Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick: Hey, good evening, everybody! You’re listening to The Lord of Spirits podcast. We are back! It is our first live show since the great flood in the Chesterton studio that happened right before Great Lent! My co-host, Fr. Stephen De Young, is with me from Lafayette, Louisiana, and I’m Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick in Emmaus, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. And if you’re listening to this live—and I hope you are—you can call in—

Fr. Stephen De Young: We’re doing it live!

Fr. Andrew: That’s right! [Laughter] It’s happening! [Clears throat] Thank you for reminding me that this is live radio.

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: So you can call in—

Fr. Stephen: So we shouldn’t, like, interrupt each other and throw each other off.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, you shouldn’t. Don’t do that.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah.

Fr. Andrew: It’s fine. It’s okay. [Laughter] You can call us, though… at 855-AF-RADIO… which is 855-237-3246. And Matushka Trudi will be taking your calls, and we’re going to get to those in the second part of our show.

So one of our perennial topics on this show is how one reads the Bible. This is a critical question for all Christians. Related to this is how one understands history, both as part of our biblical reading methodology and also as people looking at the historical narratives that are within the Bible. Now, while we’ve made many comments over our few dozen episodes about this topic, we’ve never done an episode focusing on it specifically. So what you’re going to hear in this episode is a methodology for reading the Bible that we believe not only works but also is what one sees revealed in how the Orthodox Church Fathers read the Bible, and, even more importantly, how we see the Orthodox Church reading the Bible within its divine services. And we’re also going to let you know why we so often start our episodes with Genesis, way back at the dawn of history.

So let’s start with this question of history. Fr. Stephen, what exactly is history?

Fr. Stephen: Well, before we go there…

Fr. Andrew: All right.

Fr. Stephen: I feel like we need to address an elephant in the room.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Okay.

Fr. Stephen: Not the flood—people know about the flood.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that’s true. It was not the flood that we usually talk about, though; it was another flood.

Fr. Stephen: It was another: did you get this message from Bobby Maddex?

Fr. Andrew: No!

Fr. Stephen: I get this message from him. He’s apparently hiding out in Honduras. Did you know about this?

Fr. Andrew: Oh, oh, I think he needs financial assistance, is that right? [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: He wants us to send him lawyers, guns, and money, in that order.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Wow!

Fr. Stephen: So I don’t know what’s going on here. But if you see Bobby Maddex, help the man!

Fr. Andrew: You know, it’s weird how many friends I have that have this problem. I get emails from them all the time.

Fr. Stephen: Oh, okay.

Fr. Andrew: But I haven’t gotten this one yet, it’s true.

Fr. Stephen: Maybe they can all pitch in together and help each other.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] It’s true.

Fr. Stephen: Also for listeners—pay close attention, because at one point during this episode, we are going to say something nice about Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.

Fr. Andrew: I feel like we should have had theme music for when you said that.

Fr. Stephen: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel theme music?

Fr. Andrew: Bom bom bom bommm!

Fr. Stephen: We don’t mention him that often.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] No, I know, but it was such a dramatic moment. I feel like there should’ve been music to go along with that.

Fr. Stephen: Well, I mean, you know, Beethoven or something, yeah. I mean, he is one of our 19th-century German friends, so I guess he does appear within that august assemblage, but not normally independently, as he will this evening.

Fr. Andrew: Indeed.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and since we’re going to be talking about history here, that might clue you in as to why he might come up. Part of where we have to start in terms of how to read the Bible, not because it’s necessary, germane to the Bible, but because of the modern history, especially the last couple of centuries, of biblical interpretation and biblical studies and the way the understanding of history has gotten all wrapped up with that and sort of poisoned the well in terms of how the Scriptures are read by just about everybody.

And so, as you asked the question, “What is history?” the answer that you would commonly get to that question changed at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries; there was a transition that happened in terms of what people’s understand was of what history is. So before that, if we go back before that, we go back into any pre-modern period—and this is true from ancient times, really up through the Middle Ages, the medieval period—the idea of history was very different than the modern one. You had basically in Europe and in other Christian cultures up to that point three main sources for history, and when you studied history, it would sort of be these three things woven together.

One of those was the Bible, the Scriptures, particularly in the Old Testament insofar as they described certain ancient events. Then added into that would be various extra-biblical literature, so, for example, the book of Enoch that we’ve talked about before on the show many, many times in various contexts. Long after it was settled for everybody but the Ethiopians that that’s not part of the biblical canon—long after that it was still be used in historical chronicles in the East and the West.

Fr. Andrew: Right, I recall you mentioning a Byzantine chronicler…

Fr. Stephen: Yes, George Synkellos.

Fr. Andrew: When was he?

Fr. Stephen: He was in the end of the eight century, beginning of the ninth century.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so he’s basically treating Enoch as one of those historical sources that everybody needed to read.

Fr. Stephen: Right, filling in a bunch of things in and around especially the book of Genesis, obviously with 1 Enoch. But there were others, sort of these both Second Temple Jewish literature that had been saved and preserved, mostly in Christian monastic settlements; and then also some of the Christian extra-biblical literature, stuff like the Gospel of Nicodemus and those kind of things, and martyrologies and those kind of things that would get incorporated.

And then, sort of on the other end from the Bible, you would study, if you studied history at that time, you would study classics: the Greek and Roman classics. That was the sort of civilizational level, as opposed to the spiritual levels, the way that we would divide it. But they did not divide it; they sort of blended it all together, in sometimes very interesting ways, but we won’t digress on that too much. But even into the ninth, tenth, eleventh, twelfth centuries in the Byzantine empire, they were writing commentaries on the Iliad and the Odyssey, for example, and those were still being used for education.

So from these narrative sources, there would be sort of a master narrative woven together that would be the history, the story, of a particular people, whether it’s Bede helping do this kind of thing for the English people, whether it’s Eusebius of Caesarea wanting to do this for sort of the Christians of the Byzantine Empire, of the Roman Empire—dozens of other examples. But you’re weaving this together, and you come to a story that begins with… somewhere around the creation of the world, and ends with the present day of that people in the place where they dwell. And that story, then, tells the story of where that people came from, how they got where they are now, how they became a people, what sort of values or virtues characterize that people, and then who they’re going to be going forward.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and the intention is not to sort of claim, always—I mean, I think in some cases there was this claim—that the particular people who are writing this story are the pinnacle of history or the center of the world or something like that, but rather it was just like: well, this history is written for these people, by these people, and so it makes sense that all the world’s history up to this point for us leads to here and now, where we are.

It’s a kind of… It’s like if you’re studying genealogy. Everyone’s really ultimately interested in genealogy as it leads down to one point at the very bottom, and that’s you. Everything in front of that is really interesting, but you’re not going to follow all the branches out to everybody else. You might be interested in the ones that are closely related to you, but the fact that, for instance, every single person with any European descent is probably descended from Charlemagne doesn’t mean you’re going to be following all of those stories; you’re mostly kind of interested in you and your second and third, and maybe fourth cousins potentially.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, unless you’re a Mormon, and then it fans out in all directions…

Fr. Andrew: Oh, yeah! There’s no limit there!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and so that’s it. It’s the story of those people who are standing there, and it’s being told and retold to those people who are standing there. So, yes, the English people did not particularly care about the history of the Germanic tribes except as it related to the English people.

But also, that means that there’s no idea like what we take for granted now, this division between subjectivity and objectivity. They were not trying to give an “objective look” at the history of their people and describe all of the events, warts and all. No, the story was being told with a particular purpose, and the people who were mentioned in the story were mentioned for particular reasons, because they were good examples or bad examples or something they did became important or could be important in the future, or it was to be emulated or it was not to be emulated.

Fr. Andrew: Right. You can see this, for instance, in the way we tell American history. We’ve had, what, 46 presidents now, I think? And yet, even people who are moderately familiar with American history, or even very familiar, could not tell you much about most of them. There’s just certain key ones along the way, and that’s even with just our country’s history.

Fr. Stephen: I mean, you don’t have a bust of James K. Polk, the Napoleon of the West?

Fr. Andrew: It’s so weird, right? Or Millard Fillmore? [Laughter] It’s true; it’s true. I know the ones generally that were shot; those are the ones that I remember the most—I don’t know why. But it’s true that the way that people feel, good or bad, about Abraham Lincoln, is just going to be simply different than the way that they feel about William Howard Taft. And Lincoln is considered to be much more significant to the American story than Taft will ever probably be.

Fr. Stephen: Actually, historically, if you had a time machine, and you went back to just the right time and assassinated William Howard Taft, you could prevent the Russian Revolution and at least one of the world wars. But that’s a subject for another time.

Fr. Andrew: Wow! Yeah, that’s a different podcast! That’s for a late-night podcast we’d do at two in the morning, everybody. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: But, Taft aside, yes. Just taking a biblical example, that’s what St. John says at the end of his gospel: “There’s not enough books in the whole world for me to write down everything that Christ said and did, but these things are written down so that you may believe, and, believing, you may have life in his name.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, the gospels are not biography in the way that we do it now.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, he’s saying, “I’m not being objective. I’m very much not being objective. This is with a particular purpose.” And that’s the way all history was done. That’s the way all history was done, and that’s why even if you’re going to the University of Paris in the 13th century and you study history, you’re going to be studying the Roman Empire.

Fr. Andrew: Right, even though they’re not Romans.

Fr. Stephen: Which is a long way in the past. But it was because there were key elements that we’re seeing there. It’s selective. So these stories were crafted deliberately. One of the best examples of that is when Octavian became Caesar Augustus, he commissions Virgil to write the Aeneid, to write a new—this is the history of Rome, culminating in Augustus, and he connected it to the Greek founding myths, because… connects it to the Iliad. So you see something that happens here with empires. Empires, when they write their history, they incorporate the histories of the people whom they conquered.

Fr. Andrew: It’s interesting. That same act gets done… If you read the poetic—I’m sorry, the prose Edda by Snorri Sturluson, who is… That’s one of the classic sources of Norse myth. Snorri Sturluson, of course, is a Christian, but he starts out the prose Edda by saying that the Norse gods are actually heroes from Troy who traveled north and became worshiped as gods by the people there. So it’s interesting that even this Christian’s take on the origin of Norse paganism connects it back to the fall of Troy. He’s connecting it back again to the Iliad.

Fr. Stephen: To history proper.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s interesting to see how these different… The same historical sources get used by very different cultures for different purposes, but it’s always about connecting it back. Where we are now is connected back to this source.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and once Rome conquered Greece, Greece is now part of the Roman Empire, so those Greek stories, the story of the history of the Hellenic peoples becomes part of the story of the history of Rome.

Fr. Andrew: Right, which is one of the reasons… This is one of the things I’ve been studying a little bit over the last year or two: is Christian objects—objects created by Christians, and in many cases by monks—within fully Christianized places that include pagan imagery. So one of the classic examples is the 13th-century—I think it’s called the Hylestad Stave Church in Norway that includes images from the legend of Sigurd on the doorposts on the outside of the church. But there aren’t any pagans around, or not too many at that time, that this story, this history that is the Norwegians, the Norse people, has now been incorporated into the Christian story of Norway, that it’s just simply part of that story now, too. They’re not saying you should go ahead and worship those gods that our people used to worship, but rather these stories that make up the culture of this people are now part of, or continue to be part of our story, but now they’re in many cases reinterpreted, transformed in some ways, extra commentary added, all that kind of stuff, to incorporate it into that people’s consciousness at that particular point in history.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and to help redirect those people’s consciousness of themselves. So you’re no longer a Greek who’s at the end of this Greek story; you’re now a Greek who’s part of this Roman story that’s now continuing. And one of the places where we see this kind of thing still happening today is the whole idea of Western civilization and Western civ classes, because it is not an objective reading of history to start history with ancient Sumer and end it with the United States winning World War II.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] There’s not just a clear line that goes between those two?

Fr. Stephen: Yes, that’s not like a completely objective… That’s a process of assimilation of a whole bunch of stories. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, a selection…

Fr. Stephen: Of different peoples, radically different peoples, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and I think, especially American culture in particular, which is the result—American culture as it now stands is the result of numerous streams of immigration, and this makes it easier for people to do that, that the story of the country my ancestors came from is part of my story; it’s part of the American story and so forth. But again, it gets reinterpreted. So for instance you could study wherever—you being of Dutch ancestry, me being of Lithuanian—we can study those places; we can understand those places; we can even understand our particular forebears who were immigrants—but the story of those places went on without our families, and so even though there may be a genetic link between us and that country, and even though there may be some connections—maybe cuisine is passed down, or maybe language, although if you get enough generations, the language usually stops at some point—our story is not their story. Their story has moved on without us; our story has moved on without them. We no longer have the experience that those peoples have had; even though there is this common heritage, it’s no longer the same thing, because we’re not participating in their story any more.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and that’s why you get all of these hyphenate Americans. I’m a Dutch-American, so the story starts in the Netherlands, but then it merges into this America story, and likewise with all the other various hyphenates. But even more than just that sort of master narrative that still occasionally gets taught as history… In fact, most popular level history and the history you’re going to get at most junior highs, high schools, elementary schools, in the United States at least, is this kind of history. It’s not really pretending to be objective.

But beyond even that sort of official narrative, there’s also the fact that every group and even every person has their own kind of functional, phenomenological history. They have their own story about who they are and the history of their people, their family, and who they are. And that varies a lot. It has nothing to do with what did or didn’t actually happen.

Fr. Andrew: Right, I mean, there’s a gazillion things that happened to me in my life that I simply do not remember, because they weren’t important to me to remember.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and I grew up, for example, in a Dutch community in southern California. So the American Civil War is, like, not part of my personal history. I don’t really have any firm real connection to it. I just—I don’t. I now live in Louisiana. Here, a lot of people, that is part of their personal history. I don’t deny that the American Civil War happened. It happened, but that fact is not super relevant to who I am, where I came from, where I’m going in the future.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, but interestingly, let’s say your whole clan moves to Louisiana, and they have descendants, and they have descendants. Then what can happen, because they are participating in Louisiana culture, Louisiana’s history becomes much more important to them as a result. I’m interested in Emmaus, Pennsylvania, history, but there is zero record that I am aware of of anyone I was related to ever living here before me.

Fr. Stephen: But if your kids and grandkids stay there…

Fr. Andrew: Right! Exactly.

Fr. Stephen: And so in a lot of cases, what makes that… what helps craft, shall we say, that functional history is ritual activity.

Fr. Andrew: Right, participation.

Fr. Stephen: So the Church example of this is that when we say, “Blessed art thou, O God of our fathers,” we’re talking about Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and we’re calling them “our fathers.” It doesn’t matter if you’re not Jewish; doesn’t matter if you’re not even from a Semitic people group: they have become your fathers because that has become your history. That’s why St. Paul can, writing to the Church at Corinth, in a chapter where he’s pointed out that they all used to worship idols—so he’s talking to Gentiles—he could say, “Remember, our fathers were all baptized into Moses.”

So this is not just a theological point; this is not just some kind of replacement theology. This is not some kind of weird antisemitism. This is how functional history works, and it worked that way in the Old Testament. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were Ruth’s fathers, even though she was a Moabite. And Caleb’s, even though he was a Kennizite.

Fr. Andrew: As Ruth said, “Your people will be my people; your God will be my God.” That’s—she’s—that’s exactly what she’s saying, that it becomes hers, as a result of her participation in that people.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and this still kind of takes place on a secular level as well, although it’s also through ritual activity, in naturalization. When you’re naturalized into a new country—you move to another country and you become a citizen there—there’s a process you go through, and there’s usually some kind of oath-taking involved. There’s some kind of ritual ceremony involved where you become a part of that people, and it doesn’t matter where you were born and where you grew up: now you are part of that people, and the history of that people now becomes your history. You are a part of that.

Fr. Andrew: That’s ancient history; that’s the way history used to be.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, that’s ancient, ancient history.

Fr. Andrew: Or pre-modern history, in many ways, just simply pre-modern.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, pre-modern history. Then our German friends come along and decide that history should be a Wissenschaft!

Fr. Andrew: Wissenschaft, so… I bet you’re all asking yourselves, “What exactly does this word, Wissenschaft, mean?”

[Inaugural theme music] Father Andrew’s Etymology Corner! [Baby cheer]

That’s right. It’s time for Fr. Andrew’s Etymology Corner. I have to credit listener/catechumen Chris Hoyle who sent that little jingle in for us, and that is his two-year-old daughter, Eleanor, at the end. That is not a simulated baby sound; that’s real! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: No babies were harmed in the making of this jingle.

Fr. Andrew: No, that was sheer, unmitigated joy. That is the way I feel about etymology. [Laughter] So, Wissenschaft, it’s a German word. Literally, if you want to pull it out from its roots, it’s knowledge-making. So that Wissen- part comes from the Germanic root witan, w-i-t-a-n, which means “to know,” and that actually comes from a Proto-Indo-European root—I’m not sure if I’m pronouncing this correctly—weyd, w-e-y-d, which means “to see,” and actually is the origin of our word “video” and stuff like this. So in Old English witan generally meant “to know,” but it actually more specifically means “to be aware of.” That’s how it’s related to the Indo-European word “to see.” And then this is where we get the modern English word “wise,” and also “wit” and “wizard.” A wizard is an old—a guy who knows things; it’s not a guy who does magical tricks. So these are all words that are connected in English.

Wissenschaft is a technical term in German academia, and usually the word gets translated into English as “science,” simply as “science”—Wissenschaft means “science”—but when it is used in English, often it gets used in an untranslated way—we simply say Wissenschaft, as you did. And when it gets used in English that way, we’re talking about 19th century German academia. So that’s exactly what all it is, so that, ladies and gentlemen, is the etymology of Wissenschaft as it gets used in English.

[Metallic conclusion music with echo] Etymology!—with Fr. Andrew.

There you are! See, I love those little jingles for this segment. So, thank you, Chris Hoyle.

Fr. Stephen: Very ‘80s synth-pop.

Fr. Andrew: Isn’t it! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah… Mark Mothersbaugh may sue, but we’ll go on anyway.

Fr. Andrew: Now everybody knows what Wissenschaft means.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. So this is the idea that history is a sort of science. So historical inquiry, historical methodology, shifts to this kind of scientific or quasi-scientific approach, meaning—obviously you can’t conduct experiments, but you gather evidence; you gather historical evidence. From that historical evidence, you form a hypothesis that explains as best you can the evidence you have, and then you’re kind of at an impasse is the problem, because there’s not really a good way to test that hypothesis, because someone else could come along and construct a totally different hypothesis based on the same evidence. So if you get lucky and you’re doing archaeology and you find some more evidence that might help prove or help disprove your hypothesis… but barring that, this is why you get a lot of debates talking about, for example, explanatory power, like: which one of these hypotheses best explains the evidence or explains more of the evidence. And it becomes sort of a fine debate, and the further you go back in history, the more difficult it is, because the less evidence you have.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and then you can dig up one thing from some forgotten city, and then that changes everything.

Fr. Stephen: Hypothetically.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yes, right!

Fr. Stephen: Hypothetically, because you also get things like: “Okay, we all agree that King David didn’t exist, that he was like King Arthur,” and everybody’s like: “Yeah, yeah, we all agree, the scholarly guild.” “Oh, hey, we found this inscription that mentions his name!”

Fr. Andrew: Oh!

Fr. Stephen: “Uhh…” So then you get this guy—

Fr. Andrew: Oh, but King Arthur was real, by the way. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, the guys who have made their career arguing he didn’t exist now come out with articles like: “Well, that doesn’t say Beit David; that says Beit Douad. It’s not ‘house of David’; it’s ‘house of the water-bucket.’ ”

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] This sounds like a real example.

Fr. Stephen: It is a real example.

Fr. Andrew: I knew it!

Fr. Stephen: And then construct an elaborate argument for why Israel would be called the house of the water-bucket.

Fr. Andrew: Wow!

Fr. Stephen: But again, it’s a hypothesis…

Fr. Andrew: Sure. Explanatory power. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: And everybody would have known better if they’d just paid attention to Aristotle, which is a quote you could drop in a lot of places. [Laughter] So Aristotle, all the way back in the fourth century BC, pointed out that history is always a matter of doxa, which means an opinion.

Fr. Andrew: Opinion, yeah, I wasn’t going to throw out the etymology thing for that for everybody, but, yeah, it does mean “opinion.” I mean, sometimes it can mean “teaching,” but its real basis “opinion,” because it’s related to reputation, and this is also why it means “glory,” because the glory is what surrounds and is set about a person or a thing or whatever, the doxa.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so not only does leitourgia not mean “work of the people,” but “orthodoxy” does not mean “right glory” or “right worship”; it means “right opinion.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah…

Fr. Stephen: And edokeo, the verb, means “it seems.”

Fr. Andrew: “It seems,” yeah. And it’s the basis of our word, “dogma,” too, actually, again from that “it seems,” because: “It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us”—that’s where that usage comes for “dogma.”

Fr. Stephen: And Docetism is the heresy that Christ just seemed to be a man; he just appeared as a man but was not actually.

Fr. Andrew: But seeming doesn’t necessarily mean deception.

Fr. Stephen: No, you can have a right opinion.

Fr. Andrew: And you can say, “It seems to me…” Whenever someone says, “It seems to me,” they’re not saying, “I imagine that…” They’re not saying, “I think I’m believing an illusion.” They’re saying, “This is how I understand it; this is how it seems to me.”

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so the point that Aristotle is making when he says that, that it’s a matter of opinion, is that’s as opposed to the type of knowledge that he describes as episteme, which is usually translated also “science” but is a kind of knowledge that can be demonstrated. So if I say to you, “Two plus two equals four,” and you’re dubious, I can get two apples and then another two apples and show you. And you will see: Oh, yes, your statement was correct: two plus two equals four.

Fr. Andrew: Indeed.

Fr. Stephen: But if I say to you, “If you had a time machine, and you went back in time and killed William Howard Taft, you would prevent the Russian Revolution and at least one of the world wars,” there’s no way for me to demonstrate that to you. [Laughter] I can’t prove that to you.

Fr. Andrew: Right, because you can’t do controlled experiments on history.

Fr. Stephen: Right, I can’t lay out math to prove that. I could make an argument, but that argument is just going to be an argument for my opinion. So that’s the difference there.

As an aside for our atheist friends—you know who you are—this is one of the biggest misunderstandings in popular Christian and anti-Christian apologetic stuff. People talk about Thomas Aquinas and his proofs for the existence of God, and they talk about them as if Thomas Aquinas ever met an atheist in his life, first of all, and that, when he met that atheist, these were his five sure-fire ways to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that God exists—which is also not what they’re about. So what Aquinas was doing, what Thomas was doing—he had read Aristotle, and so he was trying to prove that theology, as a discipline, is not a matter of opinion; that it’s a matter of episteme, it’s a matter of scientia, it’s a matter of science. And so these are his demonstrations; these are his logical demonstrations of the existence of God, to show that theology is certain knowledge and not purely the subject of opinion. That’s what he’s doing.

You can disagree with him, on all of them if you want to, but he never claimed: “Here’s a sure-fire way to prove to an atheist that God exists.” That’s not at all what it’s about; it’s about what type of knowledge theology is.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and the thing that occurs to me is that even attempts to— Like, our modern sense of history… Like we can’t just out of the way that most people do history now and say, “I’m not going to do that any more,” but it’s— Even that… I’m looking at my bookshelf right now, and I have a bunch of history books on there, and most of them are doing this later variety of history, but even that… So when Steven Runciman writes his histories about the Crusades or the Fall of Constantinople, this kind of thing, he’s making selections based on things that he’s found or things that he’s usually read, and creating a narrative based on that. It’s not—he’s not—it’s not a videotape of everything that happened. It’s still making a selection; it’s still creating a narrative. There’s still no way around the “It seems to me.” There’s just no way around; you cannot escape that. And I think part of our modern tension is that, in many cases, we’re not aware that we’re doing that, although we’re going to get to that, about how that awareness has come—but that we don’t realize it’s actually… what we think we’re doing is in fact in tension with what we really are doing. That’s the problem, there’s this tension. We think we’re doing science, but we’re actually not; we’re doing story. That’s what we’re doing. Which—that’s not bad.

Fr. Stephen: Modernism makes this pretense to objectivity. We’re not saying they succeeded at being objective. Modernists [don’t] succeed at being objective, but they make a pretense to it. Before they did not make a pretense to it.

Fr. Andrew: Right, there was no idea that that was even an issue.

Fr. Stephen: There was no idea that there was subjective, objective was anything anybody was thinking about. So there’s this pretense to objectivity and that we’re going to find what really happened; we’re going to uncover it. So that means a text—no matter what kind of text we’re talking about, but this includes the Bible, relevant to what we’re talking about tonight—the Bible now is not a history to be incorporated into your history. The Bible is now a piece of evidence; it’s now an artifact, to be weighed against other pieces of evidence, and the “what really happened” lies somewhere back behind it, and this is just one sort of perspective on it.

And so the kind of—again, it’s the pretense to objectivity: what really happened back behind there isn’t related to any particular group of people. It claims to be the view from nowhere, like there is no perspective, they claim: this is purely objective; there is no viewpoint, no standpoint, no observer; this is just how it is.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah, the tale without the teller, as if that’s actually possible.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. So now we’re going to get back specifically to biblical interpretation, because after this starts in Europe and there’s this transition… So in the 17th and 18th centuries, in the early modern period, what you get is you get people still treating the Bible as a true account, as a true historical account, as these things are starting to shift, but they want to try to de-mythologize it, kind of naturalize it. So they’re going to say the story of Christ walking on the water to the disciples: “Well, that’s a true account, but what really happened was that Jesus was walking on this sandbar that they couldn’t see. He could see the sandbar. So we’ve got to preserve the account, but we also don’t want to accept anything supernatural.” Once you get to the late 18th and into the 19th century, it’s just like: “Yeah, that never happened.”

Fr. Andrew: Right, the story itself is just a fabrication.

Fr. Stephen: Right, it’s just a story, and you treat it as a piece of evidence and, in this case, it’s not a very good piece of evidence because it’s got this supernatural stuff in it. And so it gets treated like the epic of Gilgamesh or the Enuma Elish or Greek myths or whatever. They just set it aside.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and it only makes sense then that a number of committed Christians are going to say, “Wait a minute. Nuh-uh. This happened. The Bible is true.” And that plays out in a particular set of debates.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and it starts because this kind of history, and then, resulting in this approach to the Bible, comes to completely dominate European universities. And this is a period of time, as we get toward the end of the 19th, moving toward the 20th century—this is a time when what we now call the Ivy League schools—the major universities—a lot of their professors and instructors are being educated at these European universities. We sometimes… I know we have a lot of listeners who are not in the United States, but we in the United States are very full of ourselves, and we like to forget that before World War II we were kind of a backwater. It’s only post-World War II that, like, Britain receded and the US became the major player on the world stage.

Fr. Andrew: Well, don’t worry. I’m sure we’re headed for backwater status again sometime soon. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Oh! No doubt! [Laughter] But so these things that we think of as these major Ivy League schools were not considered the great institutions of higher learning for the world. Our American students who had great promise, they went to Europe to study. And so some of these folks—we’ll throw a shout-out to J. Gresham Machen—were educated over there and were educated in this kind of modernist approach to the Bible, but because they were actual Christians, albeit Protestant, they were horrified. [Laughter] They saw where this was leading; they saw where this was going, because it starts out well enough, like: “Well, hey, some of the supernatural stuff in the Bible is kind of goofy. I can’t believe it,” but then it moves to, like: “I don’t know about this virgin birth thing. I don’t know about this Jesus being God thing.” And it sort of progresses until there’s less and less left, not just of the Bible, but of Christianity as such.

Fr. Andrew: Right, isn’t there a very famous cartoon I recall, which is depicted as a stairway, where gradually—I think it was called “The Descent into Modernism” or something like that, where they start taking off core beliefs of Christianity, and that eventually leads you down into the bottom, which I think is unbelief or something. I’m not looking at it right now, but, yeah, there is an illustration of this, of this reaction that these people have.

Fr. Stephen: I’m trying to remember: there was a 20th-century saint who talked about this, a saint in the Orthodox Church, and what I remember about it is he talked about how ironic it was, because most of these institutions, especially the ones in Germany, were Protestant institutions.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, yeah, here, I found the cartoon. Go ahead. It’s called “The Descent of the Modernists.” And it starts out: on the top step you’ve got “Christianity,” and the next step down is “the Bible is not infallible” and then “man not made in God’s image,” then “no miracles,” then “no virgin birth,” then “no deity,” “no atonement,” “no resurrection,” “agnosticism,” and at the bottom is “atheism.”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. So, yeah, the 20th-century Orthodox saint said how ironic it was, at these Protestant institutions in northern Europe, that the Protestant movement had laid down the Scriptures as the foundation for everything they were going to do, and then turned around and undermined their own foundation, so that the whole thing started to collapse. But so folks in America kind of saw this coming and saw this happening and did not want American institutions, like old Princeton, to go the way of European institutions—even though they eventually did, and rather quickly.

And so they set out to put a stop to this, and the movement that ensued, to debate against the modernists, was led by a group who wrote these tracts on what they considered to be the most important aspects of the Christian faith—so they’re tracts on things like the virgin birth, the deity of Christ, the Holy Trinity, these tracts—

Fr. Andrew: The Fundamentals.

Fr. Stephen: From a Protestant perspective, and these tracts were eventually collected as The Fundamentals.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and this is the origin of the word “Fundamentalism.”

Fr. Stephen: Right, those were the Fundamentalists.

Fr. Andrew: It did not mean, everybody, someone who is more serious about religion than I am and probably has a gun. [Laughter] That’s not it!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, it didn’t have anything to do with violence or extremism—originally.

Fr. Andrew: It was simply a small-o orthodoxy, designed to say, “These are the non-negotiables that you have to believe in order to be our kind of Christian.”

Fr. Stephen: And for most of the first half of the 20th century there were a lot of people who would proudly call themselves, in major Protestant denominations of the US—proudly call themselves Evangelical Fundamentalists. There was no pejorative attached to that word.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, sure, I recall in the ‘70s and ‘80s, that was still being used, and no one— And it was not, that I’m aware of—it was not used as a pejorative.

Fr. Stephen: Well, you were hanging out with a bunch of crazies, though.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] No, it was simply a label that a lot of people used, and it just meant “we’re really serious.”

Fr. Stephen: Would put on themselves.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, they would put it on themselves.

Fr. Stephen: And so this period, the late 19th, early 20th centuries, were referred to as the modernist-fundamentalist controversy, or the modernist-fundamentalist debate; the Scopes monkey trial and all that stuff comes out of this.

And coming to it from an Orthodox perspective, there’s a basic problem with both sides, and that’s that both sides share a fundamental presupposition. Both of them are accepting this modernist view of history, because the fundamentalists did not reject that modernist view of history. They accepted it; they just insisted that that’s what the Bible was.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and so it could line up. You could demonstrate the truth of the Bible using empirical scientific means. And this is the birth of kind of modern Christian archaeology.

Fr. Stephen: Biblical archaeology, yes. That’s where this starts. And it’s a cliché in the literature now to talk about these people who, during this period, went out with a Bible in one hand a spade in the other, to dig and try and prove that everything is objectively true, that the Old Testament is written from no perspective, which is clearly a fool’s errand. [Laughter] But to any reader, it’s definitely from a perspective. But so this has a number of bad effects, even on the conservative side. The negative effects on the modernist side we’ve already kind of mentioned; we’ve mentioned how that’s problematic, but even on the fundamentalist or the conservative side, since nobody likes that term any more, this led to the marginalization of a lot of non-history parts of the Bible.

Fr. Andrew: Right, no one says, “Are the Psalms objectively true?” [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Right, Proverbs, Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, even the prophets, with the few exceptions of particular hot-button passages in some of the prophets. Yeah.

Fr. Andrew: I was going to say that the fun flip-side is then how this approach gets used on the book of Revelation.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah…

Fr. Andrew: Because there it’s not about trying to dig stuff up to prove that it’s true; now it’s about trying to find pieces of evidence in the moment that we’re in that prove that the things said in the book of Revelation are about to happen in the way that I think that they are. So I mean, it works in both ends, coming and going.

Fr. Stephen: Right, it’s being interpreted as future positivist history. [Laughter] And then you also get— So once you say, “No, this is objective; this is what really happened, perspective from nowhere,” you create all these problems for yourself. So if you say that about the gospels, “Oh no, what do we do now: the gospels have some of these events in different orders.” And: “Oh no! Here there’s one blind man, and here there’s two blind men. Oh, here there’s two angels inside the tomb, and here there’s one outside the tomb.” And “Is it the late date of the exodus? Is it the early date of the exodus? Is it the even earlier date of the exodus?” What date did the exodus happen?

Fr. Andrew: How old is the earth?

Fr. Stephen: How long is a day in Genesis 1? And how old is the earth? Etc., etc., etc. All these things that I say put me to sleep, because they’re not interesting to me, because I don’t share that presupposition. I don’t share the presupposition that the Bible is modernist history! [Laughter] I don’t share this presupposition that the book of Exodus was written with any intent to help me figure out what year it happened.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and I think that the sort of caveat that I would add to the foregoing is to say—at least on my part; I don’t know how you feel about this, because we didn’t talk about this—is to say that the methodology of gathering together evidence and trying to create narratives out of that, whether it’s a scientific narrative about chemical processes or it’s about… By no means are we saying that you shouldn’t do archaeology or that you shouldn’t do experiments; it’s just that to take that methodological frame and put it onto the Bible is super problematic if you’re trying to understand the purpose of the Bible, and especially as a Christian: What is the purpose of the Bible in my life? I don’t know whether you would agree with that or not.

Fr. Stephen: Right, well, and let’s say—let’s say tomorrow some industrious person is digging out the Sinai Desert and uncovers something that proves beyond the shadow of a doubt that the exodus happens, and he goes on all the social media, and he goes: “Checkmate, atheists!” [Laughter] How many atheists do you think are going to be convinced to become Christians based on that? My estimate would be zero.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Like, that’s not… a thing! [Laughter] That’s not how this works. So, yes, conservative Evangelicals also have to publish journal articles and write dissertations. This is a good way to find a topic: find an apparent contradiction and have at it. But how productive it is for the purposes of the spiritual life, the Church, people finding their salvation—is an open question, I’ll say politely. So in both, in the modernist or what comes to be called liberalism, the liberal theological approach, you have this positive history that stands behind the Bible, and fundamental, or as it comes to be conservativism, conservative theology, you have the Bible is itself positivist history—but both of those are modernisms. And I don’t know if I’ve enunciated this this clearly on the show, so I will now: Send your angry cards and letters to Fr. Andrew.

Fr. Andrew: Yes.

Fr. Stephen: Because I won’t read them. Young Earth creationism is modernism.

Fr. Andrew: Amen.

Fr. Stephen: There you go.

Fr. Andrew: But we are still going to the Ark Experience, right? [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: No!

Fr. Andrew: Aw, man! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: We are not. You’re welcome to, but you’ll not be sharing that experience with me.

Fr. Andrew: I do have to find someone to go see that with, because I love… I don’t know, there’s something about the kitsch of that part of the religious world that I just am super into.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, he’s building a Tower of Babel, now, too—

Fr. Andrew: I know!

Fr. Stephen: —which was such a great idea the first time.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Exactly!

Fr. Stephen: It’s like when they said they were making a replica of the Titanic to sail across the Atlantic for the anniversary, the 100th anniversary. I was like: “Uhh… really?”

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] “It’s going to be different this time!”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, yeah…

Fr. Andrew: Okay, so we’ve set ourselves up. That kind of takes us into much of the 20th century. And this is still the frame that a lot of the world still thinks in.

Fr. Stephen: There’s still plenty of modernists around, yes.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there’s still the ones largely publishing textbooks and stuff, and that kind of thing, but there’s another shift that occurred within the 20th century, which has made this all even more problematic.

Fr. Stephen: Or at least confusing. And that’s post-modernism, or, to be more specific, post-structuralism.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and I was going to say, I know this is going to be a really long first half, everybody, but we really need to set all this up to be able to give you the stuff in the second and third halves.

Fr. Stephen: If you complain about how long this show is, you’re not going to have a good time with this show.

Fr. Andrew: And you must be new here. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, you need to just settle in. I mean, Orthodox church services, same thing. Holy Week’s coming up, man. Just buckle up. You’re in for the duration.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly. So, yes, post-structuralism. I remember first hearing about this when I was an undergrad doing English literature study.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. Well, the word “post-modern” gets thrown around so much now that it gets applied to everything.

Fr. Andrew: Or post-post-modern.

Fr. Stephen: Or various forms of modernism.

Fr. Andrew: Pre-ante-post—no, wait.

Fr. Stephen: Post-modern modernisms now.

Fr. Andrew: The ultimate modern— [Laughter] Pre-ante-penultimate modern— No, I don’t know.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and we’re not going to talk about it tonight, but, believe it or not, there is such a thing as meta-modernism. But anyway… [Laughter] They haven’t gotten too much ahold of the Bible yet.

Post-modernism is basically a continuation of the modernist move that starts with… because as the Bible was demoted to a piece of evidence or “a source” by the modernists, and then comes to be approached with a hermeneutic of suspicion. So it’s not just that this is one version of the story or one perspective on events, but this is an official narrative designed to cover up what was actually going on. So if you read in Exodus about the dedication of the firstborn at the tabernacle, clearly this is covering up the fact that the ancient Israelites sacrificed their children to Yahweh the God of Israel. [Laughter] I mean, clearly; obviously. Based on [Exhalation] not much, other than this hermeneutic of suspicion, that if this is the official story, then the truth must be something different, and we try to read motives into whoever wrote the official story, like the priestly caste or what have you, in order to describe this.

And so then it moves on from there until essentially you end up in a situation where you just have perspectives now.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s just all “takes”; it’s all bias.

Fr. Stephen: And whatever “really happened” becomes sort of inaccessible. So there are actually ways in which post-structuralism is helpful, and other ways that it’s not. [Laughter] Definitely ways it’s not. So one way it’s helpful is it does take seriously, as we’ve quoted Nagel—not just the bat thing, but there’s no view from nowhere—that every author, every source, every—maybe not a piece of physical archaeological evidence, but the person who finds it and the person who interprets it: they all have a perspective, they all have biases, they all come from a culture. And so there’s no objective anything accessible to us, and that gets taken seriously. So that modernist pretense that was always a fake pretense to objectivity kind of gets killed. And I’m saying that’s a good thing, killing that pretense.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, every tale has a teller. There is no escape from that.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and another good part is the idea that, relatedly, the person who’s reading the Bible, the person who is actually reading, is part of the reading of the Bible.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Right! They’re not receiving an objective Bible. When they come to it, you’re coming to it with your knowledge of language; you’re coming to it with your personal opinions of things that might remind you of something that happened to you in your life; you’re coming to it with the fact that you’re receiving this probably in translation, but even if you’re reading it in one of the original languages, you learned Greek or Hebrew from somebody who taught it to you in a particular way; you have a lexicon written by somebody who has their own take. You’ve probably heard sermons in your life, and that’s going to bring context to your reading. It just goes on and on. There’s no way around the human participation in the reading of the Bible, and that when you receive it, then that comes along with it. There’s just no way out of that.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and since we’re ticking people off tonight—and I say this, honestly I say this with love to our Protestant friends—I think one of the reasons sola scriptura is problematic is that we don’t have access to the Bible outside of our experience of reading the Bible. I can’t—

Fr. Andrew: Right, an infallible text requires an infallible interpreter is kind of another way of looking at that.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so when I read it, I’m bringing my subjectivity into the mix. And so, unless there’s some way to access the infallible text without bringing my subjectivity into the mix, it becomes difficult to see how that text can serve as an objective standard of truth. But I will leave it at that.

Now, you probably have guessed at and we’ve implied any number of bad things about this.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, post-structuralism.

Fr. Stephen: But ultimately, to sum it up, you end up with a situation where texts can mean anything, and therefore end up meaning nothing. There’s no meaning you can isolate; there’s just a thousand perspectives, and there’s no way to mediate between them, because there’s no access to the reality behind it and so, ehh, it could mean anything, but it really means nothing.

Fr. Andrew: Nothing is nothing. Yeah, there is no communication happening ever.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and that results in… You end up with practices—you’ll find this in biblical studies and journal articles, if you read JBL—where you find readings of texts against the grain. So classical real example of this: reading the book of Ezekiel from the perspective of the witches he condemns. So you’re deliberately—you are reading it from the opposite perspective of what the text intended. And this is why you end up in this “it can mean anything or nothing” place, because if you can read a text as meaning the exact opposite of what it says, then you can read it any which way, and it’s just whatever “meaning” you give it, and the meaning is just… Well, now, to be fair, this isn’t just unnuanced. So proponents of this would say, “Meaning arises within the interaction between your subjectivity and the text, which is also subjective, but it’s all subjectivity, and therefore the meaning that arises from that encounter between you and the text is just a meaning for you.” And that’s not entirely invalid in the sense that this happens. I’ve published a couple books. Occasionally I get an email from somebody who says, “Oh, this thing you said here was so important to me. It’s wonderful. It really changed how I think about this,” and what they tell me—I have no idea how they got that out of my book!

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Although usually we get the emails saying, “I can’t believe you said X, Y, and Z,” and again, we’re saying, “I have no idea how they got that out of there!”

Fr. Stephen: Right, but in that positive case, I don’t write back to that person and say, “No, you’re wrong! That’s not what it is.” I think that’s great, but that is a case where this has happened. They in their subjectivity, they had things going on in their life, they come from a background, they’re in a situation that I didn’t foresee, and so something in my book that came from my subjectivity spoke to something in their subjectivity and produced a good result. If the result’s good, great. So they’re not totally all wet with this, but—

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I was going to say the point where it sort of becomes a freaky feedback loop, though, is when someone derives something within their subjectivity and then tells everybody else that that’s how it—that’s what it is; that’s what it really means. Like: “You have to accept my subjective reading of this now.”

Fr. Stephen: Right, or even if they don’t do that, what that does is it takes meaning and atomizes it. So we’re no longer a community that has this story as part of our shared history; we’re a group of individuals, each of whom in our own subjectivity, has a particular connection to this story that’s completely independent and might be the opposite of the person to my left. And so you can’t build community based on that, and, you know, Christ actually exists. And we believe as Orthodox Christians you can have personal encounter with him, not just read about him. So there’s sort of no room for that in this just subjectivity of texts.

So as a way of talking about people reading Moby Dick, like: “Hey, I read Moby Dick, and because I read Moby Dick I now understand: I can’t destroy the Enterprise just to stop the Borg.”

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Well, I mean, that is one of the—

Fr. Stephen: Now, that’s a very particular meaning for one person’s subjectivity.

Fr. Andrew: That’s an important lesson, though!

Fr. Stephen: But Herman Melville did not have that in mind at all when he wrote Moby Dick. So for that kind of situation, yes, it is descriptive, but the Bible, as we’re going to continue to talk about tonight, has a particular relationship to a particular community, and so functions differently than just a book or a history book.

You also, then, get what can be described as standpoint epistemology, which is the idea that, because everybody’s reading just from their own perspective—it’s their own subjectivity—then if we’re all aware of that and we all agree to that, then I have to introduce my meaning from the text by stating my standpoint or bias. So as a Gen X, Dutch American from southern California, this text speaks to me this way. And we’ve all heard, “As a blank… da-da-da-da-dah.”

Fr. Andrew: Right, it’s this appeal to authority, but it’s this inaccessible authority. Well, you’re not me, and so therefore you just can’t get this.

Fr. Stephen: Right. You don’t have this knowledge because you don’t share my experiences as a fill-in-the-blank; therefore this is inaccessible to you and you just have to trust me, because I have the authority of experience.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, up to the point where someone says, “You just have to trust me,” I’m like: “Well, it’s true. I don’t have your experiences and I’m not you.” But if this is something that we’re going to be sharing, then that’s just not acceptable, especially if you’re trying to put it on me in some way. I can’t just say, “Yes, yes, it’s true. I’m not whatever it is; you are, and therefore you’re the expert, period.”

Fr. Stephen: Right, and I know a lot of people out there, because I have some idea of the make-up of our audience. A lot of people right now are thinking of identity politics, and that is an example of standpoint epistemology. But this same way of thinking manifests itself on the more “conservative” side, too, with appeals to the Holy Spirit, holiness, virtue, possession of the phronema of the Fathers, whatever someone wants to claim: a claim to spiritual experience or the Holy Spirit acting in their life, that allows them, again, to understand the text in a way that you cannot. It’s an appeal to authority that you can’t interact with, their personal spiritual experience rather than some kind of secular identity.

Fr. Andrew: Who was it that had a footnote that said, “This was revealed to me in a dream”? I’m trying to remember who that was now. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Oh! Yeah.

Fr. Andrew: But, I mean, that’s real. That’s a real thing. People are like: “I have this… You’re just going to have to go with me on this. I have this personal experience or personal identity, and therefore…”

Fr. Stephen: “I spent a lot of time in prayer. The Holy Spirit is telling me this.” And there’s no way to counter-argue that with the person, because they’re claiming an experience that you don’t share and so there’s no… And so that ends up creating sort of in-groups and out-groups, in this—either in this secular, identity politics sense, or in a kind of Gnostic sense among more conservative religious communities, where there are these enlightened people who are in the know spiritually, and then these other spiritual proles who don’t know anything and are just supposed to trust the illuminated ones.

And so, now that we’ve talked about how bad everything is, this is really—all this bleakness—this is the world of biblical studies. Now I know there’s a few of you out there who are like: “Wow, I like listening to Lord of Spirits. I want to go get a Ph.D. in biblical studies like Fr. Stephen did.” Well, maybe I’ve talked some of you out of it, but not every school is pushing this, but this is the landscape; this is the landscape out there. And we can kind of boil it down and summarize it to—whether it’s a liberal, conservative, modernist, post-modernist: whichever part of whatever spectrum you want too talk about—we can kind of boil this down to the idea that all of this modernism, post-modernism views the Bible as making claims: the Bible makes truth claims.

Fr. Andrew: Right, so we have to check them and see if they’re true or false.

Fr. Stephen: And those truth claim are either— It’s they’re making a truth claim and we need to verify scientifically that this truth claim is scientifically accurate; or, in the more post-modern thing, it’s this is making truth claims, but that’s just from this one perspective, so we need to isolate that perspective and give equal voice to all these other perspectives. But either way, it’s making claims; it’s asserting something. There’s force or power being exercised.

And this is what leads to these things. So if you read the measurements of Noah’s ark, speaking of the Ark Encounter, those measures: you say, “The Bible is making a claim that Noah’s ark had these exact dimensions.” Then you get Ken Ham telling you, “Well, if that’s not true, then you can just throw the Bible and Christianity in the garbage can.” If it doesn’t have exactly those dimensions.

Fr. Andrew: Right, that becomes the basis…

Fr. Stephen: Because it’s making a claim… And so that’s sort of the unnuanced version of this. [Laughter] Most folks are more nuanced than our friend, Ken Ham; people like friend of the show Bart Ehrman. He’s more on the—what we might call the liberal side of that. But also you find more nuanced people on the conservative side, who will separate out different types of claims. They don’t question whether the Bible’s making claims; they’re still using this modern or post-modern approach, that the Bible makes claims, but they’ll separate out historical claims from scientific claims. And so they’ll say, for example, when the Bible speaks as though the sun goes around the earth, it’s not making that as a claim; that doesn’t count as a claim, so it’s okay that that’s not accurate, scientifically.

But those same folks will then say that any historical data in the Bible is a claim, and so friend of the show Bart Ehrman: If I prove these historical claims untrue, then throw Christianity in the dumpster. And the response to him is: “No! I’m going to prove all those historical claims true!” So the nuanced folks will say, “The Bible is not a science textbook,” and I agree with them—but the Bible is also not a history textbook.

Fr. Andrew: Right, it’s not trying to say things about history that it’s not trying to say about science. Yeah, exactly. It’s not trying to do either thing; that’s not its purpose. It’s not its purpose.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and the Bible is not a modern book making claims. It’s telling a story, the story of a people, to which you are invited to belong.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly. Okay, good night! [Laughter] No, there’s more to say.

Fr. Stephen: There’s two more halves!

Fr. Andrew: That’s right, but before we say it, we’re going to go ahead and take a short break!

Fr. Andrew: Hey, welcome back, everybody. We’re talking about biblical interpretation. It’s a big old methodology episode! Not a lot to dig up out of the desert for this one.

Fr. Stephen: So the show is you, the commercial is you—are you just a full-on one-man-band now?

Fr. Andrew: I know. [Laughter] I don’t know. I mean, it wasn’t just me in the commercial, though, I should say. It was a community, an interpretive community.

Fr. Stephen: Like if I switch over to the music channel right now, will you be chanting?

Fr. Andrew: No! [Laughter] There are no recordings of me singing—that I’m aware of of.

Fr. Stephen: I was going to say, I think that somebody has something.

Fr. Andrew: I think that someone did hold up their phone during a service at some point. But, yes, we did just paint a very bleak landscape of how we got to where we are in terms of biblical interpretation. But there’s more to say on this, so the implications of where we are now; this all implies a certain methodology. So we’re going to talk in this half about the methodology that’s implied by everything we just talked about, and then make a turn to talk about the kind of methodology that we’re employing on this show and that we believe is very much the methodology of the way that the Bible is read in the Orthodox Church and by the Orthodox Church, for the Orthodox Church. All right, so, having said all that, the Bibles in a modern book, making claims… Where are we now?

Fr. Stephen: There will eventually be light at the end of this tunnel.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, we like episodes to end on a relatively high note.

Fr. Stephen: But we’ve still got a little more tunnel, regrettably. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Alas.

Fr. Stephen: So, yes. So much for history. We needed to spend that much time on it, because this is, frankly, the biggest problem right now to even coming to biblical interpretation is that, again, this modern view of history has become the predominant lens through which the Scriptures are read, and it’s causing us to miss sort of everything important. So if the Bible isn’t making claims, scientific or historical, and we’re talking about—the problem with those kind of approaches and getting locked in those debates is that you miss actual meaning. We talked about how meaning isn’t just this individualized, completely subjective thing. Now we have to kind of turn to: How do you figure out what that is?

Fr. Andrew: Right, actual hermeneutics, per se.

Fr. Stephen: Hermeneutics, not to be confused with Herman’s Head, the fine Fox television show of the early to mid-‘90s.

Fr. Andrew: Nor with Herman Eutics, the cousin, I believe, of Fr. Stephen Eutics.

Fr. Stephen: Oh. Is that a real person?

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I think it might be.

Fr. Stephen: Or a dad joke? ‘Fess up!

Fr. Andrew: No, I remember it being mentioned by our common Scripture professor at St. Tikhon’s, Dr. Mary Ford. I think she made a reference to Herman Eutics. But I think that’s a real person.

Fr. Stephen: She might have been telling a dad joke.

Fr. Andrew: She might have, but I think it’s also a real person.

Fr. Stephen: Though I think she is a mom, not a dad.

Fr. Andrew: That’s true. [Laughter] 

Fr. Stephen: So we have to sort of come at this from the perspective of presuppositions, too, because, again, coming out of this modern and post-modern milieu, people often have an idea that any given verse or passage or whatever unit of Scripture we want to talk about has a meaning, a single meaning.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, we get this question every so often. This shows up in our group, too: What’s the Orthodox interpretation of this verse? Which, I mean, I get that, but we need to kind of let go of that addiction.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so that can be meant in either a modernist or a post-modernist sense. In a post-modernist sense it could be: “What’s the Orthodox perspective on this, to compare to the Roman Catholic and Protestant perspective on this?”

Fr. Andrew: Right: “What’s you guys’ take?”

Fr. Stephen: Or it could be from the modernist perspective, of: What has the Orthodox Church historically said this verse means, objectively? the meaning that lies behind the text, in the same way that history sort of lies behind the text, in that modernist sense.

But so, just to sort of problematize the modern version of that—we’ve already kind of problematized the post-modern version of that, but the modern version of that, the idea that you come to the text, you engage in some sort of process, and you come to that meaning that lies behind it, like it’s a nugget. The analogy old biblical interpreters used to use was: kernel and husk. There’s this kernel of meaning, and you have to sort of extract it from the husk, by getting into grammar and all these sort of things.

But so if we take that approach, where the meaning lies somewhere behind the text, then we have to ask the question where that meaning resides—where is it? Where would you find it? Some folks—this is one of the typical go-tos of people responding to post-modernism, is to retreat to modernism and say, “Well, it’s in the mind of the author; it’s the author’s intent. It’s what the author intended to say: that’s the real meaning.”

Fr. Andrew: Which, okay, how do you get that? Not only do you have to do mind-reading, you have to do time-travel mind-reading.

Fr. Stephen: Right, we have to try and get inside St. Paul’s head. Very difficult to do, and not easier than interpreting what’s on the page. [Laughter] This doesn’t ease it, and in some cases we don’t even know who wrote it: Who wrote 1 and 2 Kings or 3 and 4 Kingdoms?

Fr. Andrew: You know, I never considered that question at all, actually. We don’t know, do we?

Fr. Stephen: No, we don’t, so whose brain are we even trying to get into? How would you determine the intent of a completely unknown author?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, or even, to narrow it down a little bit, how do we get into the mind of whoever wrote the end of Deuteronomy, describing Moses’ death and funeral?

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so some folks will try to escalate it a step, because they’ll say, “Well, look, Scripture has in a sense two authors. There’s a human author, but what’s really important in Scripture is what God intends it to mean.” That’s not easier!

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] We have a slightly better idea of what it’s like to be St. Paul than we do what it’s like to be God!

Fr. Stephen: So that’s going to be tough. So another answer that you’ll get is that: Well, you look elsewhere in Scripture. Scripture interprets Scripture; Scripture interprets itself. You use the clear passages, and you use those to interpret the unclear passages. But this pretty well begs the question, because, first of all, it’s completely subjective which texts are clear and which ones are unclear. Ones that I think are clear might be very unclear to you, and what’s interesting is what passages people think are clear tend to correspond to the tradition they’re coming from, tend to correspond to their own subjectivity. So my Calvinist friends find Romans 3, Romans 5, and Romans 9-11 incredibly clear.

Fr. Andrew: Crystal clear.

Fr. Stephen: It’s totally obvious what they’re saying. People from other traditions, not so much. And this is true—hey, to be fair, “partakers of the divine nature” in 2 Peter—ask any Orthodox person. That’s one thing they got clear as a bell.

Fr. Andrew: Crystal clear.

Fr. Stephen: Crystal clear: that’s talking about theosis! Now, they can’t go through the verses before and after and explain how theosis fits in there, but they will tell you that that verse is about theosis. Totally clear. And so what this shows us is that perceived clarity and lack of clarity is really based in our own subjectivity. And so that makes that problematic, but beyond even that, even a clear passage I still have to read and interpret. I just think it’s easy, but I still have to read it and interpret it. I have to discern the meaning of that “clear passage” in order to use it to interpret another passage.

Fr. Andrew: Right, because at the very least, books with words on the page don’t talk to you and correct you and make you do stuff. There’s still application that has to happen, and that means interpretation; there’s no way around it.

Fr. Stephen: Right. You haven’t told me where the meaning of the clear passage lies; you’re just claiming to me that it’s obvious, which is a dubious claim, as we were just saying.

Fr. Andrew: And it implies if you don’t agree, you’re either a liar—you’re suspect or you—

Fr. Stephen: You’re doing something fishy.

Fr. Andrew: Right, or you’re just too dumb to get it.

Fr. Stephen: Trying to muddy the waters.

Fr. Andrew: Or uninformed. It’s that trifecta of the person who disagrees with you is either evil, unintelligent, or uninformed.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. So that’s usually an answer you get more from our Protestant friends. One you get more from Orthodox folks is some idea—they usually won’t use this Latin term, because Latin’s bad if you’re Orthodox—but some idea of the consensus patrum, the consensus of the Fathers. The Fathers: that’s where you get the meaning. The Fathers have the correct meaning of each biblical passage. That’s where you go; that’s how Orthodox people read the Bible. They’ll tell you that.

So. Here’s the problems with that. Number one, the way most people do that is they go and grab their Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture, which, by the way, was translated by somebody and compiled by somebody—

Fr. Andrew: And published by Intervarsity Press.

Fr. Stephen: And none of those people are Orthodox, for our Orthodox friends. Unless you’re reading the Arabic language version: exception.

Fr. Andrew: Is there an Arabic version of that?

Fr. Stephen: There is, and the general editor in charge of the translations is a priest in our own archdiocese.

Fr. Andrew: Ohh!

Fr. Stephen: Not me, obviously; it’s Arabic. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: You don’t do Arabic? How about that!

Fr. Stephen: Not so much. A little bit! I didn’t… You know… [Laughter] So people will go and they’ll look there; they’ll look up the verse: “Well, here’s eight comments from early Christian writers,” and you weed out the two or three who are heretics, and then you say, “Well, either they’re all kind of saying the same thing, so I guess that’s what the verse actually means,” and then you stop there; “or they’re saying different things,” and now you’ve got a problem. So you can either say, “Well, like, apparently there is no clear… The Fathers all disagree so… You don’t have to worry about them,” or you get this weird thing, this weird post-modern thing that is unfortunately very common in Orthodox circles, where they will say, “Well, okay, so I see that the Fathers have one of these two opinions on what the one meaning is of this passage, and therefore these are the options have.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I can pick one.

Fr. Stephen: I can pick one of the two.

Fr. Andrew: It’s “in the Tradition” or something like that.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, “I’m allowed to believe either A or B.” Here’s why this is completely post-modern in its approach, because here are the things it assumes. It assumes that either there is no actual meaning of that text, number one, or, two, it’s completely inaccessible. This is exactly what we were just saying about post-modernism. The meaning is there behind the text, but in this case, because the Fathers disagree, we can’t know what it is; we just have these two perspectives.

Fr. Andrew: Just pick a Father that you like better.

Fr. Stephen: Right, we have these two perspectives, and then we have this idea of being allowed to pick either—the “allowed” there means to be what? It means that the Church has exercised some kind of force of power. The ghost of Michel Foucault has entered the room. [Laughter] And it has this power and has compelled us to choose one of these two options. But I am allowed to choose either of the two, and if someone comes along and tells me that one of those two is wrong, I say, “How dare you. You are saying that this Church Father was a heretic or was wrong or whatever!” This is pure post-modernism. Stop it, people! Stop it!

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and on top of this then is: “And, by the way, I’m interpreting that Church Father correctly”—but we’ll get to that a little bit more as we go. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: So we have this problematic now, of, if you’re going to take that modernist approach, that there is a meaning back there, it’s very difficult to discern even where that meaning would lie, and it’s very easy to just lapse from modernism into post-modernism when you get frustrated trying to figure out what that meaning is. [Laughter] Just decide: This is impossible.

Fr. Andrew: Throw your hands up.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. So another version of this, a more nuanced version of this, shall we say—and this is very common—is that people will suggest that we should basically read the Fathers and the Scriptures backwards.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, later stuff interprets the earlier stuff.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so you read the Fathers, use the Fathers to interpret the New Testament, use the New Testament to interpret the Old Testament. And so that sounds reasonable at first. It sounds reasonable. A lot of people just hear that and accept it. Many of our listeners probably just have accepted that in the past. But now let me problematize that a little bit, because what does this presuppose? Well, this presupposes—if we’re going to go: Fathers, New Testament, Old Testament—that each one of those is clearer than the next. So the Fathers—I can read the Fathers, and what the Fathers are saying about Scripture, how they’re interpreting Scripture, is totally clear, so that I can use that to understand the more difficult passages in the New Testament, so that I can use those to understand the even more difficult passages in the Old Testament.

And I would submit, first of all, this is on the face not true. You are not going to convince me that it is easier to understand any of St. Maximus the Confessor’s Ambigua than it is to understand the parable of the prodigal son.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Right, exactly!

Fr. Stephen: Right? Just on its face. I’m not saying to understand every nuance of the parable of the prodigal son—St. Maximus can help us with that—but the gist. Christ’s parables he told to peasant farmers, illiterate peasant farmers, and he communicated to them the means of salvation. So this is not… And there are plenty of passages in the Old Testament—the Ten Commandments are pretty clear. We don’t need a ton of nuance to crack that code. So that’s a problem.

There’s also the problem that everything requires interpretation. You have to interpret the Fathers, too. The Fathers… I don’t know of any Fathers, to put it this way, who write in very simple, straightforward, easy-to-understand Greek that doesn’t require you to have any knowledge of the Bible or philosophy going into it.

Fr. Andrew: Right. Even Chrysostom, who is one of the most… I don’t know, at least I’m reading him in English translation. Often a lot of what you read in translation is some of the most accessible stuff, but he’s making all kinds of references, especially to the Bible and to other… He’s not giving you… You don’t come to Chrysostom tabula rasa; you come… He’s making reference to things that you should know. He assumes his listeners know some of what he’s talking about.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so if you’re coming to the New Testament only to the Fathers, and to the Old Testament only through the New Testament and the Fathers, you’re not going to have a good time, because you’re going to have a lot of trouble understanding the Fathers if you don’t know anything about the Old and New Testaments. And likewise, you have to interpret the New Testament, and the New Testament kind of assumes you’ve read the Old Testament. [Laughter] That’s constantly quoting it and applying it. So it assumes you’ve read it.

So. We’re starting to get to the end of the tunnel here. The light is starting to get bigger. Now I know sometimes the shifting light at the end of your tunnel is just a freight train coming your way—but not in this case! In this case, it is hope. [Laughter] So what we’re suggesting and what we’ve been doing in this show ever since it started is the opposite of this: it’s reading forward. It’s reading the Old Testament, coming to understand the Old Testament and what’s going on there, bringing that into the New Testament to see how the New Testament reshapes, fulfills, transforms, transfigures the Old Testament; and then, moving into the Fathers, to see how they understand and apply both.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and if you look, for instance, at the liturgical texts, which I consider to be in some sense a subset of the Fathers—liturgical texts are patristic writings—

Fr. Stephen: Yes, some of them quite literally, like St. John of Damascus.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, right, exactly: we know the particular Fathers who wrote them. If you don’t have a pretty thorough knowledge of the Bible, you’re not going to get a lot of what’s in there. I mean, really, it’s so allusive. The idea… And you sometimes get this; there’s a little subset, treating the divine services as being sort of infallible guides that always interpret the Scripture correctly—and I mean, there’s something to that, of course, as we’ve said, but, again, they assume that you know, that you’re already familiar with the Scriptures. So it becomes a sort of a feedback loop. It doesn’t quite work as being a “key” to the Bible. In many ways, as you said, it kind of goes the other direction. To understand the liturgy, you really need to know the Bible.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And so now, the time has come. And I am going to say something nice about Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.

Fr. Andrew: Here it goes. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yes. This is not the only—it’s one of relatively few nice things I have to say about him. Another one that springs to mind, just because it’s funny, before we get into the actual one, is that at one point Hegel did this extended debunk of phrenology, which was considered a science in the early 19th century when he lived.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Look that up, everybody, what phrenology is: p-h-r-e-n-o-l-o-g-y.

Fr. Stephen: Here’s what you need to know to get his joke. Phrenology was measuring people’s heads and the shapes of people’s heads to determine their character, and it was used for a lot of horrible, racist, pseudo-science in the 19th century. So Hegel has this extended debunk, and toward the end of it, he says that if someone comes to you and starts talking about phrenology, the correct response is to crack their skull.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Wow! Wow. Wow.

Fr. Stephen: I do like that about him. He was an early… He would totally, if he was alive today, have a YouTube video, like “Phrenology Destroyed!” [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: “Hegel Totally Destroys,” yeah!

Fr. Stephen: But that’s not the nice thing I was going to say about him.

Fr. Andrew: Oh. Well, there’s two nice things that you’re going to say about Hegel!

Fr. Stephen: I didn’t want people to think what I’m about to say—the more important thing—is the only thing.

Fr. Andrew: We should also mention, everybody, that it’s not the same thing as nephrology, which is—your local kidney doctor’s a nephrologist.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, no.

Fr. Andrew: Or phlebotomy, which is the guy that takes blood out of you.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, that’s a phlebotomist. But so here is the nice thing about Hegel relevant to this. So Hegel is usually credited with being the one who introduced the concept of history to philosophy, in that—so, when people talked about ideas or concepts before Hegel, in philosophy, they thought of philosophers as sort of talking heads, like floating talking heads. So, “Plato says this; Aristotle says this.”

Fr. Andrew: Yes, pure concepts.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and interacting with them. And some of them saw development. Obviously, this later guy builds on this earlier guy: Plato’s a student of Socrates; Aristotle is a student of Plato, etc. But so then, when you have this concept of building—or, if you’re, for example, a Western Christian, you’d say Thomas Aquinas built on Aristotle—then what you want, if someone is building on someone else, is you want the latter part. So: “Thomas Aquinas took all the good parts of Aristotle, so just take him; you don’t have to worry about Aristotle any more.” One of two approaches, right?

But so when Hegel talks about concepts, he talks about them growing organically through time. So it’s like you have a stem, and then it buds, and then the flower opens. And when that happens, you don’t cut off the stem and the bud and just keep the petals because that’s the important part that was at the end of the chain. Or, to give another example that Hegel himself uses, if you want to claim to understand an oak tree, you also have to understand an acorn, and a sapling. You have to understand the organism all the way through, not just the end result.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, the end result is not just the latest, greatest version, and so we don’t need… It’s not like getting a new cell phone, where it’s better than all the previous cell phones that you don’t need now.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And so I think this bit from Hegel is helpful as an analogy. That’s why I’m bringing it up.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, we’re not Hegelians; we’re not endorsing Hegel.

Fr. Stephen: Oh, that’s going to be all over Reddit tomorrow, I’m sure: “Lord of Spirits is Hegelian!” [Laughter] But that this is helpful for thinking about Scripture, in that you see Truth—which is Christ, ultimately—introduced in the Old Testament, and then it grows and it comes to flower in the New Testament, in the Person of Jesus Christ, in the full revelation of Jesus Christ in the New Testament. And when that happens, you don’t throw the Old Testament away.

Fr. Andrew: No! [Laughter] They certainly didn’t!

Fr. Stephen: Because in order to really understand the full revelation of Christ in the New Testament, you have to also understand the acorn; you have to understand the beginning and the growth and the development up to the fulfillment and the flowering. And this kind of approach is why we’re always starting in the Neolithic Era on this show, or the beginning of Genesis, and tracing these things through, because to understand how they come to flower and be fulfilled in Christ, you have to follow that growth; you have to follow that gradual unfolding that happens through the Scripture.

So on a more practical—now we’re going to get more practical, and we’re going to get really practical in the third half, but here as we’re coming toward the end of Half Two… So we talked about—we’re coming back to where we started here in Act Two, which: Where does that meaning lie? We’re not going with the modernist presupposition. We don’t think each text, each verse, each passage, has this one single meaning that’s off somewhere, unlocatable. But then how do you go about beginning to interpret these texts, if we’re going to go through the Old Testament and the New Testament and watch these things grow and unfurl?

Fr. Andrew: And we’re definitely not saying because we don’t think that there’s a single objective meaning for every text that there’s therefore no meaning or that any meaning goes. That’s definitely not what we’re saying.

Fr. Stephen: Emphasis on: there’s no single.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and I think that’s the big fear: “Look, if you lose that sense of scientificity, of this, then what are you left with? It’s just all relativism!”

Fr. Stephen: Right: “If you’re not a modernist, you must be a post-modernist.” [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Right, and, you know what, everybody? Those are not the only options.

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: Those are not the only options.

Fr. Stephen: Thankfully.

Fr. Andrew: Right.

Fr. Stephen: Unless you’re writing a dissertation at certain universities, and then they are the only options. No, so—

Fr. Andrew: Don’t go there.

Fr. Stephen: So what’s a beginning of an approach? A beginning of an approach is, rather than trying to reconstruct the mind from which the text emanates, we try to reconstruct the ear, the people who heard these texts first. We’re not going for any specific person here in their individuality and their subjectivity; we’re going for a time, a place, a people-group that we can know relative amounts about. How would they have heard this text? This is a starting point, not an ending point, but this is a starting point.

What are some examples of this, a test case for this? Giants and demons. Something we talk about a fair amount.

Fr. Andrew: Our ratings just went up for this episode, because you just mentioned giants. Everyone got very excited.

Fr. Stephen: And these are some of the reactions we’ve gotten when we talk about giants. We get essentially requests that we have to prove that nephilim are giants, we have to prove exactly what being a giant meant, “can you prove that…”—and that’s taking this modernist approach.

Fr. Andrew: We love you, but that’s what’s going on.

Fr. Stephen: We love you, but you need to set yourselves free from the chains of modernism.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Unshackled!

Fr. Stephen: You’re saying… Because what that question presupposes is there is this one meaning behind the text; you need to prove to me that this meaning you’re proposing is the one meaning. You’re making this claim, and then: Are they tall people? Are they genetic hybrids of angel and human?

So we’re approaching it more from the perspective of: When the first readers—or early readers, at least—of Genesis 6:1-4, when they heard that, about the sons of God and the daughters of men, and they heard about the nephilim, the men of renown—what connections would they have reasonably made? And we know, thanks to Second Temple Jewish literature, Ancient Near Eastern literature—we know the other stories they had heard. We know how they would have seen these references connecting to each other. They would have—these are the connections they would have made.

We’re not arguing about this hypothetical “one single meaning” behind it. We’re saying: No, this is how people read it, and going from giants to demons, this is why that book—I want to say Archie Leach again; he’s haunting me: Cary Grant…

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Oh, now I’m blanking on it, too!

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Origin of Evil Spirits. What he does is he goes to the first century. Whom did first-century people, living in Judea, based on their writings, based on the texts and the stories that were going around—where did they think these demons possessing people came from?

Fr. Andrew: From Archie Wright. There you go.

Fr. Stephen: Archie Wright.

Fr. Andrew: Where did they think it was?

Fr. Stephen: Where did they think these demons came from? The people who first read the gospels and first read these accounts of Christ casting out demons, and “have you come to torment us before the time?”—what did they think that meant? How would they have read that?

Fr. Andrew: Which is a separate question from “Were they wrong about this; were they right about this?” because if they’re wrong about it, then how am I supposed to be right about it? What do I have that they didn’t?

Fr. Stephen: Well, even that question, “Were they right?” what does that mean? Again, that’s treating the Bible as if you’re saying that this exorcism story in the Gospel claim, is making a claim—it’s not making a claim. It’s telling a story.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly, it’s telling a story.

Fr. Stephen: And this is the context in which that story was heard.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and I think that this issue underlines how hard this is. As modern people, this is simply the way that we think! So we have to… Part of our project on this podcast is to try to at least give us a framework that we can enter into for a while to try to begin to think differently, not to try to make everything into an empirical quest, because some things, if you embark on an empirical quest to understand what’s in the Scripture, you’re going to actually miss the way that people received it when it was first given, because they weren’t on that quest.

Fr. Stephen: Right, there was no quest for the historical Jesus before the 18th century.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it just wasn’t a thing.

Fr. Stephen: Didn’t happen. So another text case, another example. I hate to bash our Calvinist friends…

Fr. Andrew: Do you? [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: For the sake of argument, I do.

Fr. Andrew: Okay.

Fr. Stephen: But Romans 9. When St. Paul brings up Jacob and Esau, he’s talking about Jacob and Esau to people who were incredibly familiar with the story of Jacob and Esau that’s contained in Genesis. He was not bringing up two hypothetical people, one of them good and one of them evil; one of them loved by God and one of them hated by God; one of them elect and one of them reprobate. He’s not bringing up two random people! The people who first heard him make that argument knew that story. So they knew, for example, that Jacob and Esau reconciled at the end of that story. They knew—they had read Deuteronomy 2 and knew that at that point the Edomites were still worshiping Yahweh the God of Israel.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and the Edomites were Esau’s people, by the way, everybody.

Fr. Stephen: And they had read on to Obadiah and seen that that changed later, and that’s when they were judged. And so when they hear St. Paul talking, we don’t have to try to get inside St. Paul’s head and see what he was trying to do; we can see how anyone familiar with that story would understand what he’s saying. And you can go listen to a certain episode of Whole Counsel of God on that if you want to—it’s not Calvin’s approach, if you take the actual story into account.

Fr. Andrew: Right, he’s importing that whole history, in that old sense—that history from the Old Testament into his conversation. And so reading what he says as contrary to that history, then, does not make sense.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And the response, when I point that out, of “Well, you have to use the New Testament to interpret the Old Testament, so St. Paul is saying that is what Genesis means” again, is kind of a quasi-post-modern thing, like I’ve got to go back and read Genesis against the grain now to make it mean what you say St. Paul means?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah… Why is St. Paul negating Genesis? Why would he do that? If he’s going to do that, he needs to explain why he’s doing it, and he doesn’t say that he’s doing that. He doesn’t say he’s doing that.

Fr. Stephen: And saying he’s doing it on apostolic authority is also a cop-out, because you’re essentially arguing that St. Paul was given authority by the Holy Spirit to interpret the Bible badly, which doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] No.

Fr. Stephen: Third test case, because we’ve got to do things in three; we’re Orthodox. It’s three or 40, so be thankful.

Fr. Andrew: Three or 40, occasionally twelve. Once in a while, a hundred!

Fr. Stephen: So a third test case, which is where people have wasted a ton of time, frankly, and this is comparing Isaiah 7:14 and Matthew 1:23. “Behold, a young woman or a virgin will bear a child, and they will call his name Emmanuel.” So what causes the problem here is that the word in the Hebrew, almah, just means a young woman and not a virgin, per se; parthenos, by the first century, that St. Matthew uses—by the first century mostly meant a virgin… Parthenos also meant a young woman.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, a young woman.

Fr. Stephen: At the time when the Greek translation of the Old Testament was made, it was more a young woman also, but anyway, so people get into this whole thing of “Oh, see: it doesn’t say ‘virgin,’ ” so they treat—they’re doing this thing we talked about—they’re saying, “St. Matthew claims that Isaiah predicted a virgin birth, and so if we can prove that that’s not what Isaiah was claiming, then St. Matthew’s claim is false, and the Bible’s false, and Christianity goes away.”

Fr. Andrew: Boom! Checkmate! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: But if we, instead of reading this backward, read it forward, then when we read Isaiah 7—we’ll read the whole chapter, maybe—and see that this is in the middle of the Syro-Ephraimite War, which was very poorly named, because it was not a war between the Syrians and the Ephraimites; it was a war in which the Syrians and the Ephraimites, the northern kingdom of Israel, attacked Judah. But they attacked Judah, Judah was in dire straits, they were losing, Isaiah comes and makes this prophecy and says, “This young woman standing here is going to have a baby, and before that baby is old enough to know right from wrong, before he’s old enough to know good or evil, you’ll be delivered from the combined army of the Syrians and the Israelites.” And that happened. It happened in Isaiah; it happened in the Old Testament. That prophecy that he made came true. He wasn’t talking at that time of a virgin birth; he wasn’t talking about anything happening in the first century AD.

And St. Matthew isn’t claiming he was, because that’s not how this works. The truth comes; it flowers: this idea of fulfillment, being filled to overflowing. So what St. Matthew is doing is saying, “Hey, you guys who have all read Isaiah—you have all heard Isaiah read in the synagogues every day of your life—well, maybe not every day—every Saturday of your life, that’s every sabbath—you’ve heard this story a hundred times, and you remember how the birth of that child signaled that the delivery of God’s people was near. Well, guess what!” Guess what: the birth of Christ that he’s describing in chapter one, the birth of Christ in this much fuller, richer, deeper, eternal sense, means that God is now going to shortly deliver his people.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and I think one of the things that’s really important to underline in the midst of this, like you just said, they would have heard this, for instance, every Saturday of their lives in the synagogue—I think we should underline that, because the way that a lot of modern people approach biblical interpretation is largely looking at a book that maybe they don’t know the nooks and crannies of and haven’t heard the same stories a hundred times before. I mean, some people, certainly, that know the Bible very, very well, but even people that do know it very well, we receive it in the midst of a culture full of all kinds of other stories, constantly.

This is the massive information age, whereas in first-century Holy Land, yes, there were other stories going on in their culture other than what’s in the Bible, but nowhere near like what we have, and they were ritually participating in these stories over and over and over and over again, so they all grew up hearing them. They all—the general culture knew the Old Testament way better than most Christians today do, because they were just in it all the time.

So then, when the New Testament makes allusions or references or quotes from the Old Testament, it’s bringing, it’s importing the stuff much more powerfully than it is even for us. We have to look at little marginal notes, like: “Oh, is that a reference to something in Isaiah?” I mean, this is obviously a very famous example, but they would not have needed these cross-referenced Bibles to the extent that we do now, because this was just simply: These are their societal stories; this is the history of this people. It’s embedded, in a way that I think is really hard for us to really get. I think people who belong to liturgical churches, who are really dedicated to being in services a lot, begin to get this. I’ve seen it with my own kids, that they know so many biblical stories that I never—to my shame, that I didn’t read them all to them, but they know them. Why? Because they’re in church, because they’re hearing them; they’re ritually participating in them.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and even if you absolutely hate my approach, at least it saves me a lot of these unending arguments. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, exactly. Well, that said, we’re going to go ahead and take a break, and we’ll head on into our third half. We’ll be right back!

Fr. Andrew: Hey, welcome back, everybody! It’s the third half of Lord of Spirits here, the week before Holy Week, if you’re listening to us live. So we’re right on the cusp of hearing a big, massive pile of Scripture in church, which is always just such an amazing, amazing experience.

So we’ve gone to the end of the tunnel, seem some light, done a few test cases. How do we kind of take this forward? How do we integrate this into the way that we think, into the way that we interpret the Bible, into the way that we read the Bible, into the way that we think about how the Orthodox Church does those things?

All right, folks, we seem to be having a little bit of technical difficulty here. It’s been a long time since we had technical difficulties! All right, well, while we’re going to go ahead and try to get Fr. Stephen back on the line, we’re going to go ahead and take a caller who is calling, I believe, from Canada—or at least his phone number says he’s in Canada. I’m not sure how to pronounce your name. You’re going to have to tell me. Are you there, caller?

Radu: Ah, yeah. This is Radu from Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada.

Fr. Andrew: Radu! Okay, welcome. Welcome to The Lord of Spirits. How are you this evening? We’re trying to get Fr. Stephen back, so I can’t guarantee that I would necessarily whatever he would say, but what’s on your mind?

Radu: [Laughter] Thanks for taking my call, Father. Yeah, I was just wondering what— You kind of started touching on it at the end of the last half, which is: We talked a lot about how the text should be interpreted and used that word a lot, but I’m also thinking about how people would have interacted with all this—12th-century Romanian peasants: nobody can read, or very, very few. They see the icons painted on a wall in a country church. Maybe most are taken in a language they can understand; the liturgy might not be in a language they understand. Just… it’s all either oral tradition, or they see a bunch of icons on the wall, the frescoes on the outside of the monastery church they see once a year on pilgrimage, that sort of thing. And how all of this discussion would have been relevant and real for them in that kind of non-textual world.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. So, I mean… Right, most people are not listeners to Lord of Spirits. [Laughter] Most people are not doing biblical scholarship; most people are not diving into these questions in the way that we’re talking about them. So there’s… Even within this narrative you’re talking about, still, even now, most people are simply hearing the Scriptures in church; that’s how they’re getting it.

I mean, I think that what we’re talking— we’re analyzing this from a very intellectual point of view on a certain level, but the way that most people are actually experiencing church actually does produce this for them, because if— For instance, I think about my own kids: They’re growing up in church; they’re hearing the stories of the Scripture. And so they receive all of this together as one narrative experience. For them, unless I tell them, “Look, the Old Testament and the New Testament are not one integrated piece,” they have no reason to believe that it’s not. So what’s happened is there are a lot of weeds that have grown up within culture that have made it hard for people to simply have that experience of simply growing up with Scriptures and growing up with all of these things that are connected together.

We’ve said a bunch of times: You don’t have to have read the book of Enoch in order to understand—in order to receive the Scriptures in the Church for your salvation. You don’t have to have done that. But if you are faithful within the Church—I’m not saying you have to have grown up with it, but if you are faithful and are willing as much as possible to be taught by what you’re experiencing, then you will begin to get it. A lot of what we’re trying to do is clear away the weeds of modern culture that are simply there and that we can’t help but have to deal with it. Does that make some sense?

Radu: Yeah. Yeah, it does, and it’s also quite heartening, because I have young kids. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Right. It’s been fascinating to me to watch my kids. My oldest is 15 and my youngest is five, and then I have a 12-year-old and an almost-10-year-old. It’s been fascinating to me to watch them—the way that they understand the Scripture, the way that they understand the story that the Church is telling is actually very different from, in many ways, the way that I do, or in some cases I’ve had to work really hard to get to where they are just growing up with it naturally. If they don’t ever want to be biblical scholars or even just sort of fans of biblical scholarship, which is kind of what I sort of am, that’s okay. They don’t have to be. They can still receive this for their salvation. They can even still have this integrated view.

One of the things that I’ve observed is that a lot of Christians these days are functionally Marcianists. You know, Marcian, that early Church heretic who basically said: The Old Testament, you should throw it out, because that’s an evil god who created the world, and that’s not the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. A lot of Christians are functionally Marcianists. I’ve even heard people within the Orthodox Church say to me—I’ll make a reference to the Old Testament, and they’ll say, “Oh, well, we don’t need that any more; we have the New Testament.” And that’s exactly what we’re talking about! That’s a really terrible version of it, even, the idea that the Old Testament doesn’t even matter any more. Does that make sense?

Radu: Yeah. Yeah, thank you, Father. Can I have just a tiny little follow-up?

Fr. Andrew: Sure, absolutely.

Fr. Stephen: Which is more of a tiny suggestion. I would like to throw in a Golden Jubilee Hall Seniors’ Centre in Sussex, New Brunswick, as a location for the first inaugural Lord of Spirits-apalooza, whenever we get to that.

Fr. Andrew: Oh! [Laughter] Well, all right! We will take that under advisement. So, thank you very much, Radu!

Fr. Stephen: Hi! Long-time co-host, first-time caller?

Fr. Andrew: Hey! There you are! [Laughter] Yeah! Well, welcome back. So as you can hear, everybody, we’ve got Fr. Stephen on the phone. But there you are.

Fr. Stephen: It’s Lent, everybody; it’s Lent, so everything is going badly. Okay.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Anyway. Not ideal, but we can understand you. We actually— Okay, so we have one more caller, and why don’t we talk to Matt? So, Matt, what’s on your mind?

Matt: Are you guys there?

Fr. Andrew: Yes!

Fr. Stephen: Yes, surprisingly.

Matt: I was wondering how to interpret Scripture through the nous, the noetic way. I forget what Desert Father it was—I can never pronounce his name right. Markavios or whatever his name was? How he explained Ezekiel 1 as the surrender of soul? I feel like that be a noetic way of interpreting Scripture, but that is an example of understanding Scripture through the nous.

Fr. Andrew: Fr. Stephen, you want to start off on that one?

Fr. Stephen: Well, I mean, that’s kind of what we’re going to be talking about in the third half here.

Fr. Andrew: There you go!

Fr. Stephen: So that’s a good thing; it means you’re tracking with us. [Laughter] Yeah, we’re about to go back to the Fathers and sort of talk about what they’re doing and how they’re doing it, and what that idea of the phronema, the noetic way of reading the Scriptures as the Fathers do: what that is if it isn’t taking a straw poll of patristic quotes, and then judging from that. I guess mainly my unsatisfactory answer is: Stay tuned here! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: All right, so just hang on and keep going with us. Thank you very much for calling. Okay, so, Father, before we got so rudely interrupted by whatever it is that happened to your equipment there… [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, low-grade detonation. Yeah…

Fr. Andrew: Oh! Boy! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, yeah… We talked about, at the end of Half Two—we talked about sort of moving from the Old Testament into the New Testament, but we sort of, as we just mentioned, didn’t forget about the Fathers; we aren’t just casting them aside. But then the question is: If the truth comes to flower in the revelation of Christ in the New Testament, then what are the Fathers doing? And to get at that, we have to make a distinction between the idea of interpretation and the idea of application. These are two different things.

So interpretation more describes what we’ve been talking about in a more negative sense, the idea that the Fathers are looking at the text of Scripture and trying to ascertain this one true meaning that lies behind it, and that when they therefore say different things, that means they disagree about what that one meaning is; whereas we’re going to suggest application is something different, and a good way, a good Orthodox way, of thinking about that distinction is the theological distinction we make between essence and energies. We make that distinction in terms of God, as we’ve talked about on the show; we make that distinction about everybody. It’s also worth thinking about in terms of the Scriptures and their interpretation.

When we talk about the distinction between God’s essence and his energies, what we’re saying is that God is not like an essence; he’s not a being, even a supreme being, that we comprehend with our intellect, that we go and perform an intellectual process and arrive at exactly who God is. But rather we encounter God in action. The divine energies are God, but they’re God in action. We encounter God’s loving; we encounter God’s transfiguring; we encounter God’s saving; we encounter God justifying, setting things right.

And so we should think about meaning in terms of the Scriptures in much the same way, and this is what we’re suggesting the Fathers do. That the Fathers are not peering into the Bible and trying to use an intellectual process to arrive at the essence of this or that verse or this or that passage, this meaning that underlies it, that stands behind it, to intellectually comprehend what it is; but that, through the Scriptures, God is encountered in action, because God is acting through the Scriptures. And so, as God is working through the Scriptures, in applying those Scriptures, whether they’re doing it in a direct way, as when St. John Chrysostom is preaching a homily after the reading of the Scriptures, as he’s taking them and applying them, or a little more subtly, as St. Gregory the Theologian when he writes a treatise on a current Trinitarian debate and references Scripture. They are participating, sort of instrumentally, as an instrument of God, through which the work that God is doing in Scripture is applied to the people who are under their spiritual authority, in their particular time and place.

And if we think about it that way, that has a whole bunch of consequences, over against the kind of interpretation model. It means that Scripture—we need to think of Scripture as more of a mystery, in the sense that that word is used in the Orthodox Church, to talk about things that in the West are called sacraments. That it’s sort of a material thing: that the reading of Scripture is a material thing, an audible thing, through which God works, through which the divine energies are made present, God himself becomes present in a transformative way for people. And if we accept that this is the way the reading of Scripture primarily works, that means that, like all mysteries, like all sacraments, the proper home of them is within the liturgical life of the Church, the sort of initial and proper home.

So that also, then, has its own consequences, and we’re not really used to thinking this way, because, again, we’re in the modern or post-modern contemporary world, and we’ve been by our culture, if not the church we attended—we have been encouraged to see our own sitting down and reading the Bible as being the primary venue of the Bible, the primary place where Scriptures work.

Fr. Andrew: Right, that Bible study equals me, alone, doing this thing with this book.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And we wouldn’t say that about any other mystery/sacrament.

Fr. Andrew: No.

Fr. Stephen: I know there are people who do this, but hopefully most of our listeners will understand why the whole communion-for-one thing is kind of out.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, although didn’t it happen on the moon? [Laughter] So, literally way out there!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, there are people who have done things. Or someone going and baptizing themselves, other than Robert Duvall in The Apostle.

Fr. Andrew: Right! Excellent film. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: But the same is true in Scripture, that Scripture, because its natural home is in the liturgical life of the Church, that means its primary mode of reading is being read publicly, is being read aloud. And the Hebrew word for “read” is even the word that means “to call out,” not “to sit and think.”

Fr. Andrew: So it’s out loud. I think that in most of history, at least more of the European history that I’m aware of, reading out loud is the way that you read until, I don’t know, pretty late. It’s pretty late that texts were not read silently hardly ever.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and St. Augustine mentions knowing a crazy person, and the reason everybody thought he was crazy was that he read to himself; he sat and silently.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, without any sound coming out.

Fr. Stephen: Because everyone else, even if they were sitting in their house by themselves reading something, they read it out loud. So this guy was a complete weirdo. But that gives you an idea of understanding that collective initial context. And by it being in the context of the liturgical life of the Church, that means whatever portion of Scripture is read is also set in a larger ritual and narrative context. So a good example of this will be for folks a week from today, when we read the twelve Passion gospels. We not only read the whole Gospel accounts of Christ’s Passion in all four gospels, but we do that in the context of a liturgical service in which we also enact what’s going on in those stories, so that those there are brought into a participation of an event. As we talked about before, those events are made present; they’re made now, so that the people can participate. And the reading of Scripture is a part of that, a part of that whole; these aren’t sort of two separate things, like: “Oh, we do this part of reenactment, and then we also read the story.” Those are together, and together for a reason. That that is sort of the proper function.

And even in just your typical Divine Liturgy on a Sunday morning, the Divine Liturgy itself is structured around the life and death and resurrection of Christ, and so the portions of Scripture read during it are set in that context as they’re read publicly for participation. And so preaching that takes place—and this is a lot of the writing of the Fathers, is some form of preaching and applying, whether it’s literally a transcribed sermon or whether it’s essentially a written sermon, it’s explicating. It would be a written sermon because it’s aimed at some particular situation, some particular audience at some particular place in time, whether it’s spoken aloud or whether it’s written and then someone went and read it aloud, because, remember, the recipients of the writings were reading them aloud, not silently.

Preaching, then, is always a form of application. So it would correspond, if we’re thinking about the reading of Scripture as a mystery or a sacrament—it would correspond to, for example, actually giving the people Communion, or pushing the kid’s head under the water three times; that the actual, direct application and participation by the preacher, instrumentally, is the work of God that’s taking place through the Scriptures.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and I think one of the important things to underline in that context is, whether you’re reading a patristic writing that’s particularly a homily or you’re simply listening to a homily written in your own time or delivered in your own time, is that the context in which it’s given is an important element in understanding even the homily, that the way… I remember, for instance, when I was in seminary—there’s cultural pieces to this, too. I remember when I was in seminary that someone gave a sermon which was very exercised, a lot of very strong emotional expressions and so forth, and I thought to myself, “Oh, this is kind of similar to some of the Baptist preachers that I heard when I was younger,” but we actually had a seminarian from Europe, from northern Europe, who said, “If someone preached like that in my home country, we would think of them like they were some kind of crazy dictator.” It was just received in a very different— And in northern Europe, they know something about crazy dictators. It was just received— Say that again?

Fr. Stephen: They’ve seen a couple.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right. So in his case, he didn’t have the cultural context that the rest of us did, and so he received it very differently. And then he took a completely other meaning from it that was different from what the preacher intended and from what most of the hearers heard. So that context is really, really important. So even if a Church Father says X, Y, Z, it’s important to try to understand, as much as possible, the audience that he was saying that to, the time, maybe what was historically happening in that place—all of that stuff matters. All of that stuff matters, because it’s precisely an action within a community, and so if you pull a text outside of that community, then you shouldn’t expect it to function exactly the same way as when it was originally delivered.

Fr. Stephen: Right, because if the Fathers are not trying to communicate to us the secret essence of the Scriptures that lies behind them, then what we’re trying to do is not parrot some kind of claim that the Fathers are making; what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to do what they did. We’re trying to do the same thing, and the only way to determine exactly what they’re doing is to understand what they actually did in their time and place, who that audience was, what the situation was that they were addressing, what the debate was about that they were weighing in on, what the view is that they’re criticizing or condemning or warning against. If we don’t understand those things, we won’t understand what they’re doing.

Fr. Andrew: Right, because they’re not pushing out pure, encapsulated concepts into the ether. These are not the Platonic forms of the dogmas or whatever. It’s contextualized; it’s within a— And that doesn’t mean it’s relativized. It’s not post-modern, it’s just seeing that this was not, as you like to say sometimes: the Scriptures are written for us but not to us! We’re not the original audience.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so a good example of this that’s near and dear to my heart because of the amount of my life that’s spent on it— A lot of people know, who listen to this show, at least, that my dissertation was on 1 John 2:2b, but 1 John 2:2 says that Christ died not only for our sins but for the whole world, and if you go and look up the earliest commentary on that verse among the Fathers, what you find is that pretty much all the Fathers from the fourth to the eighth century say that by saying this St. John refutes the Donatists.

Fr. Andrew: Which is a weirdly anachronistic thing to say, because there weren’t— We’re not aware of any Donatists in the first century…

Fr. Stephen: Right, Donatus himself lived in the fourth century. [Laughter] After whom it was named: he was not born yet. So it seems preposterous on the face to claim that: “No, those Fathers are saying that the single accurate meaning of that verse is referring to this specific North African heresy in the fourth century, or the fifth century.” Now this would be a preposterous argument. It would make that verse, and any number of other passages of Scripture, completely irrelevant if you understood the Fathers that way. And this is not a question of finding other later Fathers who apply it to something else, either.

What we have to do is we have to look at the sort of larger context of St. John—and I’m not going to reiterate my whole dissertation, thankfully, at this point in the evening, but essentially what St. John is doing is he’s talking about the shift that happens in Christ, from the way atonement worked in the old covenant, where it was for this one physical sanctuary, this one bit of land, this one structure in this one place, among this one people; that’s what was cleansed by these sacrifices. And St. John is expanding that out to encompass the whole world.

And so what those Fathers are saying is not that St. John had some kind of prophetic vision that this heresy would arise in the fourth century, but what the Fathers are doing is they’re saying: These Donatists are making the same mistake that St. John was talking about. They’re trying to restrict salvation to just their group, just their people, just in North Africa; they’re trying to say: We’re the only ones who have held onto the path of salvation. And St. John is saying: No, Christ made that available to the whole world. So what St. John says does refute the Donatists, among other people. They’re not misinterpreting it, but what they’re doing is they’re applying it.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, for their own time and place.

Fr. Stephen: They’re taking what St. John said and applying it in their own time and place: This is what this means now for this issue we’re facing in the Church.

So, going from the Fathers to ourselves, if we’re going to try to read the Scriptures toward application in this way and try and make this move to sort of—God in action through the Scriptures, how do we actually do that? We’ve got some sort of quasi-steps, I guess; I don’t know if they’re really steps. It would have been better if we came up with steps.

Fr. Andrew: “Five Ways That You Can—”

Fr. Stephen: “—Turn Into a Monk”? “Five Steps to Successful Biblical Application.” We could’ve made them alliterate. We could have had words that rhyme or words that all start with the same letter. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Or we could be subtle and use assonance. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Oh, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah!

Fr. Stephen: The first one starts with a Y, so we could just come up with a bunch of As. So the beginning, there’s a quote from a Church Father, potentially, that gets attributed to a lot of different people. I’ve used it and attributed it to various people, so I’m keeping the thing going, I realized at one point. Since the caller brought up St. Macarius, we’ll just say it was St. Macarius. [Laughter] But the quote is that the wise man applies everything in the Scriptures to himself and none of it to other people. And what he’s talking about there is the idea that, when we’re doing this application, one of the first principles that has to guide us is we’re applying it to ourselves and potentially to, if there is someone whom we have spiritual care for.

Fr. Andrew: Right, like if you’re a pastor and you have a flock, and it’s your flock, or you’re a parent and you have children, and they’re your children, then those are the people you can apply it to, in addition to yourself.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so the core idea is: if I walk away from the Scriptures saying, “Yeah, those people over there are rotten!” I’m doing it wrong. I’ve missed the boat. We don’t find—I put this challenge out a lot: find me a place where the Fathers talk about Christians going to heaven and non-Christians going to hell, where that’s the dividing line. The reason nobody’s found one yet is the Fathers don’t spend a lot of time talking about people outside the Church.

Fr. Andrew: Right, because they’re talking to their own flocks.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and they’re often warning their own flocks about the potential of going to hell, putting that potentiality out there. That’s what they’re concerned about, not condemning the world outside of the Church, let alone condemning their brother. That’s principle one: you’re looking at applying it to yourself, first and foremost, and then, if there are others that are under your spiritual care—for real, not whom you decided should be—then to them also. But even in those cases, speaking as somebody who preaches fairly frequently, I’ve found it most effective that I approach it as: How do I need to apply it to myself? What do I need to hear? And then usually it’s a good assumption that at least some of the people whom I’m preaching to need to hear the same thing. They’re enough like me in their humanity that they also might need it applied in that way.

Fr. Andrew: Even though they don’t know what it’s like to be Fr. Stephen De Young?

Fr. Stephen: Yes, yes, or a bat. I am not claiming to be Batman. [Laughter] So when we’re talking about applying, we’re not talking about thinking about virtues. Applying is not reading it and saying, “Yeah, it’s true; I need to exercise more self-control.” That’s not applying it! [Laughter] That’s musing. Remember, we talked about this distinction between essence and energies. We encounter Christ as Christ is working in the world; we encounter God as he’s working in the world. Sometimes I think we lapse into thinking that an encounter with God will happen when we finally get some peace and quiet and are able to meditate and say the Jesus Prayer enough times in sequence, and then we’re going to have this encounter with God, but that’s mostly not how it works, unless you’re a monastic. If you’re a monastic and you’re called to go—you’re one of a tiny group of monastics who’s called to go and be a hermit, then that may be how God relates to you, but for the rest of us, especially those of us who are out here in the world, we’re going to encounter him out here in the world. And that means through actually living the Scriptures, actually doing it, not just having the right opinions about it, but actually doing it.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which explains why there’s such an emphasis in the Scriptures on what you do, and even that—the judgment, where our eternal destiny is set, is explicitly said, over and over in Scriptures, to be based on what you do, and even in Matthew 25, with some very specific actions in mind; that it’s… Christ is not coming to judge every man according to his opinions; he’s coming to judge every man according to his works, and, in Matthew 25, where people are judged on whether they fed the hungry and clothed the naked and visited the sick and in prison, Christ explicitly says, “If you did that, you did it to me; if you didn’t do it, you didn’t do it to me.” In other words, the encounter with Christ is found in doing those works, in doing the things, the commandments of God. I actually checked recently: How many times do you see this explicit pairing of “If you love me, keep my commandments,” and I found 18 times just searching in the ESV, but the concept is even more ubiquitous; it’s all over the place. If you love Christ, you keep his commandments. You have to do that; there’s just no way around it.

Fr. Stephen: And this paradigm, over and over again, of those who hear the law versus those who do it; hearing versus doing. “Why do you call me ‘Lord, Lord,’ and not do what I say?” Yeah.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly. For instance—and one of the things that I think also underlines that is we see not just in the Scripture where it says, “If you love me, keep my commandments,” but actually we do see what the result of that is. For instance, the Lord says in Matthew 19:17, “If you would enter life, keep the commandments.” So if you keep the commandments, that means you’re entering life; that means you’re entering into eternal life. You’re doing it! We had a caller earlier ask: Is there any hope for interpreting the Scripture correctly if you’re not doing all this biblical studies stuff? And of course I said yes, but we should also emphasize that even if someone understands intellectually none of everything we’ve just been talking about but keeps the commandments of Christ, actually lives faithfully to him, then they’re doing it. And it’s not even—it’s not like a lower-class version of Christianity: they’re really doing Christianity. You can become a saint without understanding the principles that we’re talking about, if you keep the commandments of Christ, because that’s what sanctity actually is.

And the flip-side, then, of course, if you’re not keeping the commandments, then you’re not living as a Christian, and that means that your interpretation of the Scriptures or of the Fathers is probably not worth a whole lot, maybe nothing, easily ignorable. It’s not that the things that you’re saying might be wrong, but the message you’re delivering along with it is that this is the faith of demons. I can be a jerk, I can be nasty and evil and not doing the things that Christ commanded and say things that are true, but demons do that.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, as St. James points out, the demons know all that stuff for sure. They don’t just think it or believe it.

Fr. Andrew: Right, their dogma is the best! [Laughter] They’ve got it really down.

Fr. Stephen: In that sense, yeah, their doctrine.

Fr. Andrew: Well, to wrap up this evening, this conversation about methodology—that’s what this really was—I think now we’ve got enough episodes that it’s hard to tell people to just simply listen to all of them—although I still think that that’s the ideal—but I will say, though, even if someone doesn’t listen to all of them, I think this is going to be an important one, in many ways, for this podcast. This kind of lays out the method of what we’re doing. We’re not claiming this is all 100% perfect or correct or whatever, but it certainly—to me, anyways—what it is the Church Fathers are doing, to represent what it is that are happening during the divine services, to represent what’s happening within Scripture when you see people in Scripture interpreting and applying Scripture.

But far from being a kind of—just giving a mechanism or technique, because that’s not what we’re about, the point of seeing the Scriptures, for instance, as an integrated whole, that there’s not—even though there’s an old covenant and a new covenant, that these are not disconnected from each other, like we talked about Hegel earlier having at least this one good thing to say about, in his case, philosophical concepts not just coming out of earlier ones but actually resting on them. You can’t throw away the earlier stuff. The same is true with Christianity. For instance, a lot of people who convert to Orthodox Christianity weirdly stop reading the Bible that they might have been reading before, and they’re like: “Well, I’ve kind of got that down; now I want to do the Fathers: this is where it really is located; this is where the truth really, really is,” but that’s violating what the Fathers themselves do. They are constantly going back to Scripture. They’re constantly referring people to Scripture. The Church does not treat their writings on a higher level than the Scriptures. It’s clearly the other way: the Scriptures are central. The Scriptures are always being read to us in church services. The Scriptures are what we are participating with ritually, over and over. That should be our whole life.

So the purpose of trying to understand the Scriptures is, as St. John writes at the end of his gospel, that we may believe that Jesus is the Christ, and, believing, that is to say, being faithful, we may have life in his name. The purpose is for our salvation. And so I hope that one of the take-aways that people have is that all of this is worth it. It’s truly, truly worth it. I mean, it’s one of our constant themes that this podcast is not just about weird, crazy Bible stuff or things dug up in the Turkish desert, but it is for our salvation. Scripture is for our salvation; understanding these things is for our salvation. Can you be saved without this intellectual understanding? Absolutely, but if you have the capability, then you have the responsibility to use all of your capability in the service of Christ. And so if you have the ability to study the Scriptures and to understand them more deeply, then that is our responsibility; that’s what we’re supposed to be doing.

It’s been beautiful to me to see many people become excited about reading the Bible again in the conversations that we’re having. I think that the excitement comes, at least I hope, like I said, not just weird nerdy Bible stuff, but an excitement of encountering Christ, truly encountering Christ. And I think that, to me, the biggest thing to take away from this conversation this evening is that that encounter with Christ comes in obedience to Christ. It comes in obedience to Christ. This is not an esoteric experience; this is not a scholarly experience. It’s an experience of becoming conformed to who he is, and that this knowledge that we’re discussing is about bringing us more into that. I know that I find myself encouraged by these conversations to head in that direction, and, God willing, a little bit more and more I try to do that. Fr. Stephen?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so sort of our whole raison d’être with the show is to talk about the spiritual world, the spiritual level of reality that we’ve kind of forgotten about in our modern and post-modern materialism. And what we’ve been talking about tonight, at least where it went, which hopefully now after hearing all this about methodology, you understand that each episode goes somewhere—that where it went is critically important to understanding this, because this show isn’t supposed to be about “Oh, there’s this spiritual warfare going on out there, and the Bible tells us about it so we can imagine it or think about it or know about it”; it’s to let us know that we’re involved in it.

And of course our Leader is our Lord and God and Savior Jesus Christ. If you want to come to know him better, if you want to go to where he is, if you want to encounter him, if you want to be transformed by him, if you want to work with him, if you want to fight alongside him, then there’s a place where that’s happening. There’s a place where that’s happening, and it’s not a limited or restricted place. It’s potentially every place, every space, every moment of your life. That includes the liturgical services of the Church, that are sort of the center and the nexus of it; that’s sort of like the base camp. And we can certainly encounter Christ within the services of the Church, through the Scriptures as they’re read in the church, through the Scriptures as they’re read in our home.

But we also encounter Christ, perhaps most powerfully and most transformatively, as we were saying there at the end, in action. We’ve been doing the Liturgy of St. Basil the Great here in Great Lent, so as a priest I read all the long prayers, and my choir usually finishes early, so people get to hear some of those long prayers while I finish them. But one of the many things that at various points have struck me in those long prayers is it describes God as “the help of the helpless, the hope of the hopeless, the physician of the sick.” And this isn’t just a hypothetical. This isn’t stuff God is willing to do if we ask, or ways of praising him. This is what God is actually doing.

If you want to know where Christ is right now, he is with the people who are sick, the people who are alienated and suffering, the people who are alone and who are lonely, the people who are hopeless, the people who are helpless—that’s where he is. That’s what the Scriptures tell us over and over again. And we can go to those people and we can find him there. We can encounter him there. We can work with him there, to help those who are helpless, to give hope to those who are hopeless, to help heal and bring comfort to those who are suffering. When we do that, we not encounter Christ, but we encounter Christ in a way that changes and transforms us, not where we learn some things intellectually and we become smarter or more able to win arguments on the internet, we can teach other people—but we’re transformed in a way that makes us whole, that heals what’s broken in us, that gives us hope for the hopelessness that each of us has, that gives us help for the helplessness that each of us has, brings comfort to the suffering that every one of us faces.

And so the study of the Scriptures always has to be directed out; it has to be directed out in its application, has to be directed out to the world, because Christ is in the business of saving the world. That’s what he’s about; that’s what he’s doing. Any other pursuit, whether it’s an intellectual pursuit, scholarly pursuit, any other vein pursuit, it’s not what he’s about, and so that’s not where we’re going to find him. So if anything in this show has interested you, if you think any of it is true about the spiritual world, spiritual warfare, any of that, then we have a very easy way to join the fight, because the people who need you, the people whom Christ loves and is caring for are all around you every day. We just have to be willing to actually do it, to actually participate, to actually help, and to actually love them also.

Fr. Andrew: Well, that is our show for tonight. Thank you very much, everyone, for listening. If you can’t get through to us live, we would still love to hear from you. You can email us at lordofspirits@ancientfaith.com; you can message us at our Lord of Spirits podcast Facebook page; or you can leave us a voicemail at speakpipe.com/lordofspirits.

Fr. Stephen: I do listen to all the speakpipes. Join us for our live broadcasts on the second and fourth Thursdays of the month at 7:00 p.m. Eastern, 4:00 p.m. Pacific.

Fr. Andrew: And if you are on Facebook, you can like our page, join our discussion group, leave reviews and ratings everywhere, but, most importantly, share this show with a friend whom you know is going to love it.

Fr. Stephen: And finally, be sure to go to ancientfaith.com/support and help make sure we and lots of other AFR podcasters stay on the air, and Bobby gets those lawyers, guns, and money!

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Thank you, good night, and may God bless you. I hope you have a blessed Holy Week and a bright and beautiful Pascha.