Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick: Welcome back, everyone, to The Lord of Spirits podcast. A happy new year to you all, and a blessed feast of the Nativity to our listeners on the Old Calendar; it was just a few days ago for you. We just wrapped up Theophany on the New Calendar, so we’re ready for everything that is about to come. I’m Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick on the edge of Pennsylvania Dutch country in Emmaus, Pennsylvania, and with my is my co-host, Fr. Stephen De Young, broadcasting from a gigantic pot of gumbo in the middle of Cajun country in Lafayette, Louisiana. If you’re listening to us live, you can call in at 855-AF-RADIO; that’s 855-237-2346, and we are going to get to your calls in the second part of today’s show.

What are we doing tonight? Well, here’s the question: What is a body? Human beings are body and soul; we take that as axiomatic. What that means is foundational to Christian theology and what exactly a body is is foundational to how we understand and experience the world. Our general conception of the human person goes like this, and this is how we kind of see it in the modern world: I am an immaterial soul, and my soul is housed invisibly inside my body. My body is a kind of temporary material shell that changes and decays, and I will lose it when I die, when it will become a corpse and get put in the ground. And from this common conception, theologically, God does not have a body, except when the Son of God becomes man; he now has a human body, but he did not have one before.

But what if this is wrong? What if I am, in fact, a body? And what if God had a body even before the Incarnation? And what if bodies in general are actually not what we think they are? So what does that mean? Well, to understand that, first we have to talk about God’s body. That’s actually the title for our show tonight, because God is first. He’s the Creator; he’s the one whom we image. So if we’re going to understand bodies, we begin not from our created experience and cast our eyes heavenward and try to figure out God from there.

Next time, we’re actually going to talk about human and angelic bodies, and I know a lot of your questions that you’ve sent to us already have been about that, but just be patient while we lay out the groundwork in this first episode, because this is going to be a two-parter. I’m going to warn you now that this one is going to be a bit of a brain-bender, so you will probably want to listen to it more than once. But this is what happens when you have to reconsider such a foundational, basic concept like this.

So let’s ask the question: What is a body? Fr. Stephen, what is a body? And welcome, by the way. Good to talk to you.

Fr. Stephen De Young: Yes, as you said, some people’s brains after this may go into recovery mode from taking in so many high-level ideas, but we’ll…

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] It definitely did with mine, actually, when we were doing our pre-show prep!

Fr. Stephen: But we’re going to… This is important, and I think as we talk about it we’ll see why it’s important and why it’s worth the time to try to wrap our mind around it.

When we think of what we think of body, we think of meat, like an object.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, this physical stuff that I’m sitting in, that is sitting in my chair right now.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and we even refer to sometimes the angelic beings as bodiless powers. We say God is a spirit, and being a spirit means you don’t have a body. That’s sort of our shorthand. Those two things are opposite each other, but that’s not how ancient people understood bodies, or what they meant when they talked about something’s body. What they meant when they talked about something’s body was—and we came up with a couple of different phrases; we’ll see which one catches on and becomes a meme—

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Get those memes, boys and girls!

Fr. Stephen: A nexus of potentialities or a collection of powers or energies or abilities. And I know that makes about zero sense, but that’s why we’re going to talk about this more.

Fr. Andrew: -I kind of like… So, all you meme-makers, I’m leaning towards “nexus of potentialities” because there’s a lot of Star Trek possibilities there.

Fr. Stephen: There are, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: So get William Shatner out.

Fr. Stephen: Anything with William Shatner is good, automatically.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly, yes.

Fr. Stephen: But so what does that mean, that a body is a sort of nexus of potentialities? Well, to give some examples, we’ll talk about body parts. When we talk about eyes, we’re thinking about the gushy things in your skull.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, eyeballs.

Fr. Stephen: When they’re talking about eyes in the ancient world, they’re talking about the power of sight.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, this is a huge distinction. Rather than talking about a kind of thing, an object, the term refers to what you’re doing. It’s dynamic versus being a thing to be put under a microscope and examined. Eyes refer to the power of sight, not to what, in my wife’s family, is the last part of the lamb that you eat. [Laughter] There you go.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and likewise with ears. Ears—it’s not talking about your lobes, it’s not talking about the tiny bones in your skull, your tympanum; it’s talking about the ability to hear. So when Christ says, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear,” he’s not saying, “You deaf people, don’t worry about it, but the rest of you who have physical ears, you should listen to what I’m saying,” he’s talking about those who have the ability to hear what he is saying need to hear it. He’s talking about the ability to hear.

Then feet is a reference to the capacity for movement. Arms, especially right arm, since most people are right-handed, is a reference to strength or power or might. Face, a reference to a face, is a reference to the ability to communicate.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and I think it’s important—and we’re going to talk about this more when we start talking about how these words apply to God, but I think it’s really important just to come to state right here is that what we’re not saying is: They’re not objects; these are metaphors, and the objects are being used to set out these metaphors. Like saying, “You need to have spiritual eyes, or the eyes of faith,” meaning you understand and you see things, but it’s like having eyeballs. That’s not what we’re saying, because, again, this is the show that we tell you that the things that you thought were metaphors are not metaphors.

Fr. Stephen: So our—the round gushy orbs in our skull, those eyes, are the instrument which we use to see. They’re the instrument through which we exercise that power.

Fr. Andrew: So in a sense, eyes include the eyeball in the sense that eyes need the eyeball to do the thing that they do, if that make sense.

Fr. Stephen: For us.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, for us, right.

Fr. Stephen: It’s what we use to do that, not necessarily… But that doesn’t mean that something can’t have the power of sight, the power of hearing, the ability to communicate, without having a meaty, fleshy organ that we have.

Again, this is probably still super-weird and confusing. To help with this, we’re going to… Again, we’re talking tonight about God’s body in particular, so when we read in the Scriptures and we read things talking about some body part of God, that God defeated Pharaoh with his strong right arm—

Fr. Andrew: Right. It’s not a metaphor.

Fr. Stephen: Right. Or God’s eyes go throughout the cosmos, go throughout the world and see everything. Or when we read about… Yeah?

Fr. Andrew: I was going to say like Moses, speaking to the Lord—I mean, this is the language in Scripture—face to face, as a man speaks with his friend.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and the face of God is referred to all the time. When someone says that they want to see God’s face, he doesn’t say, “Don’t be silly. I’m a spirit, a ghost. I don’t have a face.” He says, “I have a face, but you can’t see it and live. So if I show it to you, you’ll die. If I try to communicate with you directly, you won’t be able to bear it.”

Fr. Andrew: Right, and the problem, of course, is that, as modern people, when we see these references… Like, for instance, God, in the garden of Eden, he’s walking in such a way that they can hear him. It makes a sound. There’s that kind of thing. This language is used for God, and so, because we have this idea that God doesn’t have a body, God is immaterial—and obviously, we’re going to unpack what all of that means and kind of how we got to where we are now—but what happens then is, as modern people who are faithful Christians—we want to believe what the Bible says—we look at that and say, “Well, that’s metaphorical language for God. God doesn’t have an arm. He doesn’t have a nose. He doesn’t have eyeballs.” Because we’re used to thinking of a body as being an object or a collection of objects, then when those kinds of words are used to talk about God, we say, “Well, God doesn’t have that. He’s not limited like we are. So it’s just a metaphor. He accomplished this through some other means that the biblical writers were just trying to come up with ways of talking about, so this is what they came up with.”

Fr. Stephen: And the term that’s applied to that is “anthropomorphism,” anthropos meaning a human and morph form, shape.

Fr. Andrew: So we’re giving a human shape to God in order to understand him better, bring him down to our level.

Fr. Stephen: Right. Human beings can’t understand God; God is distant and remote and unintelligible, and so we just kind of explain him and describe him in human terms—that’s how people will generally talk about those references in the Scriptures. And we’re here to say that’s exactly backwards. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yep, that’s right.

Fr. Stephen: It’s exactly the reverse of the truth. That the way the Scripture sees it is humans are theomorphic; humans are in the image and likeness of God. So God is the paradigm, and then humans are a sort of weak and diminished version, and our powers are a weaker or a diminished version of his powers, not: we take our powers and just sort of project them to giant size and attribute them to him.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and, you know—correct me if I’m wrong about this—an obvious parallel seems to me wherein, if I recall correctly, it’s in Ephesians 5, that passage that gets read at weddings in the Orthodox Church, where St. Paul talks about how men and women, husbands and wives are supposed to relate to one another within marriage, and then he says, “But I am speaking of Christ and his Church.” So a lot of times the way that gets read is people will say, “Oh, the relationship between Christ and his Church is like a human marriage.” But as I’ve pointed out many times to couples, as I was preparing them to get married: “No, no, no, no, no! Your marriage is like the union between Christ and his Church.” Am I off-base here?

Fr. Stephen: No, that’s right, and thank you for choosing the least controversial possible example you could have taken from Ephesians 5.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yes.

Fr. Stephen: This could have gone a whole different way.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, you were like: What is he about to say? [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: God is eternal. What we call “seeing” is sort of a very weak version of what it means that God is able to see. So what we call eyes is this weak material, fragile, subject-to-corruption version of God’s eyes, his ability to see, his ability to communicate, his powers, the divine energies. We have a human energy which is obviously much weaker, but is in the image of the reality that is God.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, he is the original; we’re the icon of that, the much lesser version.

Fr. Stephen: Right. Going back to that example of God having a face and him not denying that he has a face, this is something that gets masked in most of our English translations. All the time in the Old Testament we read about “the presence of God”: the presence of God in the Temple, the presence of God in general. Jonah gets told to go to Nineveh, to the Assyrians, and he knows that the Assyrians flay people alive, so he’s like, “Nope,” and it says that he flees from the face of God. Because the word “presence” there, that’s translated “presence,” is the word “face.” He flees from God’s face.

And we talked about “face” representing this power of communication. When it says that Jonah is fleeing from the face of God, it doesn’t mean, well, God’s over here in this particular geographical locale, and he’s running away from it. It’s more like he’s putting his fingers in his ears and going “Nananana, I can’t hear you!” and taking off in the other direction. But that fear we mentioned, where God said you can’t see his face and live, that’s what’s going on when the people of Israel come to Mt. Sinai and they hear God communicating in the thunder on Mt. Sinai, and they’re terrified that they’re going to die, and they say, “Moses, don’t let God talk to us directly. We’ll die! You go. You go up there and interact and talk to him and communicate with him for us.” So that language of “face” is actually probably the most prevalent one of these, even though it’s hidden by translation in the Scriptures.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and again, it’s so tempting—Jonah fleeing from before the face of God—like, oh, that’s a metaphor. But, again, where exactly is God’s face that he could run away from it? It doesn’t make sense in that way. Again, nowhere in there does it say, “This is a metaphor.” Like you said, God doesn’t say, “Well, I don’t really have a face, but I’ll let you say that I have a face because it makes sense for you.”

This speaks to… One of the critiques of Christianity is that man makes God in his own image, but that’s actually not the Christian teaching, although some Christians effectively seem to think that it is, because that’s what we’re talking about, that we say, “Oh, we do use this human language for God; it’s anthropomorphic language for God, but he doesn’t really have that.” So there’s kind of an apologetic side to this as well. You could say, “No, no, no, actually, no, this language that we use to God refers to something real, and the human version of it is the kind of much lower, lesser version of that.” So even though I understand sight by virtue of what I am doing now, the things that I have eyelids blinking on the outside of, that’s just a small—a sliver of what God is able to do. I shouldn’t assume that his sight is just like mine, but bigger; there’s something else going on there, especially because he doesn’t need eyeballs to do it. He sees in some other way that I don’t understand, but he nonetheless does see; nothing can hide from him.

Fr. Stephen: He doesn’t need and won’t ever need the cheap Walmart reading glasses I need now that I’m always breaking.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, which I’m pretty close to getting a set for myself, since we’re about the same age. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: So you get like five-packs, so when they break you just move to the next one.

Fr. Andrew: Just flip, yeah, exactly.

Fr. Stephen: Right. So our powers—and this is key. I’m tempted to go down this rabbit-hole, but I won’t. I’m sure we’ll talk about it more in the future. But this is key to all kinds of things in terms of how we think about God, where understanding that we’re not… he isn’t like us; we’re becoming like him. Those are very different sort of ways of proceeding.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. To kind of summarize this piece of it, when we talk about a body being a nexus of potentialities, a collection of powers or energies, it’s not a kind of object; it’s rather the abilities that we have to do—not just we, but that anything that has a body has—to do all these things. And God has these abilities. Scripture talks about him this way. So that’s what a body is.

So if that’s what a body is, then how does that differ from our concept of the body? And then what do we do about the fact that we have all this language, especially in the New Testament, about flesh? I mean, I think most of us tend to think that body and flesh are just synonyms. I mean, that’s the way we use it in English, that flesh is just kind of a nice, poetic, archaic way of the same thing that we mean when we talk about bodies. I know St. Paul makes this distinction. What does St. Paul say the difference between “body” and “flesh”? I know that in Greek, “body” is soma, and “flesh” is sarx; those are the two words we’re dealing with in Greek.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and the biggest place where you can easily go completely wrong with reading St. Paul is missing the nuances of the way he uses—he distinguishes between his usage of similar words. So when he talks about Judeans, it’s usually translated in English as “Jews,” that’s not the exact same group of people when he talks about Israel. He doesn’t just use those interchangeably. This gets really granular to the point that St. Paul, when he refers to “dead,” without a definite article, is referring to a different group of people than when he refers to “the dead,” with a definite article, even though both get translated as “the dead” in English. So in most English translations you can’t even tell! This is how nuanced you can be. The same is true—

Fr. Andrew: I think we need a new study Bible, Father.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] The same is true with the way he uses “body” and “flesh.” We can read over it very quickly, and there is, for example, a Gnostic reading of St. Paul that reads these both the same, because, as you’ll see, even just casually reading one of St. Paul’s epistles—and this is true outside of St. Paul as well; it’s just very clear in St. Paul, but St. John in his epistles and other New Testament authors use these terms the same way, basically—

Fr. Andrew: So it’s consistent across the New Testament.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, it’s just St. Paul is Exhibit A; it’s the easiest place to see it. St. Paul has a lot of negative things to say about the flesh and its inability to inherit the kingdom of God, for example, and seems to tie it very much to sinfulness and to passions and desires. Again, if you read that as meaning: Okay, well, our body is all sinful, and then our soul, which is this other thing, is not, you can very easily go in a Gnostic direction.

Fr. Andrew: Right, where the material gets opposed to the spiritual.

Fr. Stephen: And so “body,” for St. Paul and for the ancients in general, is this overarching category of this nexus of potentialities. We’ll dig deeper into what he says in 1 Corinthians 15 next time, but there, for example, he talks about how angels and men and animals have different types of bodies, all within that big category of body. They all have powers, they all have the ability to interact with the world, they all have these potentialities.

“Flesh” is then a subcategory. It’s a smaller circle within the big circles of bodies, is flesh. Flesh is a type of body that, for St. Paul and the other New Testament authors, is weakened, is corruptible, is changeable, is mortal. It’s an even more limited version of the original human body.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so it’s the way… We’re going to talk about Adam and Eve in just a second; maybe we should introduce that. Adam and Eve, they have the original human body, and then it changes because of sin. God gives them this change; it doesn’t just sort of come out of nowhere.

Fr. Stephen: On purpose, for reasons.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, for reasons which we’re going to go into a lot more next time. So write down the phrase “garments of skin,” everybody—but this is not that episode. Two weeks from today.

But just to cover this briefly, though, God gives them what are called in Scripture “garments of skin,” which doesn’t mean that he gives them nice leather suits. It means that their bodies are altered so that they now become fleshly bodies. I kind of like that as a sort of adverb—I don’t know if it’s adjectival; yeah, I guess it’s adjectival, but “fleshly bodies.” And then they function in a fleshly way, so it’s not just a way that their bodies changed as a thing, but also the way that they function, because, again, a body is collection of powers and abilities and so forth. What that means then is that our bodies, when God gives mankind the garments of skin, our bodies change in such a way as to become limited and corruptible and deathly. We’re going to talk next time about why that was actually good from God’s point of view, so we’re giving all kinds of teasers.

I think it’s really important to understand that this change happens. It’s not that they were exactly the same before and now, oh, boom—now you can die! That’s not all that happens, that they, again, if a body is a collection of powers, a nexus of potentialities, then that means that the powers themselves change, so they presumably lose some abilities and gain some abilities, weirdly enough.

Fr. Stephen: There are powers that are lost completely and potentialities that are lost. There are powers and potentialities that are weakened, like the nous, the mind; so there are capacities that are weakened and attenuated. And then there are new potentialities that are gained, like the mutability—

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, changeability.

Fr. Stephen: —and corruption and mortality that are taken on by them at the point of that change. So if you think about a being’s body as sort of a circle that includes, or a bubble that includes all these powers and potentialities, the change that happens is that some of those leave, some of those diminish, and then new ones sort of come into the membrane of… Now I sound like an Origenist because I’ve got a spherical body.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] That’s a good name-drop for a lot of the super-nerds out there.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, send your written condemnations to AFR at…

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah, like another way—this is just a metaphor, people, but it’s something that occurred to me right now—but another way of thinking about it is almost that our… If we could think of our bodies as having DNA—and, again, I’m using “body” in terms of that “nexus of potentialities” not DNA like we think of the modern idea. But DNA, of course, is the kind of code that tells our flesh what to do, how to shape and function and so forth. We can imagine, in a sense, that the DNA of our collection of powers gets rewritten because now it does different things, functions differently. Again, this is just—this is a metaphor. [Laughter] Does that work in terms of kind of rewriting the code, so to speak? It’s not… No metaphor really really works, but, yeah…

Fr. Stephen: But hopefully one of those, at least, will help people start to wrap their head around it. And once you have that in mind, though, you can see that play out. St. John doesn’t say, “The Word took a body”; he says, “The Word became flesh.” It’s more specific than that. Just saying, “The Word took a body,” wouldn’t mean the same thing. We’re talking about the Incarnation, Christ’s being made man. When Christ, after the resurrection, says, “A spirit has not flesh and blood as you see that I have,” he doesn’t say, “A spirit doesn’t have a body.” He says, “A spirit doesn’t have flesh and blood.” Human flesh—and animal flesh is also flesh, but we’ll get more into that next time—but flesh, a fleshly body is a type of body; it’s not synonymous with “this is always what a body means.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. We’re going to go to break in just a second here, but another thing. We’re just going to give people all kinds of hooks to save for next time, because this is what we do on this show. But another one to think about is when Christ rises from the dead, as you were just talking about, he still has flesh and bone, so that means that his body still has flesh, that there is something about it that is still quite human. Obviously, we’re going to talk about that more the next time, but clearly it works in a different way after the resurrection. He’s no longer mortal, for instance.

Fr. Stephen: Well, he technically wasn’t before. But we’ll get into that next time.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, exactly. Sorry, sorry, yes. All right. Well, all that being said, we’re going to go ahead and take a break. Please call. We would love to hear from you and talk to you even though this is a very mind-bending version, a very mind-bending episode of The Lord of Spirits. So let’s go ahead and go to break, and we’ll be right back in just a second.

Fr. Andrew: Welcome back. This is the second part of the show, and it’s where we begin to take your calls. We would love to hear from you. You can reach us, just like you heard from the Voice of Steve, at 855-AF-RADIO, 855-237-2346, and we would love to talk to you.

In the first part, we talked about what is a body and also a bit about what it means that God has a body, and also we touched very briefly on what happens to Adam and Eve’s bodies after they sin. But, you know, in trying to begin to rewrite the way that we think about this stuff and bring it into line with what the Scripture says, which is embedded in this ancient way of thinking, we need to talk a little bit about how it is we got to the way that we think now. Actually, the seeds for that are sown in the ancient world, but it doesn’t come from Scripture; it comes from pagan Greek philosophy. They begin to ask the question, “Does God have a body?” And the answer that they come up with is, “No, he doesn’t.” So how did they get to that, and what does that all kind of mean?

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] And really, what… I mean, we’re particularly obviously talking about Greek philosophy here, but when the Greek philosophers start to address this question, what they’re really doing is sort of philosophically dealing with and encoding what was already the general pagan view. We talked about this in a previous episode how, after what is described as the Tower of Babel event in Genesis 11, that we see in cultures all over the world, that the most high god, the creator god, the highest god, sort of becomes distant and is seen to be disconnected and removed from the world, and human beings interact with these sort of lesser gods and spirits but not with the greater god. So the Greek philosophers don’t substantively differ from that, but they do speak about it, obviously, in a different and philosophical way that will especially deal with it in terms of having a body.

So if you look at, for example, Aristotle—even though we’re going in reverse order by talking about Aristotle and then Plato—

Fr. Andrew: How dare you, sir?

Fr. Stephen: I know! People are offended all over the place. “You could have started with Parmenides!” But then people would really fall asleep. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: I just remember pre-Socratics like Thales, who supposedly thought everything was made of water. That’s what I remember about that bit of undergraduate introduction to philosophy.

Fr. Stephen: I’m not taking your bait, sir, and getting into that. [Laughter]

For Aristotle, we usually refer to Aristotle’s “god” or “most high god” as the “prime mover,” because we’re getting it kind of filtered through Thomistic theology. But the way he describes this being, like in Metaphysics Lambda, he describes this being as noeseos, which is something like thought-thinking-itself, or just pure thought. But key to that is the idea that, because it is the highest being, it is the being of beings, it is completely unaware of anything else that exists, because for it to think about anything other than itself, it would have to lower itself.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and so then this is the beginning of… Gnosticism kind of branches off from this idea, that the true god, the unmoved mover, is so pure, so perfect, that it can’t even pay attention to anything. It’s just the sort of perfect self-contemplation. Without that, then, it’s sort of lowering itself.

Before we get too much deeper into that, which we certainly will, we actually do have someone calling in. We have Alec, who is calling from Florida, and he has a question about what happens to our body in the next life, pertaining to theosis. Alec, can you hear us?

Alex: Yes, Fathers, Alex with an -x from sunny Orlando, Florida. I can hear you loud and clear.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, Alex; Alex with an -x, excuse me. Well, welcome, Alex, to The Lord of Spirits. What exactly is your question?

Alex: Yes, well, it’s a bit convoluted, I guess, but the glorified saints, I would think, take part in the divine council, so to an extent I don’t know how much they share in God’s, I guess… in their powers of omniscience are enhanced, their bodies are glorified, speaking of Christ’s body as an example, first-fruits. I was wondering if you could tie that into the concept of the nous and to what extent in the Church’s experience do saints in their earthly life achieve this: aspects of clairvoyance, knowing things that they couldn’t humanly know, things of that nature?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, well, that’s a great question. I’ll just say one thing and then Fr. Stephen can correct me or add to it or whatever.

Fr. Stephen: Um, actually…

Fr. Andrew: “Um, actually…” yeah. We’re going to cover this a lot more in the next episode, but just to answer a little bit this time around: part of what happens, or I should say what happens in theosis, this process of becoming adopted sons of God and becoming more like him and participating in his glory, is that our body begins to become, to reflect more the likeness of God. So that’s why the saints have the abilities that they do. They’re actually becoming what human beings were meant to be, but that’s not—

Alex: Before the Fall.

Fr. Andrew: Right, human beings are not independently sort of powerful; it’s their participation in God that makes them what it is that they are and have these, from our point of view, what looks like extraordinary abilities, but actually is kind of ordinary for… They’re normal; the rest of us are abnormal.

Alex: They’re like examples in a sense because of their freedom from the flesh.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, exactly. That is at least what I would say about that. I don’t know; Father, is there anything you would like to add or adjust or correct or whatever?

Fr. Stephen: I’ll add. This is again, like we’ve been saying, we’ll get into this more next time. But this is pertinent here, because I think what we’re talking about tonight, what we’re going to talk about in two weeks, as we go on, hopefully you’ll see, if we do a good job of explaining it, that this is the nexus where a whole lot of our theology and our belief all comes and fits together. Specific to theosis, we have these different moments we think about or talk about when we talk about theosis. We think about glorification and the transfiguration of the body, Christ’s transfiguration, some of the saints who have shone with the uncreated light of God at the times of their deaths or at other times in their life. And we also think about participation in the divine energies, the energies of God, God’s activities and his power in the created order. We have these as these sort of separate things—and the purification of the nous—we have all of these things as separate, but this is really where all those things come together, because if we come to participate in God’s energies. We don’t gain God-powers; we don’t get some power he has, but we participate in his. He acts through us, when we’re imaging him.

Alex: Like a conduit.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so that is transforming, then, of our powers, and therefore of our body. The idea of transfiguration and glorification, that’s where that comes together with the idea of participating in the divine energies, because our body then becomes the instrument for God’s energies and powers and activity, in a way similar to the way—

Alex: What he is by nature…

Fr. Stephen: Similar to the way that I was talking about, that the gushy things in our skull, the gushy orbs that are the instrument that we use for the power of sight, we as persons become instruments for God’s love or peace in the world, and then that’s transformative.

Alex: And for that reason, among others, the Church is called the body of Christ.

Fr. Stephen: Right.

Fr. Andrew: And it’s reflecting his love in the world.

Fr. Stephen: Right. That’s what St. Paul’s getting at when he talks about the body in 1 Corinthians 13, that the way in which Christ communicates to the world is through the Church. The way that Christ is brought to the world—his feet, his hands—that’s the Church.

Fr. Andrew: We’re going to flesh that out—pun intended—a lot more—sorry, I couldn’t help myself—a lot more in two weeks, but we just kind of realized when we were going over this—or actually, I should say Fr. Stephen just informed me: Look, this is going to take a couple episodes. I was like: Great!

Alex: That’s a lot there. Thank you, Fathers.

Fr. Andrew: Thank God. Thanks for calling in, Alex.

Alex: Thank you.

Fr. Andrew: Okay. All right, let’s talk a little bit more about the god of the philosophers, if we can put it this way. There’s this idea that it’s the unmoved mover, that this god doesn’t even pay attention to anything other than itself. It does not communicate, does not see, does not hear. What the philosophers are denying is that god has body in this ancient sense of being this nexus of potentialities, collection of powers and abilities. As I was trying to imagine what that could be like, because there’s still this some kind of interaction with the rest of… with creation, you still have… It’s the unmoved mover, but it’s moving.

I thought about the Force in Star Wars. I mean, it’s not a perfect analogy, but the Force in Star Wars is similar in that it doesn’t talk to you—although, I mean, it depends on which one of the films you’re watching; the Force seems to have a will, but the Force doesn’t step out and say, “Hey, Luke, I have something that you need to know.” That’s not a thing. But there’s still a sort of influence there, but it’s impersonal. Would it be correct to say that the philosophers’ god is not a personal god? What do you think, Father?

Fr. Stephen: Well, because we have this idea of prime mover, we might be deceived into thinking that means that, well, he’s moving everything else, that he’s sort of actively somewhere in some other realm turning a crank and that causes everything else to move, starting with the sun, moon, and stars, and then working its way down. But that’s actually sort of the opposite of how it works. The way it actually works is that everything else sort of seized the unmoved mover, seized thought-thinking-itself, and motivated by love and sort of awe of its perfection, attempts to imitate this sort of impersonal but perfect being.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, I see. So it’s almost an unmoved inspirer rather than mover exactly. Does that…? I don’t know.

Fr. Stephen: They move out of desire to be like it and to be closer to it. So it’s sort of like the whole cosmos stands the prime mover and must try and be closer to it. That’s not a place where Aristotle differs from Plato. Plato has basically the same thing, and then he has “the good,” and “the good” is sort of in perpetual stasis: doesn’t move, doesn’t change—because it’s perfect, so how could it? If it changed, it wouldn’t be perfect any more. And then the heavenly bodies, which are sort of the next most perfect thing, move in circles because going in a tight circle is the closest they can get to imitating that sort of perfect stasis. That’s why Plato, in the Timaeus in particular, comes up with this demi-urge, this lesser divine being who’s going to create everything else, and he sort of looks at the good and looks at it admiringly and sort of tries to create everything else based on that, that admiration and sort of inspiration that it draws.

This is a god that doesn’t have a body in the ancient sense that we’ve been talking about. It doesn’t communicate, it doesn’t act, it doesn’t speak, it doesn’t hear, it doesn’t see anything else outside of itself. And that gets, as you mentioned already, brought over into Gnosticism fairly directly. When we found the Nag Hammadi library, sort of the biggest collection we’ve found of the Gnostic texts, Plato’s Timaeus was in there as part of it, sort of as their Old Testament. So they had this Plato creative story, and you see in various Gnostic systems they have this God with a capital G who is remote and unknown and unknowable, and then this whole series of emanations sort of working their way down until you get to material things in that direction.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and it’s easy to see, then, that this god of the philosophers, who has nothing directly to do with us, it’s really easy to see how people can morph that into, for instance, Deism, which is a little bit closer to us. Deism is the idea that God created everything and then walked away from it, the cosmic watchmaker: wind up the watch and now just let it tick away. And then there’s not much distance from that to our disenchanted world, which is a major theme of everything we talk about in this podcast, because if God is not present to us by means of his body, the body that we’ve been talking about, his collection of powers, nexus of potentialities, the ways that he interacts with mankind—if he’s not present to us in that way, then it becomes all the easier not to believe that he’s there at all, or, that if we do believe that he exists, it’s not… he’s kind of not an everyday thing. He’s out there somewhere, and we wish once in a while that a miracle might happen—boom! Oh, he stepped in. Thank you, God.

But this is the origin of the kind of disenchanted way of understanding the world, of secular materialism, because this is the god that doesn’t have anything to do with us. This is the god that can’t interact with us, or won’t, however you want to perceive what that is. Obviously, Plato and Aristotle are describing a god who can’t interact with us, because that would be against his nature. Modern man looks up, sees nothing, shouts at the sky and gets no answer back, and so he assumes: “Well, God, if you’re out there, obviously you don’t care.” But they’re just kind of different permutations, different ways of seeing God in the same way.

This is pastorally huge and theologically huge, that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is not the philosophers’ god. The philosophers’ god has no body, he’s remote—“it.” I should really say, “it.” It is remote and distant. Because “he” implies this kind of personal reality. So we can’t know him, and the idea that Jesus Christ would make him known, as we’re going to talk about in a second here, that doesn’t make any sense at all. The way that that kind of makes its way down through history is that, eventually, you get what’s referred to as the god of the gaps. There’s these scientific things happening that we can’t explain, so we’ll just say, “Well, that’s God.” But then, as science gets bigger: “Well, we don’t really need the god of the gaps any more,” so, boom: secular materialism eventually is where that way of thinking goes.

It’s interesting that there’s a direct line between saying, “God does not have a body,” and ultimately secular materialism, atheism, all of these modern problems that we have now.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and you sort of start with Gnosticism, you cut out all the middle-men, and you’re left with agnosticism.

Fr. Andrew: Right, yes. There are a lot of middle-men along the way. I’m just skirting over 15-, 16-, 1700 years of history there, as one does. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: So this comes up, as you mentioned, in terms of how we understand who Christ is, and it comes up at an event that I think a lot of people have probably heard of, at least vaguely, but may not know what it was actually about.

Fr. Andrew: Right. When we were reviewing this, I had only the barest outline. I remember, oh, yes, this is something where someone said something bad about St. John Chrysostom.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And if it’s dealt with in terms of what it was about, what you usually get is: “Well, this was really just about Church politics.” But we’re talking about the Synod of the Oak, which is when St. John Chrysostom was condemned and exiled for the first time in AD 402. It is likely—there were a lot of Church politics involved; this was motivated by that—but that is… There was an actual accusation made against him, of heresy, at this synod. So what we want to talk about here is the nature of that accusation.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because that’s very pertinent to everything that we’ve been discussing. We’ll say from the outset that it was a false accusation.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yes! So if you’ve read anything about the Synod of the Oak, you’ll probably know that they accused St. John Chrysostom of being an Origenist. Now, Origenist is a very flexible accusation. [Laughter] It can refer to lots of things. You could be saying somebody’s a universalist. You could be saying that resurrected bodies will be spherical.

Fr. Andrew: That’s my favorite.

Fr. Stephen: You could be saying any number of other things. But in this case, what they were saying made St. John Chrysostom an Origenist was that they accused him, and the Tall Brothers whom he’d given aid and comfort to from Egypt—

Fr. Andrew: Who were a group of monks, by the way, these Tall Brothers.

Fr. Stephen: He was accused of being an Origenist because they said he said God didn’t have a body.

Fr. Andrew: Right. They are saying that he said that.

Fr. Stephen: Right. They accused St. John Chrysostom of saying that God doesn’t have a body, and a group of monks were sent who are referred to as anthropomorphists because they believed that God had a body. So sometimes, if anyone even gets into the details of the accusation, they look at it as kind of silly, because they say, “Well, of course God doesn’t have a body,” because they’re thinking of “body” in the modern sense, not as we’ve been talking about it. The accusation at the time actually was an accusation about St. John’s christology primarily.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and I think it’s important especially to know that part of the frame for this is that it’s actually a guilt by association accusation. It’s not from something that he himself ever said or wrote. It’s just: “You’re from this town and they have bad christology over there, so you therefore must as well, because we all know how people from Antioch are, don’t we?” Nudge, nudge, wink, wink.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and it’s Antioch, and there are other Antiochene writers whose christology was later condemned, like Theodore of Mopsuestia, Theodoret of Cyr, and it was not coincidental that they were condemned alongside Origen, because there is a connection that we’re about to talk about. The idea is they were condemned for a christology that was Nestorian, meaning they were condemned because they said that their view of Christ had some kind of separation between Christ’s humanity and his divinity. And the particular way that worked was based on a certain view of Christ as a divine Person. If you take—and again, we won’t get into even whether this was actually what Origen believed, but Origen was thought and said to have accepted this philosophical notion of the divine nature, that God has no body in this ancient sense, this ancient sense that God doesn’t communicate directly to his creation or act directly in his creation, that he can’t.

Fr. Andrew: Now, would it be correct to say… I know that the word has developed a lot, much later, but would it be correct to say that these are the energies of God we’re talking about? Is “energies of God” synonymous with the “body of God”?

Fr. Stephen: I wouldn’t say synonymous.

Fr. Andrew: But there’s certainly some overlap.

Fr. Stephen: There’s some overlap here, yeah. When we talk about God’s powers and his… Yeah.

So for him, God (capital G)—they held that for Origen: God (capital G) is like the god of the philosophers and is disconnected. And then for Origen, they held… They held that Origen said that then the Logos is sort of a lesser divine being who serves as an intermediary. So if you imagine for a minute that we’re thinking about Christ, we have Christ as humanity, but then you believe that divinity, including Christ’s divinity, is bodiless in this sense—is detached, is infinite, and unaware and unable to interact with creation—you end up having sort of this human being, Jesus, who is in some way attached to or connected to a divine Person in some kind of unique way…

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. The Force. [Laughter] Sorry.

Fr. Stephen: Right, midichlorians…

Fr. Andrew: He’s really strong with the Force. Yeah, right.

Fr. Stephen: ...in some way, but it’s not one Person. It’s not one Person. So that understanding of God is incompatible with Orthodox christology. You can’t have… If God is that way, you can’t have him meeting with a person. So that was the accusation, the incorrect accusation.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and if I recall correctly, Nestorius’s solution to this problem—because this was his view—is to say that the divine Christ is joined to the man Jesus by good will. Wasn’t that true? Evdokia or whatever, by good will, conjoined by good will. So you have two persons who hare conjoined. And it’s made necessary for him to say this, because he has this sense that God does not have a body in this ancient sense of having a body.

Fr. Stephen: Right. So the way this ends up getting resolved surrounds—and now we’re going to use some fancy Greek and Latin words—

Fr. Andrew: All right!

Fr. Stephen: In case everybody’s not…

Fr. Andrew: If we haven’t lost everybody. We might have five or six people listening still!

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] If there’s anybody still hanging with us, this should take care of it!

—and that’s this phrase in Greek, kyriakos anthropos, or in Latin, homo dominicus, which both translate roughly to “lordly man.”

Fr. Andrew: “Lordly man,” yeah.

Fr. Stephen: That phrase in its original use was heretical.

Fr. Andrew: Right, because it came from Apollinarius.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so the Apollinarians had a view where the way you get one Person for Christ is that he sort of has some human aspects and then some divine aspects, and when you put them all together, you get one Person.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, or the way I’ve often heard it described is that you swap out his human soul or mind for the divine Logos. And if I recall correctly, it was this particular problem that was what inspired St. Gregory the Theologian to say, “What is not assumed is not saved,” in other words, if there’s any part of human nature, any element of human nature that the Son of God does not assume in the Incarnation, then that, we can’t be saved. So if he doesn’t have a human mind, then our minds can’t be saved, and we’re in big trouble! So you get sort of human parts, God parts, stick ‘em together, and you have the Apollinarian Christ.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so that obviously is wrong. And St. Cyril of Alexandria, when he was arguing against Nestorius, was accused at some times of being an Apollinarian because he was insistent that there’s just one Person, so they said, “Oh, well, you must be an Apollinarian, and must you have pieces if you say there’s just one, one subject.” So he, in rejecting that charge, sort of condemned that term.

Nonetheless, that term got resurrected by St. Mark the Ascetic, or St. Mark the Monk. It’s “ascetic,” not “aesthetic”; it wasn’t just that he was really good-looking.

Fr. Andrew: Or an excellent dresser. Yeah, he was probably a terrible dresser, being a monk.

Fr. Stephen: But he took this term and redefined it and reused it. He used it to talk about Christ’s body apart from the Incarnation.

Fr. Andrew: Or before the Incarnation, maybe.

Fr. Stephen: Right. Well, both.

Fr. Andrew: Both. Ohh…

Fr. Stephen: Time, right, you know. God’s outside of time, so “before” gets tricky. To talk about the divine Person, Christ, who pre-existed the Incarnation.

Fr. Andrew: So in this case, then, that phrase, “lordly man,” “lord” obviously hearkening back to the Old Testament referenced to God, to Yahweh. The lordly man: “man” there is by way of analogy, because we’re talking about, inasmuch as he’s not man, before he becomes man, even, and apart, whatever. So it’s not that there is this man, this lordly man who then joins with a human man.

Fr. Stephen: Right, but it’s to say that the divine Person—the Son of God, the Logos, the Word of God—had a body in this ancient sense, meaning he had a will, he has energy. And this understanding, then, becomes the source of some of the later Ecumenical Councils where it’ll say that Christ has two wills, a divine will and a human will; two energies, divine energy, human energy; because he has these capacities already. He is not cut off from creation in his divinity before the Incarnation.

Fr. Andrew: All right. Before we go to our next break, we have another call that has come in, and this is Greg who is calling from Texas. Greg, are you there?

Greg: I am. Good evening, Fathers.

Fr. Andrew: Good evening, and welcome to The Lord of Spirits podcast, Greg. What is your question or your comment?

Greg: Short comment. Been listening to your podcast for a while. It is awesome. I’m also engaged on your Facebook group. I cannot thank you enough for the research and effort and everything you’re putting out there. It is tremendously helpful to me, who is not at all Orthodox and not all from an Orthodox background. I come from Charismatic background, etc., so this is mind-blowing to me, and I love it. Thank you. Thank you, thank you.

Fr. Andrew: You’re welcome, Greg.

Greg: That means that my question… Let’s call it the God-body. What kind of God-body do the fallen sons of God have? And my question is specifically with an eye to the New Testament—I think it’s a New Testament idea, that the spawn of the fallen sons of God, the spawn of the nephilim, after they’ve died, etc., etc., the demons or unclean spirits that are floating around. They seem to need or they seem to look for a physical body to inhabit. That’s what I’m trying to get some more knowledge around. What did they have? When they died, what kind of body do they have? And why is there that need for them to “find” a human body or a physical body to inhabit?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, we can’t get away from giants, Father. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Who would want to?

Fr. Andrew: People get excited when you talk about giants.

Greg: I listen to that giants episode once a week.

Fr. Stephen: Literally listen to it religiously.

We’re going to talk a little bit more about exactly what an angelic body is next time, but in terms of your question, we talked, of course, about the five(ish) falls of angelic beings. The angelic beings proper who fell still have an angelic body, though their fall has changed it in certain ways, so that’s what we’ll be talking about more next time. But the nephilim, the giants who died, those are the spirits of dead folks, so they don’t have bodies currently. Their body went into the ground and decomposed, and that’s why those are the spirits who will possess humans, will indwell idols in temples, and are active. They don’t have a body, strictly speaking, right now, and therefore can’t really interact outside of that.

Now, their bodies will be resurrected along with everybody else’s on the last day, and they’ll go to their final condemnation, but we’ll be talking more about the bodily resurrection next time, too.

Fr. Andrew: Does that help, Greg?

Greg: That helps tremendously. Thank you very, very much, Fathers. Again, keep up the great work.

Fr. Andrew: Thanks for calling in. All right. Well, that wraps up the second part of our episode this evening, and we’re going ahead and go to break, and when we get back, we’re going to actually talk about the way that the Old Testament talks about God’s body. Let’s go to break!

Fr. Andrew: Welcome to the third half of The Lord of Spirits. Here on Thursday night, January 14, 2021, we’re glad to be with you. All right, we’ve just been bending your minds and definitely mine—I’m sure Fr. Stephen’s had this stuff well in hand for years now—talking about the body of God. In the third part of the show, we want to talk specifically about some of the ways that the Old Testament shows that God does indeed have a body. Let’s talk about some of those. We have a few examples. There’s actually piles of examples that we could give, but we just selected a few that just show that God is interacting bodily with his creation with mankind.

Perhaps the most common kind of thing we see… We see, for instance, in Genesis 15, when it says, “The word of Yahweh came to Abraham in a vision,” or as it often gets translated as “the word of the Lord came to Abraham in a vision.” So he’s seeing something. That’s a physical experience. That’s actually a material experience.

Fr. Stephen: That’s actually the episode where he first receives the promises. So what’s presented there is not that… There was a movie with—who was it? Was it F. Murray Abraham, I think maybe?—there was some Bible movie where he played Abraham; I think it was him. And he went out and sort of looked at the desert outside of a CGI Ur, and there was sort of this voice on the wind that came and spoke to him, and that was the word of the Lord coming to him. But it actually says, “The word of Yahweh appeared to him in a vision and told him these things.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there wasn’t a ooo-ooo-oooh! [Laughter] All right, we’ve got some more. Another one having to do with visions. So this is from 1 Samuel (or 1 Kingdoms—I always get this mixed up), 3:1-21: “The word of Yahweh was rare; there were not many visions. Samuel did not yet know Yahweh, for the word of Yahweh had not yet revealed himself to him.” And this is the part that really gets me: “Yahweh came and stood, calling as at other times.” He stood next to him.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so we’re told there’s this poverty of the word of Yahweh, and that doesn’t mean, oh, there aren’t prophets, no one’s communicating anything. We’re told: there’s not many visions, meaning, nobody’s seeing him in a long time. He hasn’t appeared to anyone in a long time. We’re told that the reason Samuel didn’t know Yahweh, the God of Israel, yet is that he hadn’t revealed himself to him. There’s this whole episode where he calls out to him at night, and Samuel keeps thinking it’s Eli, the priest, calling him. So he keeps running over and being like: “Hey, what do you want?” and Eli’s like: “I didn’t call you. Go back to bed, kid.” [Laughter] And this happens three times, and then finally Eli says, “Well, hey, maybe it’s the Lord. So next time just ask him what he wants.” So that’s when we get this, that the word of Yahweh comes and stands next to his bed and calls out to him the way he had the other times. This isn’t, again, a disembodied voice.

Fr. Andrew: Again, another one—and this is very not-disembodied; this is quite embodied—Jeremiah 1:4-9: “The word of Yahweh came to me”—and here we go—“and Yahweh stretched out his hand and touched my mouth.” Yeah: stretched out his hand and touched his mouth, making him a prophet, giving him the words to say. But, again, he touches him. It’s not a metaphor; it’s an actual experience that he’s having. And then another one—this is probably one of the most famous, and let’s explicate this one a little bit—that encounter at the oak of Mamre, where Yahweh comes to Abraham and shows up as… There’s three men that show up and talk to Abraham. What’s going on there?

Fr. Stephen: One is identified as Yahweh.

Fr. Andrew: Right, one of the men.

Fr. Stephen: The other two are angels. And because we read the Bible in bits and pieces in individual stories, we don’t necessarily get this connection that this encounter at the oak of Mamre, the hospitality of Abraham, happens immediately before the whole episode surrounding Sodom and Gomorrah.

Fr. Andrew: Right, so the angels go down, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: So Yahweh and these two angels come, and Abraham has Sarah go and make them a bunch of food, and they lay out a spread, and they sit and eat and converse. And then we’re told that Yahweh sends the two angels down to Sodom to get Lot, and he stays and talks to Abraham. Again, this is not a disembodied voice.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there’s someone staying there to talk to him.

Fr. Stephen: And conversing with Abraham. And then as that unfolds, we get these two episodes, and you can read these. The first one, where Yahweh talks to Yahweh. [Laughter] Where we’re told Yahweh says:

Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do? seeing that Abraham shall surely become a great and mighty nation, and all of the nations of the earth shall be blessed in him. For I have chosen him, that he may command his children and his household after him to keep the way of Yahweh by doing righteousness and justice so that Yahweh may bring to Abraham what he has promised him.

Fr. Andrew: Which Abraham sort of “overhears.” [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: So Yahweh is standing there talking to him, and then Yahweh talks to Yahweh about him. And then, even more tellingly, once Lot is safely out of the way—that’s in Genesis 18:17-19—then in 19:24, after Lot is safely out of the city, we’re told then Yahweh rained down fire on Sodom and Gomorrah from Yahweh from heaven. So Yahweh who’s still standing on earth calls down fire from Yahweh in heaven.

Fr. Andrew: Which underlines, by the way—I mean, we haven’t spent a lot of time on this—that the idea that God is a single unitarian monotheistic God is not a thing. It’s not a thing in the Old Testament! Because here you’ve got Yahweh talking to Yahweh, Yahweh calling down fire from Yahweh in heaven. Clearly at least there’s two; at the very least there’s two, right? Go ahead.

Fr. Stephen: I was just going to say what gets pointed out very clearly over the course of a few verses in Exodus, which I think you were about to read.

Fr. Andrew: Right, Exodus 3:3, Moses speaks to God, “face to face, as a man speaks to his friend”—I love that. And then later God says, “No one can see my face and live.” I’m like: So which is it, God? Can you speak to him when it was face to face or can he not see your face? Obviously there is the face of God that Moses is talking to, and then there is another Person whose face no one can see and live.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and these are… When you say “later,” this is twelve verses later. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s in the same passage.

Fr. Stephen: Twelve verses later, yeah. “You’ve been talking to me face-to-face; you can’t see my face and live,” over the course of those few verses. And as you said, there’s a hundred or more, more examples we could give in various parts of just the Old Testament. This kind of gets summed up by St. John at the end of the Prologue to his gospel, where John 1:18, he says, “No one has seen God at any time, but the unique God who is in the bosom of the Father has made him known.” When St. John says that, he’s not ret-conning the Old Testament; he’s not saying, “Oh, hey, all that stuff you read when you thought that was God appearing to people or they saw God? That never happened.” That’s not what he’s saying; he’s saying the opposite. He’s saying that the Person that they saw, the Person whom they saw is the Logos whom I’ve been talking about in this Prologue.”

Fr. Andrew: Yes. “In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was God.”

Fr. Stephen: That second Yahweh, the one who was standing there talking to Abraham, the one whom Moses talked to face-to-face, the one who touched Jeremiah, the one who stood next to Samuel—that’s the Word of Yahweh, as it said in Samuel and in Genesis; that’s the Logos.

Fr. Andrew: And we have, we actually have a very relevant question specifically about this. Scott is calling from Alabama. Scott, can you hear me?

Scott: I can, Father. Thank you for taking my call.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, sure! Scott, you have a question that’s pretty much about what we were just talking about, right?

Scott: Well, I was worried you wouldn’t take my call, because this is sort of the answer, I think, to my question. Long-time listener, first-time caller; love the show.

Fr. Andrew: Yay.

Scott: As you were speaking of this and giving the examples from Jeremiah, it talks about the Word, but then you’re talking about Yahweh. In previous episodes or maybe in some of your blogs, you’ve talked about the Lord, I guess Yahweh, hiding his face or “you can only see my backside,” as he says to Moses. You’ve said before, this is actually God the Son that people are experiencing directly and having this direct relationship with. So in this episode, I really was seeking some clarity on whom are we interacting with mutually in the Old Testament as we read; whom are we interacting with and putting ourselves in the mind of? Are we interacting with God the Father? Are we interacting with God the Son? I’ve never heard God the Son referred to as “Yahweh.”

Scott’s wife: Your wife would also like you to talk about the Holy Spirit, as you talk about the bodies.

Scott: It’s a family affair here.

Fr. Andrew: Leave nothing out! Hey, everybody! [Laughter] It’s like the old time, people gathered around their radio. This is great!

Scott: We are, absolutely. You should see the kids. They’re actually bored, but that’s okay.

Fr. Andrew: Oh. You’ll understand this later, kids, and you’re going to love it!

Scott: Yeah. Maybe.

Fr. Andrew: Maybe!

Fr. Stephen: Not when you’re teenagers. When you’re teenagers, you roll your eyes, but then you’ll get older again and then you’ll dig it, yeah. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: That’s right. Yeah, go ahead, Father. Tackle this massive triadological question that he’s got here!

Fr. Stephen: And manage not to get… Let’s just add some more heresies people could accuse me of—no. [Laughter] So we’re talking about, as you mentioned, as we were already saying, that this is God the Son, this is the Logos whom we see in the Old Testament. Yahweh is treated by the Church not as a personal name, but as a title, and here’s what that means. “Yahweh” is not the name of one of the three Persons of the Trinity. It’s not the personal name of the Father or the personal name of the Son or the personal name of the Spirit. “Yahweh”—I don’t know how far down I want to go down this rabbit-[hole] getting granular with Hebrew grammar, but the word “Yahweh” is a form of the word “to be,” that in Hebrew… It’s in what’s called the Hiphil binyan, which means basically that it’s causative. So it literally means the one who causes things to be, he who causes things to be that were not.

Fr. Andrew: The creator.

Fr. Stephen: The idea of creation, that things are not, and then he causes them to be, to exist. This is important in understanding a lot of places, especially in the prophets in the Old Testament where he will say, “Then you will know that I am Yahweh.” And it’s like, “Well, they’ve known your name for a while, right?” But what he’s saying is, for example, “Israel will be destroyed, and the bones in a valley, but when I breathe new life into those bones and bring them back to life, then you will know that I am Yahweh; then you will know that I am the one who causes things to be.”

Fr. Andrew: Because only he could do that.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so what that means is this is—St. Dionysios the Areopagite tells us that the titles of God, the names of God are his energies—this is one of the powers, obviously, as the Creator, that is possessed by all three Persons, so we can talk about Yahweh the Father, Yahweh the Son, Yahweh the Spirit. Or the Spirit of Yahweh, the Word of Yahweh, and Yahweh; that’s a perfectly appropriate way of speaking. We actually say—it’s hidden in our English translations, some of which are extraordinarily bad—at the end of every Vespers service, in the dismissal, we say the name Yahweh and identify Christ as Yahweh. It depends on how it’s translated. We’re both Antiochians, so most of our texts have: “Christ our God, the existing one…”

Fr. Andrew: And in Greek it’s ho On, which is the Greek translation—well, sort of—of Yahweh, but I’ve also heard it as, “Christ our God, he who is…”

Fr. Stephen: Or “He who is, Christ our God…” sometimes, which really confuses it. But we’re saying that name and we’re saying that’s who Christ is. We’re saying that Christ is Yahweh in that blessing at the end of every Vespers service. So that’s that part.

But in terms of—and this is a good clarification, too, in terms of the Spirit and the Father with bodies—we’re not saying that Christ has a body in this ancient sense and the Father and the Spirit don’t. We’re not saying the Father and the Spirit don’t interact with the creation. God the Father is not the god of the philosophers, and then we’ve got Christ as an intermediary. They all do.

Fr. Andrew: Right, I mean, in Genesis, you’ve got, for instance, the Spirit of God hovering over the face of the water. That’s movement. That’s a bodily action.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and one of the things that unites the three Persons of the Holy Trinity is that they have one energy, that they’re united in these things. We’ll be talking more particularly next time about the Incarnation and the way in which Christ, obviously, because he also has human nature and a human body, how that, then, is different [from] the other two Persons. But it’s not a case that Christ interacts with the creation and the other two Persons don’t, or that they only do it through Christ, because we clearly see that’s not the case in the Scriptures.

Fr. Andrew: Does that make sense, Scott and… Mrs. Scott? [Laughter] Sorry.

Scott: Scott and Megan, yeah, thank you.

Fr. Andrew: Scott and Megan, okay.

Scott: Yeah, it does, it helps, and I guess I hope to hear more clarity on this, because God the Father, in my teaching, what I’ve been taught, has always been the originate Creator—and maybe incorrectly I’ve been taught that he creates and sends his energy into the world through Christ and through the Holy Spirit as his metaphorical two arms. Any correction on that I would love to hear, now and on future episodes. Thank you so much!

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, like Father said, they have one energy, so it’s not like God the Father operates independently of the Son and Spirit, or sort of uses them.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and that language, the “through” language—“from” and “to” and “through”—and we’ll get into that in a future date, because that’s going to be a topic in and of itself, the way St. Paul uses those prepositions, that gets granular, but we will get to that.

Fr. Andrew: All right. Thank you very much, Scott and Megan, for calling in from Alabama. Great to hear from you.

Let’s move forward now, and we’re going to try to wrap this up with some of my favorite stuff. [Laughter] Yeah, we’re going to talk a little bit about paganism and also about worship in particular and how all of this kind of plays out there as well. We’ve already established that St. John in John 1 is not talking about multiple gods; he’s talking about the one God, Yahweh, Yahweh the Father and Yahweh the Son. That’s what’s going on there in the Prologue. How, then, is this different from the way—? And we kind of touched on this a little bit when, I think it was Greg, called in, talking about giants. But how, then, is this different from the way that pagans interacted with their gods? What kind of bodies do their gods have? How does that work?

Fr. Stephen: Just to take a little bit of the heat and hate-mail off myself, Fr. Andrew did just say that pagan worship is his favorite thing.

Fr. Andrew: One of my favorite topics.

Fr. Stephen: Oh, just one of them.

Fr. Andrew: One of my favorite topics, yeah. Whew. [Laughter] Well, I am suspicious now, because I am taking… I have just started master of arts program in language and literature, in which I’m particularly looking at ancient pagan myths, so there we are. So who knows? Who knows what I might be doing?

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] When we’re talking about pagan gods, ancient pagans believed that any given god had a whole bunch of bodies. You could come at this from a couple ways. One of them is really granular and I’m not going to get into right now—maybe in a blog post at some point—and that’s types of bodies that they believed their gods had. But for now, we’re going to talk about multiplicity in terms of one god having a whole bunch of bodies.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which is totally a thing in the ancient world, people. Totally a thing.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and this happens primarily through what we call idolatry. This is an important part of how idolatry worked as a way of localizing a god. But one god could be localized in a whole bunch of different places at the same time. As an example, one of the examples I use is you look at Re in Egypt, the sun god.

Fr. Andrew: Who is called Ra in most English sources, but I did look this up, and it is Re, or Rë. I’ve seen it, apparently in some languages it’s Rë as well, which is interesting.

Fr. Stephen: It’s R-e with an umlaut over it.

Fr. Andrew: I do love a good umlaut.

Fr. Stephen: In fact, it’s probably not an umlaut when it’s over an e, but I digress.

For the Egyptians, the sun in the sky, like the actual solar disk in the sky is one of Re’s bodies, but at some periods of Egyptian history, and in some sense the pharaoh is Re on earth, and at the same time they’ve got temples to Re in some places that have statues that are bodies of Re. And sometimes these will get the names of a particular place; this is why it’s referred to as localization, sort of attached to them, and they’ll look a little different. But when someone went to communicate with or commune with or worship or sacrifice to Re in a particular temple, the sun didn’t disappear out of the sky, pharaoh didn’t cease to exist. This wasn’t that Re was running around and sort of like: “Oh man, I got to get over to Thebes fast!” [Laughter] “I’ve got a sacrifice at twelve.” That’s not how they viewed it.

They viewed it as having multiple bodies, because, again, bodies—it’s not talking about the physicality, it’s talking about these points of communication, communion, interaction with the world and with people. So there’s tons of them. And because it’s peculiar form that we’ve talked about before on the show that idolatry takes, this is human initiative, going and creating a body for the god so that the human can interact with the god and communicate with the god and get the god to do what they want in that particular place, to sort of draw them down.

Fr. Andrew: Trap the god. It’s a god-trap.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Put them in that. It’s a death-trap, a suicide-trap. You put them in the statue, and now they’re localized.

As we talked about also, when you come to the Torah and the Torah forbids idolatry, it’s aimed at forbidding not just making a statue. This is how many of our Protestant friends interpret it, that idolatry is just making a picture or making a statue.

Fr. Andrew: No, it’s using, using the image in a particular way—

Fr. Stephen: In a particular way.

Fr. Andrew: —to try to trap and provide a body for your god.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and manipulate the god and exert power and control over the spirit that you’re worshiping. So what we see… That’s why what we see in response in the Torah is not just “Hey, don’t make statues except for the few I tell you to make on the ark of the covenant and that kind of thing, but other than that, don’t make any”—

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, “by the way…”

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] It’s not that. It’s what it’s coupled with is: You’re only going to come and worship Yahweh in one place. That’s going to be the tabernacle and then the Temple. There’s just going to be this one place where you come, to interact with Yahweh, to commune with Yahweh, to hear from him, and it’s going to be the place—it’s referred to all through the Torah as—“the place I will choose,” that God is going to choose that place. Actually, first it’s the top of Mt. Sinai, and then it’s the tabernacle, but it’s the place where God chooses to come and be present. That’s the place where God’s body is, is the place where he chooses to come and make himself present, and that’s the place where all of the Israelites have to come, to hear from him, to communicate with him, to interact with him, to sacrifice to him, to worship him.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and if you think about that, just in a psychological way, there is a difference between “if you can summon someone to you” versus “you have to go to them.” And idolatry is really about—because you could set up your idolatrous temple anywhere you like—and the point is, you’re summoning the god to you, but God, Yahweh, is saying, “No, no, no, no. I’ve picked a place, you come to me.” And this helps to underline what kind of God he is. He’s not like… I mean, this is one of our frequent themes. “Who among the gods is like unto thee, O Lord?” Answer? None. And the fact that one place is chosen by him and that it’s only one place… I mean, such that it becomes such a polemic later against the Samaritans, like: “You guys are worshiping on the wrong mountain.” This is so important, because it underlines who God is, that you have to go to him.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and this is why there was so much opprobrium towards the Samaritans because of that. It wasn’t just like: “Oh, hey, you guys are worshiping in the wrong place.” Like you’re digging in the wrong place. It was—

Fr. Andrew: “You guys are idolaters! Look what you’re doing!”

Fr. Stephen: Right. That was idolatrous. That was heretical, to go and build a temple there, on Mt. Gerizim and worship there. And we see this connection between the body of God and the Temple in a bunch of places. One of the primary ones, or at least one of the ones I think of as primary because I wrote my dissertation about the Day of Atonement, is the Day of Atonement, because part of it that gets left out when we talk about the Day of Atonement in our modern Christian world, we’re almost always talking about the goats, because everyone wants to talk about atonement theories, so it’s: “What’s going on with the goats?”

We miss some other key elements of the ritual, a main one of which was the high priest, this was the one day a year when he would go into the holy of holies, where the ark of the covenant was. Before he did that, he would have to make a bunch of sacrifices for his own sins. Then he could enter and as he entered he was required to offer this huge amount of incense to make this cloud of incense. And the purpose of the cloud was to cover—and there’s sort of a word-play there, because the word for “cover” is the same word as the word for “atonement”—to cover the fact that Yahweh appeared there on that day. So if that smoke wasn’t there to cover it, he would see Yahweh and die.

So he did that; he had to offer the incense so that he wouldn’t see directly Yahweh when he appeared, and then he would come in with the blood of the goat that was for Yahweh and use it to purify the ark of the covenant and its cover and then the rest of the tabernacle and later Temple, so that God could continue to live in the midst of his people for another year without consuming them in fire because of their sins or…

Fr. Andrew: Right, and as I recall, the reason why this is done is because this is the day that God has chosen to make himself known. It’s not because doing this ritual makes God show up.

Fr. Stephen: Right, no. You don’t… You’re not doing the ritual to make God appear.

Fr. Andrew: Because you can’t do that. He’s not that kind of God.

Fr. Stephen: That’s the day when God is going to appear in the Temple. He’s going to appear in the holy of holies, so you have to do the ritual to make that safe.

Fr. Andrew: And of course there’s an interesting sort of modern analogue to that; it’s not identical, but as an analogue which is that we have the miracle of the holy fire that appears in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher on Holy Saturday. Again, it’s not that we’ve called him down; it’s that this is the day, this is the appropriate. It’s funny, there’s even that historical instance where the holy fire appeared even though the services were not allowed to be done at some point in history. It still appeared and cracked one of the pillars nearby, which I gather you can go see. I’ve never seen it, but I’ve talked to people who have. That God himself still chooses to appear.

Now, why don’t they have to do a massive, gigantic cloud of incense—although I’m sure probably they do have some incense—in order so people don’t see that happening? It’s okay to see it happening; people see it happening.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and that’s because Christ’s atonement has now purified the world.

Fr. Andrew: He’s done the covering.

Fr. Stephen: And this: see the whole book of Hebrews. That’s a lot of what Hebrews is getting at. So it’s now safe to approach God.

You see this similar idea of God’s body enthroned in the Temple and the visions, the vision that Isaiah has when he’s called to be a prophet, where he sees him enthroned with the altar as his footstool.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, “Here am I, Lord. Send me.” I love that bit.

Fr. Stephen: And then Ezekiel sees a very simpler thing, but then he sees God, Yahweh, on his chariot-throne in the Temple, but then before the Temple is destroyed, he leaves. That’s what Ezekiel sees. So when he leaves, the Temple is destroyed. We’ll probably get into this a little more in the next episode, but, as a semi-tease, the reason why we don’t have just one place where we worship now is that any place where God’s body is, say, in a tabernacle, say, on an altar, becomes a temple.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Wow. Cool! Very cool. Christ becomes the new temple. And as kind of the final tease that I think would be helpful for next time, in two weeks, is if the Son of God has a bodily existence apart from the Incarnation, and then he also has a bodily existence by virtue of being human, does that mean that Christ has two bodies? Tune in next time; we’ll talk about that!

But before we close, having gone through this mind-bending experience, now twice for me, I want to just give some of my own impressions about this, and then, Fr. Stephen, you can close us out. I think one of the big take-aways for me—I mean, there’s two big take-aways. The first is the stuff we’ve just been talking about, which is how the truth that God has bodily existence—that he interacts with the world, that he has a nexus of potentialities, powers, however you want to put it—that that is what we’re… he’s what we’re… whom we’re interacting with in worship. If he really was the god of the philosophers, then he wouldn’t be available. He wouldn’t show up; he wouldn’t reveal himself. He wouldn’t do that.

And then, connected to that, my other big take-away is how important it is that we understand the biblical language about God’s bodily existence, because if we don’t then we’re not worshiping the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; we don’t have a God who loves us; we don’t have a God who cared enough to create us. The god of the philosophers had to have, not even an emissary, if he’s even aware of him, but this demi-urge, this intermediary. And a number of heretics over time, they accept that model, and they identify Christ as being that intermediary—but he’s not. He’s not some lesser creator-being that the unmoved mover is only kind of tangentially connected to or whatever.

This is the God who loves us. This is the God who reaches out to us. This is the God who touches the mouth of Jeremiah. This is the God who stands next to Samuel’s bed. We don’t have to be embarrassed by that language. It’s in Scripture, and it means something. It may not mean exactly the same thing when I stand next to a bed, but that doesn’t mean that it didn’t happen or it’s just some kind of metaphor. It’s not! Again, the Scripture never says, “And Yahweh became present in a manner like unto a man stands next to a bed.” It doesn’t even say that! Just that he stood next to the bed. Or that he ate—how much more bodily can you get? He ate with Abraham. And our February episodes are all going to be about sacrifice and worship, everybody, so hold onto your hats for those. That’s going to be really cool.

But it’s astonishing—I know that I use that word a lot on this show, but it just really is astonishing. And it’s okay to take this stuff seriously and not think that we’re anthropomorphizing God; we’re not. Again, remember, like we said at the beginning: it’s the opposite. We are theomorphized. We are like God. We’re much smaller, lesser, corrupted, limited imitations, but we are like God. He’s not like us; we’re like him. We have to keep that in the right order.

Those are my big take-aways from this conversation. Father?

Fr. Stephen: There’s a place in the Scriptures where St. Paul talked to a bunch of those philosophers we were talking about, about their God.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, the Areopagus.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, I think you’re vaguely familiar with that passage, Father.

Fr. Andrew: Yes! I’m a fan of it, I guess. It’s one of my favorite things!

Fr. Stephen: And when he speaks to them, he certainly, repeatedly, condemns idolatry, but he also speaks to this philosophical notion of God, that he’s remote, that the Most High God has distanced himself and is now sort of gone, and maybe we can content ourselves as much as we need with these idols and these lesser spiritual beings. But what St. Paul says to them in response to what they believe is that when God created all people—the Most High God, Yahweh, the God of Israel, created the whole world—and he assigned to people their allotted places and times, that he did this not—well, first of all, that he did it, but also that he did this not to push them away, not because they were lesser than him or didn’t think about them or couldn’t think about them or didn’t care about them—exactly the opposite—he did this, St. Paul said:

So that they should seek God and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him, yet he is actually not far from each one of us, for in him we live and move and have our being.

So he’s telling them: This is a part of the Gospel, especially for these philosophers and how they’re used to thinking about God. That God not only knows you exist, but he cares about you. He wants you to seek him, and he wants you to find him. He’s here with you. He’s around you. He’s how you’re taking your last breath and your next breath. He’s the one who’s giving you life, and not only brought you into being but is maintaining your being.

It’s very easy for us, in our sort of modern, materialistic mindset, as we already talked about, to fall into this kind of accidental agnosticism, where we don’t doubt that God exists, but that he’s off somewhere, at least most of the time, and he’s not here with us, he’s not close to us, he doesn’t care, and at least he doesn’t care about the little stuff, maybe about the big stuff, maybe politics or something he’s involved, but not with me and my life and the things I’m worried about and paying my bills and all of these things. And the truth is that the God who created the universe is the opposite of that.

We’re told by the Scriptures over and over again that God has done all these things for us out of his love. He created us out of his love, he created the cosmos out of his love, and he’s done all of it so that we would seek after him and find him. We’re told that if we seek him with our whole heart, we will find him, and so that he can share his life, which is an eternal life, with us in his kingdom that has no end. So this is something that should— It’s not just— I know a lot of our episodes, we talked about the saints, I talked about how we’re never alone in terms of having the saints and the angels around us and worshiping with us. God’s here, too. Christ is here with us, too. The Holy Spirit is living within us, and it’s not far off somewhere.

Fr. Andrew: Amen.

Well, that is our show for today. Thank you very much for listening, everybody. If you didn’t get a chance to call in during the live broadcast, we would love to hear from you either via email at lordofspirits@ancientfaith.com, or you can message us at our Lord of Spirits podcast Facebook page. We read everything, but we can’t respond to everything, and we do save what you send for possible use in future episodes.

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