’t know how they feel about it, very kind of modern American ways of talking. And you encourage them: “Well, look. Do this. Pray this daily prayer rule. Do this. When you come to church, make the sign of the cross. Do this. When you— Even though you don’t particularly feel like you love your wife, do a good thing for her at least once a day.” And if people do those things—if I do those things—then over time I discover they’re not only easier to do, but the way I think about them changes, so that conviction actually follows conditioning. The action precedes the belief. The belief is not—

And I was actually— There’s a quote, a great quote from St. Athanasius—I think it’s from On the Incarnation—that I just saw today, where he says—and I’m probably slightly paraphrasing, but he says, “Unless you have a pure mind and try to imitate, you cannot possibly”—and this is how it is: “You cannot possibly understand the teachings of the saints unless you have a pure mind and try to imitate their life.” It’s one of the best— And it’s great, because it’s one of those quotes that even if you take it out of context, it still has the same meaning! And he says that. If you’re not living it, then you can’t understand it.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, it’s not possible. And so, yes, ideas—these thoughts, these things—are epiphenomenal. And this is all the time on this show! Kind of the whole purpose of this show is correcting a lot of bad ideas and ways of thinking we’ve gotten from our culture and our society. And most of these things aren’t things that someone sat down and told and we believed at some point in the past.

Fr. Andrew: No, we weren’t taught these as lessons.

Fr. Stephen: And in fact, a lot of them, if we were asked straight out— Like if you ask the average Christian straight out, “Do angels and demons exist?” they’ll say, “Yeah!” Does that have any affect on anything in their life? No. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah: What are you actually doing about that?

Fr. Stephen: The six days a week, you live basically the same way an atheist does, and then: go to church. [Laughter] An atheist who’s a reasonably moral person. No one was taught that. And if asked directly, they wouldn’t say they believe it, but, through years of living a certain way, being in a certain society, having media present you information in a certain way, we’ve—all of us, hosts of this show included—been guided to certain ways of looking at things and viewing things, slowly over time. And so we’ve got to break those, but those ideas—those thoughts, those ways of thinking, those ways of viewing the world—came through practice, came through a way of life, came through repeated experiences.

And the opposite is true as well. All the time I have folks who come from— For example, who come into the Orthodox Church from a Protestant background and were getting near the end of their catechesis, and they’re kind of concerned because: “Oh, I’m supposed to get chrismated. I’m supposed to get baptized and—I’m still not sure about this Mary stuff. It still makes me a little, nnn, I don’t know,” because of the way they were brought up. And my answer to them is, like: “Well, then, no. Gatekeeping! You cannot be chrismated or baptized until you agree with this list of points of theology from the Orthodox Church”—I tell them the exact opposite! I tell them, “That’s fine. We’ll baptize you; we’ll chrismate you. You’ll live as an Orthodox Christian,” and invariably, within a couple of years, those people say, “Oh, yeah! All of a sudden, I get it! I never got it, but I came to the Akathist hymns, and now this Theotokos stuff makes sense to me all of a sudden. Now iconography makes sense to me all of a sudden.”

That’s the answer. The answer is life. The answer is not having an argument where I prevail and demonstrate that this point of theology is correct. I kind of wish it was that, because I’m good at it, but that’s not how it works. I’m much better at intellectual argument than I am at life. I mean, I’ve got a wall of graduate degrees to attest to this, and non-sainthood to attest to the other. [Laughter]

But that’s the reality of how it is. St. Paul— Again, St. Paul in Romans sums it up. It’s not the hearers of the law but the doers who are justified.

Fr. Andrew: Pretty straightforward.

Fr. Stephen: You can know the Torah backwards and forwards; it doesn’t help you if you don’t do it.

Fr. Andrew: All right, well, that’s the end of the second half, but there’s a third half to come! So we’re going to take our final break, and we’ll be right back with The Lord of Spirits.

Fr. Andrew: And we’re back with the third half of The Lord of Spirits in this pre-recorded episode. Again, we’re not taking calls this time, because Fr. Stephen is up in Canadia when this airs live.

Fr. Stephen: The Great White North, eh?

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] That’s right! Where everyone’s sore-y.

Yeah, so we’re talking about judgment; we’re talking about doomsday. We just spent the first couple halves talking about—well, especially this last half—works and the judgment according to works, but also the Day of the Lord in the first half in particular and what exactly that means.

Fr. Stephen: Judgment day.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, judgment day, end of days.

Fr. Stephen: Which— You won’t know what I’m about to talk about, but is a weird faction if you really think about it, especially Dominik Mysterio. I mean, I get what he’s doing, but it’s a weird faction. Anyway, go ahead.

Fr. Andrew: I’ll look that up later, I guess. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: There’s a very select group of our audience…

Fr. Andrew: I was about to say, is that a Terminator thing?

Fr. Stephen: No.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, okay. I know there’s a Terminator II: Judgment Day, and I have seen that film.

Fr. Stephen: That’s a pro-wrasslin’ thing.

Fr. Andrew: Oh! Oh, yeah. A friend of mine actually worked— One of my friends who was a stagehand as well, he actually worked a couple of pro-wrestling shows and had some really fun stories to tell about guys who—the wrestlers, like out in the hallways, they turn the camera on them and they’re all like—[Pro-wrestling growls]—and, you know, thumping their chests or whatever at some other guy, and then as soon as the cameras are off, they’re buds. [Laughter] It might not be real, Fr. Stephen! I’m just saying… It might not be real.

Fr. Stephen: Man! There are kids who listen to this show, man! [Laughter] What’s next? Santa Claus? Tooth fairy? Whom are you after next?

Fr. Andrew: Jonathan Pageau said Santa Claus is real!

Fr. Stephen: You are a thief of joy.

Fr. Andrew: I am. [Laughter] All right, so, what does all that have to do with the bodily resurrection? Which probably to some people is going to sound like a non sequitur.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, it’s not like we ramble or digress on this show! I mean, obviously it must be pertinent!

Fr. Andrew: Not ever. Not even a little bit.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] No, I mean, I think right off the bat, even though some people might say the bodily resurrection and the last judgment, those are different topics, like they’re thinking about systematic theology and theological topics and subheadings. Obviously, from any Christian perspective, the resurrection of the body and the final judgment are linked, at least sort of temporally. These are things that go together; they happen together.

But what we’re going to talk about here—we’re not talking about the bodily resurrection per se; we talked about that in a previous episode—but we’re talking about why those two things are linked and how those two things—the bodily resurrection and the last judgment, the final judgment, the final setting-right of the world by God, restoration of justice by God—how those two things go together, and ultimately—spoilers for this third half—how they not only go together but they’re inseparable.

We have to start by talking about the origins. We talked about ideas arising. Whence does the concept of the bodily resurrection arise? So if folks know anything about the Pharisees and the Sadducees who show up in the New Testament, if you know one thing about the Pharisees and the Sadducees, it’s that the Pharisees believed in the bodily resurrection and the Sadducees did not.

Fr. Andrew: Right, that’s kind of the thing people know.

Fr. Stephen: And that’s why the corny joke: That’s why they were sad-you-see?

Fr. Andrew: Right.

Fr. Stephen: Ahh!

Fr. Andrew: I know. I grew up with that joke, I did. I grew up with that joke.

Fr. Stephen: You should never joke about the Pharisees and the Sadducees. I got a very angry phone call about this once.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Wow! From a Pharisee or a Sadducee?

Fr. Stephen: Not joking! That is not a joke. I really did get a phone call, excoriating me for joking about the Pharisees and the Sadducees.

Fr. Andrew: Wow.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] From a Southern gentleman, who was very upset. And so this is true. This is not “the one thing you thought about Pharisees and Sadducees is wrong.” The one thing you know about Pharisees and Sadducees is right; that is correct. Now, it may not be for the reason you think, because if there’s two things people know about the Pharisees and the Sadducees, then the second thing they know is that the Sadducees only considered the Torah, the Pentateuch, the five books of Moses—only considered that to be canonical, and nothing else; whereas the Pharisees had the larger Hebrew Bible that included the Prophets and, depending on when we’re talking about in history, a bunch of the Writings. Those were formed over time. And even in the first century, there were still debates about Esther and Ecclesiastes and some of those.

And so because that’s the second thing people know, people tend to assume that the second thing they know and the first thing that they know are directly related. And this happens through a kind of anachronistic belief that first-century Jewish folks believed in sola scriptura, and therefore, well, since the bodily resurrection isn’t clearly described in the Torah itself, therefore the Sadducees didn’t believe in it, because it wasn’t in their Bible, whereas the Pharisees had the bigger Bible and so it was in there and so they believed in it. [Laughter] And that’s wildly anachronistic, because, first of all, didn’t nobody have a Bible in the sense that we use it.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, what’s a Bible, you guys?

Fr. Stephen: These are separate scrolls and stuff. This is a question of the relative authority of books. But also, the Pharisees and the Sadducees actually agreed that the Torah was in a class by itself. The Pharisees did not—and their descendants in Rabbinical Judaism do not—put the other texts in the Hebrew Scriptures—the Navi’im and the Ketuvim, the Prophets and the Writings—do not put them on the same level as the Torah. So that’s not the real source of disagreement there about the texts. Both of them agreed.

The issue was primarily a liturgical issue in that the way this functionally happened— We’ve talked before about how, even in Christian terms, what makes something canonical is that it’s read publicly, in the gathering. And this is derived from this, with the Pharisees and the Sadducees. The Pharisees had a reading from these other texts, in addition to the Torah reading, in the structure of the synagogue service, which, to the Sadducees, looked like they were putting them on par with the Torah. The Pharisees insisted otherwise, and they didn’t just insist otherwise in arguments. This is played out in the synagogue service: There’s the procession with the Torah scroll. The Torah reading is treated differently from the other readings.

And, by the way, the same is true for Christians in the New Testament. This is how anachronistic that kind of sola scriptura view is, and you can see this in an Orthodox church today. We make a procession with the Gospel book. The gospel reading is only done by clergy; the epistle reading can be done by lay people. In some situations, the epistle reading can be done by people who aren’t even Orthodox Christians, let alone only clergy. Everyone stands for the gospel reading; people can sit for the epistle reading. So even— This is something we’ve actually kept from Judaism, is the idea of preeminence within the canon.

This is not a rabbit-trail I will go down here, but that also—that idea of preeminence within the canon—if you don’t understand that, you’re going to find it really hard to understand what’s going on in the Orthodox Church when we talk about the preeminence of Scripture within Tradition and how that cashes out.

But so this is a liturgical, primarily, dispute. Canon disputes were always liturgical disputes in the ancient Church and in ancient Judaism. So that’s not why the Sadducees didn’t believe in it and the Pharisees did.

It is true that the places where we explicitly see the bodily resurrection discussed in the Hebrew Bible are from later texts, texts later than the Torah, written after the Torah, so that much is true. That much is true. But for the Pharisees, the bodily resurrection is not so much derived from these places where it’s mentioned in these other texts as these other texts are reflecting the belief in the bodily resurrection that developed because the bodily resurrection—this idea: this idea of the bodily resurrection—emerged from and played a particular role within the understanding of God’s justice, which is why we’re talking about it now and why it’s critically important to understanding the last judgment, the final establishment of justice.

We’re going to read one of these texts. It’s a little long—you’ll live. [Laughter] But this is from Job, and this is one of the clearest texts, and then we’ll have a couple of other, shorter texts from the Old Testament, from the Hebrew Bible, that talk very specifically, very clearly, unambiguously, about the bodily resurrection. These three text we’re going to read from the Hebrew Bible are actually probably clearer in terms of the physical bodily resurrection than a lot of the texts in the New Testament are; that’s how clear it is.

Fr. Andrew: All right. Job 19:1-27.

Then Job answered and said:

How long will you torment me and break me in pieces with words? These ten times you have cast reproach upon me. Are you not ashamed to wrong me? And even if it be true that I have erred, my error remains with myself. If indeed you magnify yourselves against me and make my disgrace an argument against me, know then that God has put me in the wrong and closed his net about me.

Behold, I cry out: Violence! But I am not answered. I call for help, but there is no justice. He has walled up my way so that I cannot pass, and he has set darkness upon my paths. He has stripped from me my glory and taken the crown from my head. He breaks me down on every side, and I am gone, and my hope has he pulled up like a tree. He has kindled his wrath against me and counts me as his adversary. His troops come on together. They have cast up their siege ramp against me and encamp around my tent. He has put my brothers far from me, and those who knew me are wholly estranged from me. My relatives have failed me; my close friends have forgotten me. The guests in my house and my maidservants count me a stranger; I have become a foreigner in their eyes. I call to my servant, but he gives me no answer. I must plead with him with my mouth for mercy.

My breath is strange to my wife, and I am a stench to the children of my own mother. Even young children despise me. When I rise, they talk against me. All my intimate friends abhor me, and those whom I loved have turned against me. My bones stick to my skin and to my flesh, and I have escaped by the skin of my teeth.

Have mercy on me! Have mercy on me, O you my friends! For the hand of God has touched me. Why do you, like God, pursue me? Why are you not satisfied with my flesh? O that my words were written! O that they were inscribed in a book! O that with an iron pen and lead they were engraved in the rock forever! For I know that my Redeemer lives, and at last he will stand upon the earth. And after my skin has been thus destroyed, yet in my flesh I shall see God, whom I shall see for myself, and my eyes shall behold, and not another besides me. My heart faints within me.

Fr. Stephen: So you may say, “Why did we read all that, since the stuff about the bodily resurrection is right there at the end?” [Laughter] Because it’s important to see how it’s framed. I don’t know of a more clear statement than: “After my skin has been thus destroyed, yet in my flesh I shall see God.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, “in my flesh.”

Fr. Stephen: “I and not another.” So this is— I know there will be some people who will point out: “Well, I know the Greek tradition points out Job as being the grandson of Esau,” which is true, and they’ll say, “Well, this takes place in the patriarchal period”—this is true. It was not written before the Torah. Job didn’t write it. The text doesn’t say Job wrote it, and I don’t care if a study Bible note says Job wrote it; he didn’t write it. [Laughter] I don’t know where the study Bible note is even getting that! You can look at it in Hebrew. It was written after the Torah.

And also, now that that has ticked a certain group of people off, let me tick off another group of people. That really clear statement of the bodily resurrection we just read? The Greek butchers it. The Greek absolutely butchers it, like changes verb tenses and stuff. There’s no way to determine why. We don’t know who translated Greek Job, because, again, as I know we’ve mentioned on the show before, the Septuagint, the work of the 70 rabbis, was a translation of the Torah, of the Pentateuch; they didn’t translate Job. The letter to Aristeas does not say they translated Job. None of the Church Fathers say they translated Job. So we don’t know who translated it. Maybe it was a Sadducee and he was deliberately fiddling with it. Who knows! But, yeah, it gets made hash in Greek. In the Hebrew, it’s very clearly talking about the bodily resurrection; it’s very clearly talking about the fact that God will stand upon the earth on the last day, in verse 25 in the Hebrew—not so clear in the Greek; that may be another reason why it got fiddled with. I hate to break it to people, but not all the differences between the Greek and the Masoretic Text make the Greek more Christian. There’s a few that make it less Christian.

So now that I’ve alienated a whole other group of people… Sorry, it’s just true! [Laughter] The point of reading all that is, in the setting, Job is here responding to one of his “friends,” who have been hitting him with the “No, God wouldn’t be doing this to you unless you were a sinner. Repent of your wickedness, you wicked man!”

Fr. Andrew: Which, you know, to use our language from the first half: They are mistaking pruning for the whole wheat-and-tares thing.

Fr. Stephen: Being cut off.

Fr. Andrew: Being cut off, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: And so he’s saying, “Look, no!” And so his expression here of the bodily resurrection is Job saying— What he’s saying here is: “Even if I don’t get justice in this life, even if my righteousness is not vindicated in this life, I know that the day will come when I will stand in my body—me, not somebody else, not my descendant, whatever, but me—I will stand before God and on that day I will have my justice; I will have my vindication.” That’s what he’s saying here: “Because I’m a righteous man and I have suffered horribly, but I know that ultimately God will bring forth justice. Even if it’s someday when I am long dead, he will bring me back to life in some form, and he will give justice.”

All that framing and all that reading was that we have to get this dynamic: this is what the bodily resurrection is about. The bodily resurrection is about justice because in this world a whole lot of righteous people go to their death in suffering, in misery. Exhibit A: Martyrs die a horrible death. Sometimes they die young. And on the other side, in this world, there are wicked people who seem to prosper their whole lives and go to their deaths and leave all their wealth to their children. And we can look at that, not out of resentment or envy or jealousy—we can look at that based on what God has told us in the Scriptures and say, “That is unjust. That is not the way God created things to be.”

There are folks out there who look at that and say, “That’s not how the Bible says God created things to be, therefore God must not exist.” [Laughter] But that’s not the route Job takes. That’s not the route the saints take. The route the saints take is: “Therefore, God will bring justice to this in the future.” When that final justice happens, when the last judgment happens and justice is finally established, then there will be justice for this, and that requires that all of us—the righteous, the wicked, everybody—that we’re all alive again, in our bodies—it’s us, not somebody else—standing on this earth in front of him to receive that justice, one way or the other.

So you see this again. Another place where the bodily resurrection is very clearly discussed is in Isaiah, and it’s framed in a similar context.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. So Isaiah 26:16-21:

O Lord, in distress they sought you. They poured out a whispered prayer when your discipline was upon them. Like a pregnant woman who writhes and cries out in her pangs when she is near to giving birth, so were we because of you, O Lord. We were pregnant, we writhed, but we have given birth to wind. We have accomplished no deliverance in the earth, and the inhabitants of the world have not fallen. Your dead shall live; their bodies shall rise. You who dwell in the dust, awake and sing for joy, for your dew is a dew of light, and the earth will give birth to the dead.

Come, my people, enter your chambers and shut your doors behind you. Hide yourselves for a little while until the fury has passed by. For behold, the Lord is coming out from his place to punish the inhabitants of the earth for their iniquity, and the earth will disclose the blood shed on it and will no more cover its slain.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, you don’t get much clearer than “your dead shall live; their bodies shall rise.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, again, explicitly about the bodies.

Fr. Stephen: And the earth will give birth into that. This is as clear as it gets! At least as clear as any statement in the New Testament.

But notice the framework, especially that last verse: The earth is going to disclose the blood shed on it, and no longer cover the slain. Think of Cain and Abel. The blood of the martyrs that cries out from the ground to God for justice. So here, what is the purpose of the dead being returned to life? Justice. This is a little more negative than Job’s. Job’s was in a positive sense, that Job would be vindicated; this is kind of in a negative sense: these evil-doers, these wicked who have shed this blood will face the consequences of their actions, but that also implies the vindication of Israel. That’s who’s being talked about here. The other nations have done evil and have oppressed Israel and killed—up to and including killing Israelites and the people of Judah. And there’s going to be justice for that; Israel is going to be vindicated over against them. Same kind of context for the bodily resurrection.

Another one—we’ll do a third one, because, as Aristotle says, everything that comes in threes is perfect.

Fr. Andrew: There we go.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] —in Daniel.

Fr. Andrew: And that’s why there’s three halves to this show!

Fr. Stephen: Yes!

Fr. Andrew: Finally. Finally we reveal that after almost three years. So Daniel 12:1-3:

At that time shall arise Michael, the great prince who has charge of your people, and there shall be a time of trouble such as never has been since there was a nation till that time. But at that time, your people shall be delivered, everyone whose name shall be written in the book. And many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life and some to shame and everlasting contempt. And those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the sky above, and those who turn many to righteousness like the stars, forever and ever.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. So notice there we again have “those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake,” “some to everlasting life, some to everlasting contempt”—same adjective. Sorry, certain folks.

Fr. Andrew: Which is almost exactly what Jesus says.

Fr. Stephen: Right. But then notice also—notice also that verse three, which is one of the classic descriptions of theosis—that the righteous will shine like the stars of heaven, this idea of theosis, of stars, replacing the angels who fell, that whole idea of theosis—is not in any way opposed to the bodily resurrection.

Fr. Andrew: No! Yeah, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Like, these are right after each other; they go together. They go together just fine. But again here the resurrection of the dead is related to the last judgment. It’s part and parcel of it. So the idea of the bodily resurrection arises from people having come to know God, having come to know what justice is, by being taught by God what justice is. And so this body of the bodily resurrection naturally arises, and that’s why we see it start showing up in these later texts. God created us, and he created us not as floating spheres—sorry, Origen—but he created us with material bodies, and we are part of his creation in our material bodies. So restoring that creation, transfiguring and transforming that creation, requires us being put back into the proper set of ordered relationships—within ourselves, with each other, with the rest of the creation—hence bodily resurrection, for justice to be restored.

This also, though, is important because the bodily resurrection—another key element here… And the text in Job—another reason why we read the whole thing—really gets at this when he says, “I and not another,” because there’s a lot of ways in which God’s justice is spoken of by people who don’t necessarily believe in the bodily resurrection. I don’t know how much people have heard these, because I know we all have siloed listening and viewing, so I don’t know how many people will have heard these kinds of things—but the idea that the arc of history bends toward justice.

That’s actually a quote from somebody you’ve heard of. “The arc of history bends toward justice”: that’s actually Martin Luther King, Jr. That justice is this sort of over-arching, on-the-whole kind of thing. So there may not be any justice for… Hey, let’s just stay where we were. So the people whom Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., said that to, they may not receive justice for their suffering, but ultimately in the future, their descendants will live in a more just world.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. I just looked this up, by the way, and the more exact quote is he says, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” It’s just exactly what you’re saying, that things are not great now, but ultimately it’s headed in a better direction.

Fr. Stephen: Right, but those people are not going to—those individual human persons, who were standing there listening to him, might go to their deaths in suffering and never experience any justice. And so people will talk about justice being… Or even from folks who at least tacitly believe in the bodily resurrection—because it wouldn’t be an episode of Lord of Spirits without at least one instance of “sorry, Calvinists”—that in eternity, in the age to come, we’ll look back at history, and we’ll see how everything was perfectly just, like, retrospectively. We’ll see that nothing needs to get fixed, because everything that happened was perfectly just. Not that things will be fixed in the future… This kind of view that justice is a thing about the whole.

But what we see in Job is that that’s not the kind of justice we’re talking about when we’re talking about the bodily resurrection. Job is emphasizing: No, him. Job. He needed to be vindicated—not his descendants, not after Job was dead his friends would be like: “Yeah… Job was right and we were wrong,” finally admit it, put a little plaque on his grave admitting they were wrong. [Laughter] That’s not what we’re talking about. It’s not even that Job would be a saint in heaven. It’s not even someone would make icons or statutes of Job or something, and that’s some kind of indication. Job is clear that, just as he has personally, in his body, experienced this suffering, he is also going to personally, in his body, receive vindication and justice for what he’s been through. So God’s justice is for each person, not just for the sweep of history.

So this idea of resurrection, bodily resurrection, as justice, as part and parcel of the final judgment, the final establishment of justice, forms the basis for how the apostles—it’s not the entirety, but it forms the basis—for how the apostles start to understand the resurrection of Christ, and that is really clear when we read the New Testament closely, that there’s an idea here that Christ is being vindicated when he’s raised.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, some of those early apostolic sermons: “Jesus, whom you crucified, God has raised from the dead and made Lord and Christ.” You know: “You put him there.”

Fr. Stephen: The righteous one. “The righteous one,” St. Peter says at one point, “whom you crucified.” [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Right, that he was righteous and you gave him injustice, and God has given him justice.

Fr. Stephen: Right. God has vindicated him by raising him from the dead. And so there is this language of justice and justification linked for this reason with resurrection, with bodily resurrection, in the New Testament. And people have gotten confused by this, especially for the past few hundred years, into taking that language, which is Pharisaic language—this is the language of Pharisaic Judaism regarding the bodily resurrection—taking that language related to justice and justification and resurrection, and turning and morphing that into what ultimately becomes— treating it as judicial language, and judicial particularly related to retributive justice, criminal justice. And this culminates in the Reformed idea of penal substitutionary atonement.

But this is a fundamental misreading of the Pharisaic language that St. Paul is using, for example, when he talks about Christ’s death and resurrection, because St. Paul is, remember, a Pharisee. He refers to himself as a Pharisee in the present tense in his letters. So this undergirds his thinking. To give an example of this, to give an example of what I’m talking about, we’re going right for it: we’re going to 2 Corinthians 5:21.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. This is… [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: If you ever have someone throw you a prooftext about penal substitutionary atonement, there’s about a 33⅓% chance it’s this one, and I’m not doing Scott Steiner math; this is regular math. Go ahead.

Fr. Andrew: 2 Corinthians 5:21, which, this is— I mean, even if you don’t have a big ideological horse in this race, this is a hard verse to understand, especially the way it gets translated in English.

For our sake, he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

So the “him” of course is Jesus. He made Jesus to be sin…

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Well, “he” would be God the Father, “him” would be Christ, yeah. This of course gets puzzled over, typically in Protestant and especially Reformed context, which is why this sometimes gets used as a prooftext for penal substitution: this idea that gets translated usually in English that God made Christ to be sin is understood to mean that— refer to all of our sins being sort of “put on” Christ and then punished there, which I think even those folks have to admit is reading a bit in, even to this English translation.

But here’s the real problem—hey, guys, here comes our second patristics citation for the episode, of the most non-patristic Orthodox show on the… St. Cyril of Alexandria is helpful here, if you didn’t already know this, because to kind of figure out what’s going on with this verse, you kind of need to know Hebrew, but if you don’t know any Hebrew, St. Cyril can help you out here, because St. Cyril of Alexandria points out that what this means, when it says, “he made him to be sin,” is—he says he made him to be a sin-offering. So if you don’t know any Hebrew, you might look at that and be like: Where is St. Cyril getting that?

But if you know at least a little Hebrew, then you know that in the Torah, the word for sin-offering is just the word for sin. It’s the same word. So if you translated, woodenly literally, the stuff about the sin-offerings in Leviticus, it would say, “He will offer a ram as a sin to the Lord.” [Laughter] Now, that makes no sense in English. We’d be like: “He offers the ram as a sin? Wait, what? I thought he was supposed to do this.” And that’s why we put in the word “offering,” because it doesn’t make sense otherwise, and that’s the sense of it. Well, the same thing’s true here, but New Testament scholars and Bible translators aren’t Old Testament scholars and Bible translators, so they don’t talk. [Laughter] So that’s what St. Cyril’s pointing out here, is that St. Paul is just using the common convention of using that word to mean a sin-offering, because St. Paul was Jewish.

So what this is saying is that God made Christ, even though he knew no sin, even though he was sinless— he made him to be a sin-offering. It’s not even an “even though”: because he was sinless, God made him to be a sin-offering, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

So what is this referring to? When St. Paul refers to Christ’s death, every time, he’s not just referring to his death in general; he’s always referring to his crucifixion. Remember? “I preach nothing but Christ, and him crucified.” Crucifixion, crucifixion, the cross, crucifixion. We’ve been crucified with Christ, not just we died with Christ: we’ve been crucified with Christ. St. Paul emphasizes this over and over again, because the way Christ died is not irrelevant. Crucifixion is the death of a condemned criminal. It is a mode of death that is under a curse, according to the Torah: “Cursed is everything that hangs on a tree.” And so Christ is dying the death of a criminal, even though, as St. Paul is pointing out here, he knew no sin; he committed no sin.

Think about in the gospels: the thieves. What does the wise thief, St. Dismas, say? “We are suffering the same fate he is, and we, justly.” There’s that “justice” word. They were being executed for their crimes. They were dying for their own sins. They were dying because, as a result of, their crimes. Christ was not. And therefore, because Christ’s death was unjust, because he was sinless, but was dying as a condemned person, St. Paul is saying God could received it as a sin-offering, could receive his life, could receive Christ’s offering of his life, as a sin-offering.

And this is grounded in the theology of martyrdom that had developed within Judaism up to this point. We see an example of this in 2 Maccabees. 2 Maccabees is the Maccabean martyrs are going to their death. I believe it is actually Eleazar who prays and explicitly asks God that he would receive their deaths—they’re being murdered by the Seleucids, by the Greeks; the Greek pagan oppressors are murdering them—for their refusal to violate the Torah, their refusal to violate God’s law. They’re being murdered, and I believe it’s Eleazar who prays out of them that their deaths would be received by God as sin-offerings for the people, because they were being killed for righteousness’ sake, but the people had committed sins and needed a sin-offering.

This is not to say that Christ’s death is the same thing—obviously: I’m a Christian—but Christ’s death is that pattern, that already-established pattern within the Scriptures. Christ is the sine qua non because Christ is not just a righteous Israelite; Jesus of Nazareth is not just a righteous Israelite. Jesus of Nazareth is the Messiah. Jesus of Nazareth is the Word of God, second Person of the Holy Trinity. Jesus is God. And therefore his self-offering is the ultimate, the sine qua non, the fulfillment, the filling to overflowing of that pattern.

But that pattern exists, and that pattern is in the Scriptures before Christ’s death for this reason: to enable the understanding of what Christ is doing, and St. Paul is interpreting this for us, because he has this Pharisaic understanding of the bodily resurrection. So Christ is the sine qua non of this. He’s received as a sin-offering. And then his resurrection is the demonstration of his righteousness, is his vindication as the righteous one, as the just one. He rises from the dead because of that.

And if you go back a few verses from 2 Corinthians 5:21 and see what the context in which St. Paul makes this point, verses 14 and 15, he says:

For the love of Christ controls us, because we have concluded this, that one has died for all; therefore all have died. And he died for all, that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised.

So those who follow Christ—and he’s going to get more specific about this in some other places that we’re about to talk about—have died and risen with him, and that, having died and risen with him, they now live not for themselves, but for Christ’s sake. They now live faithfully to Christ. This is what’s meant by “becoming the righteousness of God,” “that they might become righteous.”

Verse 17, again in the same context, this is where St. Paul says, “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.” What is new creation? Put in order again. That’s what creating is, remember? It’s not that the person that we were, we literally crumbled into dust and we’re literally resurrected—that’ll happen later—but we are put back in order; we are already a new creation, re-ordered, justified. And it’s for this reason— I’m sure most of you, when we were reading that, dying with Christ and rising with Christ, becoming a new creation, this is of course associated by St. Paul with baptism, directly associated with baptism, that we die with Christ in baptism, we rise out of the water, out of the waters of chaos, a new creation, justified, sanctified, washed, as we say in the Orthodox baptismal service, and as a new creation put back in order.

And so this is why in Romans 4:25 St. Paul can say that Christ was delivered for our trespasses and raised for our justification. Notice “raised for our justification.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, the resurrection is towards our being made righteous.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, being put back in order, being justified, as a new creation. And this isn’t just— So that’s taking a key text from St. Paul and showing this, but this is everywhere in sort of the ur-layer of the apostolic preaching, so the earliest—we’ll read one of these and then give you references for some more—these early sermons by St. Peter in the book of Acts, in the Acts of the Apostles. But a good example of this is in Acts 2.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, where he says:

God raised him up (referring to Jesus), loosing the pangs of death, because it was not possible for him to be held by it. For David says concerning him,

I saw the Lord always before me, for he is at my right hand, that I may not be shaken. Therefore my heart was glad and my tongue rejoiced. My flesh also will dwell in hope. For you will not abandon my soul to Hades or let your holy ones see corruption. You have made known to me the paths of life; you will make me full of gladness with your presence.

Fr. Stephen: So why was Christ raised according to this quotation that St. Peter uses? Because he was righteous! Because he was holy! Therefore he could not remain in the grave. Hades had no claim on him, and so he’s raised and vindicated. You can check out Acts 3:14-15, Acts 4:10-11, Acts 5:30-31. Over and over again: Christ is righteous, you crucified him, you executed him as a criminal, God raised him up and vindicated him.

We can say that any Christian who’s been baptized, as we say in the Orthodox baptismal service, has been justified; we can say that they’re already resurrected in one baptismal sense—in the baptismal sense, because they’ve already died to sin; they’ve already been made alive in Christ. But in another sense, we as Christians are awaiting our final vindication, which will come at the bodily resurrection and will come at the last judgment. So if we live in this world with all of its suffering, with all of its difficulty, a life in this world that for all of us inevitably ends in physical death, if we live that faithfully, if we live that righteously, if we live that justly—which we can only do, as we said, through the works of God and through repentance—you don’t become righteous by never sinning; you become righteous by repenting when you sin—if we live our life in that way, then when we stand before the dread judgment seat of Christ, that will be the moment of our vindication.

And if we don’t live in that way, there is the potential that could end up being our condemnation, because that sense in baptism in which we’re resurrected, that sense in which we’re justified in baptism, is not inalienable. God can begin the work of—this is inverting one of St. Paul’s examples, but God can begin the work of putting us back in order and we can abandon that work and go back to disorder and chaos and destroy what he’s been trying to build. St. Paul uses the opposite example. He talks about “if I rebuild what I once tore down,” like tearing down the edifice of sin, and then he goes back and rebuilds it. It’s the same purpose. We can move away from that. So it’s not: You get baptized, “Hey, you’re justified! You’re in! That’s it! Resurrected! Just wait, you’ll be vindicated!”

And we’ve been told that—we’ve seen over and over again—pretty much every quote we’ve read from the New Testament tonight has said that, has said: because this is true, therefore you need to lead a life pleasing to God. Because this is true, you need to live not for yourself but for Christ. Because this is true, you need to walk before God and be righteous. But it is true.

But because it is true, now there is something we need to do, not just we need to believe really hard that it’s true, but there’s something we need to do.

Fr. Andrew: Well, as we wrap up this episode of The Lord of Spirits podcast, I’m not going to play the jingle, but I wanted to do a little etymology. It seemed weird to play the jingle here at the end. But, yeah, the word “doom,” the title of this episode, “Doomsday.” In English, we tend to think of “doom” as… I mean, the way it’s used in the modern sense now, typically, is that “doom” means a bad outcome: “You’re doomed!” It’s kind of funny when you can kind of put it that way, right? “You’re doomed!” Something is terrible is going to happen to you.

But the older sense of “doomsday” is it was a synonym for judgment day. In fact, it’s the older English word. And one of the first places that this word comes up, or probably one of the most well-known early instances, is of a book that was called the Domesday Book, although usually spelled D-o-m-e-s-d-a-y, Do-mes-day, because that’s sort of the early Middle English spelling of it. So the Domesday Book or Doomsday Book was a late 11th-century book that was created at the behest of—well, he’s known to history usually as William the Conqueror, but various other epithets were attached to him, but he’s the Norman that conquers England. So he orders that this book be made.

The book actually is a kind of survey of property in England, and part of the point of it was to make sure that all the taxes that he felt that he was owed were paid to him. But the point of calling it that was—although it was not called that when it was made; that was a later name attached to it later, maybe a century or so later—and one of the reasons that it was called that was it was said that it was as unchangeable as judgment day. So it was a kind of analogy. But it was really about taking a trip, a number of people taking a trip around England and judging what the lands were, just assessing. It was a sort of big assessment. And this gives us that earlier sense of “doom.”

We still have the related word “deem,” which— Usually when we say the word “deem,” we don’t mean some negative outcome. I could just say, “I deem that to be true,” which is “I judge it to be true; I perceive it to be true.”

So “doom” was simply a judgment or a pronouncement, a fate maybe, as it were. And of course the word actually has a much older history. It comes from our Old English heritage and then Proto-Germanic, and then all the way back to Indo-European, Proto-Indo-European. And in that Proto-Indo-European root, it means to place or to put something somewhere, so it has this sense of order, of putting things in order. And then when it gets into the early Germanic usage, it starts at that point to be used as judgment, to perceive, to assess, to see things as they are, to make a decision based on that.

This doesn’t disappear. Eventually you get the word “kingdom,” and that “-dom,” d-o-m on the end, refers to the area or the sphere of influence of the king, the sphere in which he is the one who renders judgment, in which he is the one who is putting things in their proper order.

Like I said, we think of this word “doom” as meaning misfortune, and “doomsday” the end of the world, lots of bad things happening, but the history of the English word really keeps within it all of these biblical senses we’ve been talking about, that judgment is God putting things in their proper order, perceiving that they’re out of order and putting them in their proper order. And also judgment is that sphere of influence. His kingdom is truly a kingdom. It has that sphere of influence, his rule, his ordering. And our task, as living within the kingdom of God—it’s not some other kind of community; it’s God’s kingdom—is to participate in that doom, the doom of God, to do it as well: to also be deeming, to also be placing things in their proper order, number one, ourselves. We do that through repentance.

There’s a famous saying, I think from Mount Athos: “If you die before you die, then when you die, you don’t have to die,” which means: Put yourself in proper order in this life, so when you depart this life, when you move into life of the age to come, then God doesn’t have to do it to you; it will already have been done in this life with his help through repentance.

So you may notice that even though we started out talking about the end of the world, where we ultimately ended up was the resurrection, and that’s because, when we think about doomsday, when we think about judgment day, as Christians we shouldn’t merely fear and tremble, although that’s useful. Our hymns for the Sunday of the Last Judgment are often focused on that and have always been. This is something that humanity needs. It needs that kind of warning language. I know I do.

But that’s not the only thing we should focus on. We should also focus on the sense that justice is coming, that God’s justice, God’s ordering, God’s re-creation, is coming and is already breaking through, and we can participate in it even now: to put ourselves in order, to put the space around us in order, to have orderly relationships with the people around us. And when I say “orderly,” I don’t mean formal or regimented or anything like that; I mean that we’re living according to God’s order, which is an order of love and self-sacrifice and humility. That’s what it means to have a truly orderly relationship from God’s point of view.

And the more that we do that, the more that we will become fit for the kingdom of heaven, that we will be living appropriately according to that doom, and also that we will attract other people, by God’s grace, to participate in it as well. So when we think about doom, when we think about the doom of God and doomsday, we don’t have to be afraid of it; we don’t have to have some sense of horror in response, but rather it should be about hope. It should be about hope, because the summary of this is resurrection. Now, there’s a resurrection of life and a resurrection of damnation, of condemnation: that’s what Jesus says, and of course he’s almost quoting the Old Testament, as we heard earlier.

And so the call is to live according to the works of God, to live in a way such that when we are judged according to our works—and we will be judged according to our works, not according to our opinions, not according to our beliefs, according to our works—that when we are judged, that God will look at us and say, “Well done, good and faithful servant.” Notice he doesn’t say, “Well thought” or “Well believed” or “Well agreed-with”: “Well done.” It’s about doing.

We live in an era in which it’s easy not to do anything. I only recently learned the expression “touch grass,” which means, from what I understand, you’ve been spending way too much time on the internet; you need to go out and connect with the world, the 3D world. I think that that’s something that we especially need to remember in this time and place, at this point in history, this culture, that we will be judged according to what we have done. It’s very, very easy to try to have all the right beliefs and to be really good at defining them or arguing for them or whatever. And it’s good to have the right beliefs, but if we’re not doing what will be deemed by God at the end to be faithful to him, then it doesn’t matter what you believe. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter what you say; it’s what we do that counts in the end.

So let’s be faithful. Let’s be “doomable” in the right way. [Laughter] In the way that will show us to be among the righteous at the end. Father?

Fr. Stephen: I know there are, like, five Whovians out there who are upset that I haven’t mentioned the Doom’s Day Event going on amongst the licensees, but I’m not into it; I’m sorry. Time Lord Victorious was good, but this one looks kind of lame—but there, I mentioned it.

So there was a time when you would hear preachers preach about the last judgment, and sort of the way of life that was seen as being opposed to the Christian way of life was a way of life that is sort of pleasure-seeking, people just going out—wine, women, and song—and having this wild life, chasing after the pleasures of the flesh and all this. And that was: You could do that or you could be a good, upstanding Christian, and then when the last judgment comes, there’s going to be justice for both. And now the way society has gone, I don’t think most people can identify with that any more. I don’t think those are the two ways of life that people see set before them. In fact, I don’t think most people in our current society really see two ways of life set before them.

I think at this point in our society—post-COVID, now everything is demonetized, post-alienation and -isolation and the internet and everything else—I think we’re at the point now where almost everybody is primarily concerned about how they feel. And this isn’t some kind of weird selfish, self-centered thing; it’s more that everybody is sick and tired of feeling sick and tired. Everybody’s tired of feeling bad, everybody’s tired of feeling hopeless, and everybody’s tired of feeling like their day-to-day life is meaningless, like: “I’m going to get up every day and do what I do every day, the same thing over and over again until one of these days I’ll keel over dead.”

And people are just trying to find some way—happiness may be too much to grasp, but just not feel bad, just feel okay, just feel like there’s some purpose to things, or maybe something might get better at some time in the future. I think people even approach religion that way now. I think a lot of people who are former atheists and stuff coming back to religion, a lot of it is, sadly—I mean, it’s a good result, people coming back to especially Christianity, but a lot of it is desperation; a lot of it is just: “I need something. I need something that’ll make this mean something or be worthwhile.”

And the problem with that—and we’ve gotten there just by being broken down, but the problem is we’re just seeking to alleviate suffering. We’re just kind of seeking to anesthetize ourselves for a little while. We’re just kind of seeking an escape. And not to bring everybody down further—I know I’ve brought everybody down, but not to bring everybody down further—but there is no escape. There’s suffering and there’s trouble in this life. There always has been; there always will be. And it’s not always just, meaning it doesn’t always make sense. Job’s suffering didn’t make sense to him. It doesn’t always make sense! And we’re all going to die, eventually, on a long enough timeline; we all end up dead.

But so there is something we can do. There’s something we can do. There’s something we can do that will give meaning, that will give us hope, the hope for vindication, the hope of Christ’s return, the hope of judgment. And it’s not “avoid suffering”; it’s not “anesthetize ourselves from suffering”; it’s not “carve out a few little moments of joy or beauty amidst all the suffering”; it’s not “avoiding death for as long as possible in any way possible.” We’re going to suffer. Why not suffer for something? We’re all going to die. Why not die for something, for someone? For something or someone who’s worth it? For someone or something who means something.

We can’t avoid the suffering; we can’t avoid death, but we can make the suffering we face in this life and we can make our death meaningful. And we do that by how we choose to receive it, what we choose to take away from it, what we choose to learn from it. I mentioned earlier the Maccabean martyrs, who were being tortured to death, because they wouldn’t eat pork—tortured to death, in very graphic ways, if you read 2 Maccabees—and who prayed to God and said, “You know, my death, receive this as a sacrifice on behalf of the people, because we’ve sinned.”

And so each of us has choices to make as we go through our life in terms of whom we’re living for and whom we’re going to die for and what that’s going to mean. We can make choices such as we’ll sit at the end of our life, whether it’s on our death bed or whether it’s before the dread judgment seat of Christ, and look at our life and say, “Yeah, that was all just a meaningless, horrible mess.” That’s entirely possible, if we choose to live that way. Or we can live in a way where we look back on it and say, “That was hard, that was difficult, that was painful at times, but it was worth it, and here’s why. Those things I sacrificed were for something, were for Christ and his kingdom. That suffering and those sacrifices helped get rid of the garbage in my life that was making me so miserable. What I went through helped this other person, helped this other person make the next step in their own life.”

This is the choice that’s before us. I can’t choose tomorrow whether I’m going to get sick or not. I can’t choose whether I’m going to get stuck somewhere. I can’t choose whether, you know, I’m going to be in miserable conditions. I can’t control whether I’m going to get an unexpected check in the mail or an unexpected bill in the mail. But I can choose what the purpose of all this is going to be. I can choose whether it’s going to be meaningful or not. And so, hopefully, as we think about the last judgment, as we thinking about wanting to be on the side that’s going to be vindicated, that takes us back, as we saw, over and over again in the New Testament texts that we went over, to how we live our life today, how we live our life for Christ and not for ourselves, how we try to live a life pleasing to God, how we try to do the works of God in the world, so that ultimately all this stuff that we’ve gone through and are going through and will go through will all be worth it in the end and not just a horrible wait.

Fr. Andrew: Well, thank you very much for listening to this episode. This is our show for today. If you didn’t get through to us live during one of our other live shows, you can still contact us. You can email us at lordofspirits@ancientfaith.com; you can message us at our Facebook page; you can also leave us a voicemail at speakpipe.com/lordofspirits.

Fr. Stephen: And join us for our live broadcasts—although this one and the next one won’t be live—on the second and fourth Thursdays of the month at 7:00 p.m. Eastern, 4:00 p.m. Pacific. And I have to say, I miss DMX, because he was going to give it to us.

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Fr. Stephen: And finally, be sure to go to ancientfaith.com/support and help make sure we and lots of other AFR podcasters stay on the air. He wasn’t going to wait for us to get it on our own; he was going to deliver it to us.

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