Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick: Good evening, giant-killers and dragon-slayers! You are listening to The Lord of Spirits podcast. My co-host, Fr. Stephen De Young, is with me from Lafayette, Louisiana, and I am Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick in Emmaus, Pennsylvania. This is a pre-recorded episode, so we’re not taking any calls this time, and even though I said I’m in Emmaus and Fr. Stephen’s in Louisiana, the truth is when you’re hearing this, assuming you’re listening to it live, we’re actually both somewhere in Texas—can’t tell you where exactly, but somewhere.

Fr. Stephen De Young: Not “listening to it live”: listening to the premiere.

Fr. Andrew: Ah, that’s true. Yes, thank you for that precision. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and also we will take your call if you sense that we’re recording and you call right now.

Fr. Andrew: It’s true.

Fr. Stephen: What I’m really hoping, by repeating that in these pre-recorded episodes is that listeners of the show will just start calling the Ancient Faith studios at odd hours—

Fr. Andrew: Poor Trudi.

Fr. Stephen: —hoping to catch us recording. That’s what I’m going for.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] “Are they on now? Can I get through?” A brief commercial. On October 26-29, 2023—happy new year, everyone, by the way—at the Antiochian Village in western Pennsylvania, the forests of Penn, we are going to be holding the first-ever Lord of Spirits Conference. Fr. Stephen and I are going to both be there; we’ll both be speaking, as well as will be Archbishop Alexander (Golitzin) and Frs. David Subu and Lucas Christensen. And, yes, there will be an RPG tournament.

Fr. Stephen: Dungeons & Dragons.

Fr. Andrew: Extra points to anyone—and I’m not kidding about this. Extra points to anyone who brings me a copy of Jack Chick’s literary and, yes, indeed, film classic, “Dark Dungeons.” The schedule is still being worked on, but you can find all the current details and you can register—very important, because we’ve sold out I think over half the Antiochian Village now, well over half. You can go to store.ancientfaith.com/events, so get your tickets right now!

Fr. Stephen: And because my sister had to have this question answered, her question being—and I quote—“Can I get a refund if somebody dies before then?”

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] You mean like you?

Fr. Stephen: It could be. It could be her, I don’t know!

Fr. Andrew: I mean, I could die.

Fr. Stephen: You yourself.

Fr. Andrew: Someone else could die. I think they would still hold the event. We’d have to all die.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, but the answer is yes, it is possible.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, it is possible to get a refund up to some point—I don’t know when exactly. But, yes, it is a thing. It is a thing.

The other commercial I want to give, since, you know, this is our bully pulpit, I want to point everyone—

Fr. Stephen: And you are a bully.

Fr. Andrew: And I am sometimes a bully—but I’m a nice bully! I’m a very nice bully. I want to point everyone to a newly released pilgrimage documentary that has begun to be available through Ancient Faith Radio and, of course, on all of your favorite podcasting apps. It is called The Wolf and the Cross, and it is the result of a pilgrimage that friend-of-this-show—I shouldn’t call him that: actual friend, Richard Rohlin, and I took along with my daughter to Lithuania this past summer, and we made a bunch of recordings, and we’ve done a huge amount of research. The first episode is out; it’s a little over two hours long. Fans of this show should recognize that as a very short episode of something. Very, very high level of production: we’ve got ambient music, we’ve got sound effects, we’ve got voice actors. It is not just the whole nine yards: this goes to ten yards! This is ten yards’ worth of material. So I hope everyone will check that out. Like I said, the first episode is now available. We’re planning on releasing them about once a month or so, maybe have some bonus episodes on top of the nine main episodes that we’re planning on doing. I think you will find it fascinating and a lot of fun to listen to, actually.

Tonight, though—

Fr. Stephen: And allow me to point out—

Fr. Andrew: Oh, yeah. Point it out.

Fr. Stephen: —when the shameless self-promotion is over that when I called out Richard Rohlin, he fled the country.

Fr. Andrew: That is actually true. Yeah, he’d actually never been outside of the country before.

Fr. Stephen: That just shows what kind of a guy he is, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: So tonight, though, for this episode, we’re going to be talking about confession. We’re continuing our series on the sacraments. Confession is the Christian sacrament of the forgiveness of sins. What exactly is it? What does it do?

Before we get to that, though, we really need to ask: What is forgiveness? So is it true—I’ve heard this—is it true that some Christians actually think that God can’t forgive people?

Fr. Stephen: Kinda.

Fr. Andrew: Kind of true, right. [Laughter] They wouldn’t say that. We should be, you know, fair, and say they would not say that, but what does that “kind of” mean?

Fr. Stephen: Well, part of what occasioned this phrasing was the exerpting from a YouTube conversation I had, by a person who I believe is a Muslim apologist of a less than a minute-long clip of me saying that God can forgive people, and this was posted as me making—me as a Christian priest—making a “startling admission!”

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] You’ve given away the farm!

Fr. Stephen: It was “admits.” Like admits, like I’d been trying to conceal this from people, that God can forgive people.

Fr. Andrew: Wow. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Right. But what occasioned this from him, I’m assuming—I don’t know him, but what I believe occasioned this from him and from some other folks in other interactions I’ve seen, and what occasioned me talking about it in the YouTube conversation—was that the people involved had been speaking to certain Christians who hold to a certain view of—from their perspective they would say how forgiveness works. So they wouldn’t say God can’t forgive sins, but the way they would define, theologically define, God forgiving sins to especially non-Christians does not sound like forgiveness.

Here’s what I mean by that. There is—and we’ve got to be honest, this is mostly some of—not all, by any means, but some of—our Protestant friends have this view that God has to punish sin, and not just in general.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. “All sin must be punished.”

Fr. Stephen: But that he has to punish sins, like the individual acts all have to be punished, because if he doesn’t punish every single sin, then he isn’t just: God isn’t righteous, he isn’t just if he fails to fully punish any sin. And so there are a lot of problems with this idea.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean…

Fr. Stephen: Logical, biblical… [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: To me the biggest one is the sense that God must do something, anything.

Fr. Stephen: God has to do something.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that God is subject to some kind of necessity, that there’s— I mean, frankly, that there’s something that God has to be obedient to.

Fr. Stephen: Right, that for God to be just he has to do this means that this category of justice or righteousness is somehow over above him.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean ancient people would have regarded something like that as being a god itself.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so if that’s true, then whatever that is or whoever put it in place is the actual God. [Laughter] So that’s a problem. But when the folks who hold this view, when you ask them, obviously when you ask them, they’re not going to say that. They’re going to say, “No, no, no, no. There isn’t something above God.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, no. “This is just who God is.”

Fr. Stephen: Right. “It’s God’s own nature. God’s own nature: God has to be true to his nature.” Again, using “has to” is weird in that case with “nature,” right, because nature’s just who and what you are. But God acts consistently with his nature. But that ends up amounting to a weird circular reasoning. So it’s like: “God is just, and therefore he has to punish every sin completely.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that’s about one particular version of justice.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and they would say, “Well, that particular version of justice is God’s nature.” But that’s why it becomes a weird circular argument, because let’s say, for the sake of argument, that God actually didn’t have to punish any sins at all. Let’s say God just forgave all sins, and he didn’t have to punish any of them. Then that would be “the way God is,” and so that would be justice.

Fr. Andrew: Right. It’s just a definitional argument is really what it is.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so “that’s the way God is because that’s the way God is” is not an argument. It’s just a statement. [Laughter] It’s a tautology.

Fr. Andrew: Well, the first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. So you could use that same argument to support any notion of God’s justice.

Fr. Andrew: “It’s just who he is.”

Fr. Stephen: “Based on his nature, that’s who he is.” But so beyond those logical issues is the fact that you end up with a God, then, who is merciless, because how can he—if he has to punish— Definitionally, one of the words—not the most common one; probably the second most common word in the New Testament that gets translated as “mercy”: the literal, lexical definition is “not punishing to the full extent.” So if a judge could sentence you to—I mean, I’m using a modern example, but if he could sentence you to 20 years in prison and he sentences you to ten, he is having mercy in that sense, by not punishing you to the full extent. So that word for mercy, God can’t have in this view at all. And the way that other term then gets interpreted, according to this view is: “Well, yes, God has to punish every sin and he has to punish it fully, but so he shows mercy to you by punishing someone else, namely Christ, for it.”

So in order to argue that God is just, because justice has been defined as punishing every sin completely, and so to make God fit that definition, you now have him letting a guilty person go free and punishing an innocent person and saying that that makes him both just and merciful, when really it kind of makes him neither.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah. Say, I can imagine, you know—my kids occasionally get in fights, and they occasionally do wrong things.

Fr. Stephen: Are they fighting about, like, etymologies?

Fr. Andrew: Um… not today… [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Okay.

Fr. Andrew: But we do— I mean, it is my house, so occasionally we do have conversations about… But, let’s say, if one of them decides to— Like, I have a fondness for what we refer to in my house simply as “fake cheese,” which is that sort of chemically produced Tostitos nacho cheese, and I bring it home usually expecting that I will, you know, eat some of it. Sometimes when I go to eat some of it, it is gone, already gone: someone has taken it without permission. So if I find out who took it without permission and I say, “Well, look, I’m going to have mercy on you—by punishing your brother instead. He has to go to his room for the rest of the day, or he’s grounded from playing with his friends,” number one, they would be dumbfounded. [Laughter] But, number two, that would seem so arbitrary and cruel, especially to the person who had to receive the punishment, and probably the person who didn’t receive it, the kid would be like, just kind of confused by the whole thing.

Fr. Stephen: And wondering when his turn was going to be.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right: when are you going to get it next time? Yeah, I mean, it’s not merciful, because there’s no— Like in that model where to be merciful is not to give the full punishment, that’s not what’s actually happening there. What’s happening there is part of the punishment or all of it is being given to someone else instead. The holding-back is not actually a thing within this model that we’re talking about.

Fr. Stephen: Right. So the Scriptures are pretty clear that the God who created the heavens and the earth, at least, is not merciless; in fact, quite the opposite.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Right.

Fr. Stephen: He is abundant and plenteous in mercy.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, way more merciful than any human being ever.

Fr. Stephen: And that creates yet another problem with that view, which is when we’re told by Christ, “Forgive as the Lord forgave you…”

Fr. Andrew: Whoa. [Laughter] I just thought about that.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. What does that mean?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that means the scenario in which I punished the kid who didn’t do anything, not the one who did something.

Fr. Stephen: Or does it just mean, as any of the folks who hold that view would say, when it comes to humans, they would say, “Well, no, you need to just forgive people; you don’t need to punish every sin committed against you completely and totally”?

Fr. Andrew: Meaning: “Just let it go. Just say it didn’t happen. Move on.”

Fr. Stephen: “Move on. Have more love in you for them than the pain they caused you.” That’s what we would say. But so are humans more merciful than God in that model? Humans can do that but God can’t? And if you’re going to say God can’t do that because it would be unjust, is he commanding us to be unjust? So that whole thing kind of falls apart, that whole understanding.

So the truth is—as shocking as it is apparently, to at least one Muslim apologist—God can and does and always has just forgiven people their sins. Now, the rest of this episode, we’re going to be kind of talking about how he has done that at different times and different places and how he does that today, and who is involved—as we talked about last time in the ordination episode, God works through people—through whom does God do this: that’s what we’re going to be talking about the rest of the episode. But we have to start with: Forgiveness is a thing. Forgiveness is a thing, and it’s not, again, a question of what sins was Christ punished for 2,000 years ago.

Brief note to our Protestant listeners who are not Calvinists: How does that even work for you? Like, I get how it works for a Calvinist, because God had already decided whom he was going to save and whom he wasn’t, so Christ was punished for the sins of those people he was going to save and not for the others, but for the rest of you folks who aren’t Calvinists, how does that work? Anyway. I’ll leave that to you. [Laughter] Or we can sort of abandon that view of atonement, sin, and punishment, and our lives get much better.

So the other piece that we kind of need to talk about here at the beginning is about the Torah, the Law, as St. Jerome would have it, although when he translated it that way—I think we’ve talked about this in a previous episode, that when he translated it that way, it didn’t have the same connotation—lex does not have the same connotation as “law” does today.

Fr. Andrew: Right, it’s much more like “ways,” like the Greek nomos.

Fr. Stephen: “Teachings,” yeah. “Custom, way of life.” You know how I hate to pick on people—

Fr. Andrew: Do you, though?

Fr. Stephen: —or at least how I hate to be seen picking on people… [Laughter] Because, you know, hey, Thrasymachus kind of had it right: As long as you appear just, you can act unjust and get the best of both worlds.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Well, good night, everybody!

Fr. Stephen: Many of the same folks who hold to the view of sort of justice and the punishment of sin and forgiveness that we just talked about also have another belief regarding the Torah, the Law, the commandments, in terms of what it’s for, what the purpose was, and that’s why it’s germane here when we’re talking about confession and forgiveness. And that’s that— The view that some folks have is that the commandments are— outline a way to earn your way to heaven.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and I think that this is mostly connected with our dispensationalist friends, where there’s this saying—

Fr. Stephen: Oh, there’s lots of folks. Definitely them, but also others.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it especially gets out into a lot of other groups as well. There’s this notion that, well, God set up this one method of salvation that he knew everyone was going to fail at so that the next method of salvation’s going to come on the scene with Jesus, and you don’t have to do much for that one, and it’s okay; it’s not about you failing or succeeding: Jesus is going to take care of it, essentially. This is the view I was raised with as Evangelical, although we weren’t especially dispensationalist.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and classical Reformed—not just Reformed like Calvinist, but Reformation Protestantism—is that Christ comes and fulfills the Law and earns—it’s the flipside of what we were just talking about—Christ earns heaven for himself by keeping the Torah perfectly.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, he gets it all and now he can kind of hand it out.

Fr. Stephen: And so he receives the punishment for our sins and he gives us the heaven that he earned.

Fr. Andrew: Almost like it’s a storehouse of merit… [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: And so the core problem here is that’s never what the Torah, the Law, the commandments—that’s never what they were.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it never says that anywhere in the Old Testament.

Fr. Stephen: It says that nowhere in the Old Testament; it says that nowhere in the New Testament. Jewish people have never believed that. They didn’t believe it in ancient Israel; they didn’t believe it in the Second Temple period. I have it on very good authority they don’t believe it now. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: And that’s why even there are some Jewish people who don’t actually believe in an afterlife.

Fr. Stephen: In heaven, eternal life, the resurrection.

Fr. Andrew: Which would be an impossible belief to hold if that’s what the Law was all about.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Right, but, yeah— or salvation, however you want to talk about “earning” salvation. It’s not about “earning” anything. There’s all kinds of basic levels that falls apart at, beyond the fact that it literally never says that, and, as we’re going to talk about here in a minute, the Scriptures say it was for something else. Just think for a second about the fact that most of the commandments of the Torah are directed at Israelites and only Israelites. So it is just way harder for Jewish people to get to heaven than anybody else? [Laughter] Is their road of salvation just way harder than anyone else’s? Gentiles just have to not eat blood and refrain from sexual immorality and idolatry.

Fr. Andrew: Wow. Yeah, because the Law includes commandments for them.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, but that’s about all you have to do. You can eat bacon; you can live, laugh, love. At that level, it doesn’t make sense either. But more importantly the Scriptures tell us what the commandments of the Torah were for and are for still, and that’s that they operated as sort of a sin-management system. Yahweh the God of Israel comes to dwell among his people. He is holy, therefore that is dangerous, because they are sinners. And so the Torah’s this system for managing the sins of the people. Part of that system is giving commandments of life, meaning: Here’s how to live your life to avoid sin, to avoid coming under the power of sin. Part of that, then, also, though, is what you do when you sin: how you deal with sin when it happens.

Fr. Andrew: Some of the commandments are— Like, you can’t keep all the commandments without breaking some of the commandments. There’s no way around it.

Fr. Stephen: St. Paul says this in Galatians when he says the Law was added because of transgressions. The Torah was given because of transgressions. If it were not for sin, it wouldn’t have been needed. Well, that means it can’t be about how to earn your way to eternal life or salvation.

So, yeah, keeping Torah—the idea of keeping Torah—is not just about not doing a whole list of bad things. That’s a small portion of—

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I think for a lot of people that their concept of it is: “Thou shalt not, thou shalt not, thou shalt not—” And as long as you “shalt not”—terrible grammar, I know—but as long as you “shalt not,” then you’ve got it covered. “Oh, you broke one!” “Sorry, loser.”

Fr. Stephen: “That’s it. Now you’re going to hell.”

Fr. Andrew: Right!

Fr. Stephen: “There’s nothing you can do about it, unless someone gets punished for that thing you did.” Again, that’s nowhere in Scripture. One of the things that really highlights this is that the Scriptures say that there are a bunch of people who kept the Torah perfectly, and even though they kept the Torah perfectly, they still needed Christ; they still needed a Savior. For example, one of these that people find surprising is David.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, the adulterer and murderer?

Fr. Stephen: Yes. [Laughter] And if you want to see where, you go to where, after the kingdom has been—most of the kingdom has been taken away from Solomon because of his sins… So Rehoboam becomes the king of Judah, which covers Judah, Benjamin, and most of the Levites. And then the other tribes, the northern kingdom of Israel, is being given to Jeroboam, son of Nebat, who was one of Solomon’s court officials. And God sends the prophet to Jeroboam, and the prophet says to Jeroboam, “If you keep all of my commandments and my statutes, just as my servant David did, I will also give you an everlasting dynasty.” Little record-scratch: David perfectly kept all of God’s commandments and statutes? Well, he did once you realize the fact that a whole bunch of those commandments and statutes are about what to do when you sin. So when David sinned, he repented. He did what the Torah prescribed. He did what he was called to do, and so he is, as far as God’s Torah is concerned—he had kept it perfectly. That didn’t mean never sinning; it meant doing what it said when he sinned.

By the way, I know there’s this weird meme going around that’s come out of certain Old Testament scholarly circles that the Torah only offered forgiveness for unintentional sins. Here’s an example where that’s obviously false: David committing adultery and murder was not unintentional or accidental or involuntary. And how do you involuntarily steal? [Laughter] “Oops, I robbed someone!” So anyway… But so David kept the Torah perfectly: still needed a Savior.

Some unnamed Gentiles kept the Torah. You can find that in Romans 2:14 specifically, but in Romans 2— In Romans 1… I’ll back up even a little further, real briefly. So St. Paul writes his epistle to the Romans, to the Christian community in Rome, after— For a couple of years the Emperor Claudius had expelled all of the Jews from Rome. This is actually mentioned in the book of Acts. This is how St. Paul ended up Ss. Priscilla and Aquila, is that they were some of the Jewish people who had been exiled from Rome. Then after a couple of years he let them come back. So the Christian church with only Gentile members had continued functioning in Rome, and now the Jewish members are coming back after being away for this time. So St. Paul writes the epistle to the Romans aimed at primarily helping them reintegrate into one community and not becoming these two separate— This is a constant struggle for St. Paul is he doesn’t want there to be a Jewish church over here and a Gentile church over there, sort of ethnically defined.

So in the first chapter of Romans, St. Paul’s kind of talking to the Gentile members of the Church, talking about all the former wickedness and depravity they were involved in back when they were pagans. But then in the second chapter he turns to the Jewish Christians and says, “Okay, yeah, well, you weren’t in the same boat—you had received the Torah, you had received the covenants, the commandments; you had received these things.” But then he turns around and says, “Okay, you received all these things. You received the Torah, but did you keep it? Did you really live by it, or did you violate it?”

As part of that argument, he says, “The Gentiles, these people who aren’t Jewish, there’s a bunch of them who have kept what’s required of them in the Torah without knowing about the Torah.” And he says, “They were like a law unto themselves; they were like a Torah themselves.” They were self-taught, if Torah means teachings. They were sort of self-taught. “They kept those things better than some of you did who read and studied it.”

So in the course of that argument and in the point that he’s trying to make, St. Paul says there were Gentiles who didn’t even know what the Torah was—didn’t know the Law—but who kept it. He’s not saying by that, “Well, I guess those Gentiles have earned their way— earned their salvation and don’t need Christ.” That’s not what St. Paul is saying. [Laughter] Again, see chapter one. His point is, again, about Torah-keeping.

But probably the most important example here, I think, is in Philippians 3. St. Paul, in sort of listing off his credentials from his former life as a non-Christian Pharisee in Philippians 3:6, says that he—this is before the road to Damascus; St. Paul’s writing after, but saying about himself before—that he was blameless in terms of the Law; he was blameless in terms of the Torah.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which— He’s not saying he never sinned, and he’s certainly not saying he does not need a Savior. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yes, because he goes on to say he was murdering Christians.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: He certainly isn’t saying it. In fact, he goes on to say that he counts all of that as rubbish, as garbage, compared to what he found in Christ.

Fr. Andrew: Right, because what you get from the Law is not the same thing that you get from Jesus Christ.

Fr. Stephen: Because it serves a different function. It’s a whole different thing than what Christ does. To sum that up, the commandment to repent is a commandment. You can’t say you’ve kept all the commandments unless you have also kept the commandment to repent.

Fr. Andrew: And you can’t repent unless you’ve sinned.

Fr. Stephen: And the person who repents is keeping the commandments.

Fr. Andrew: Yep, which, as a sidebar, some Christians have this notion that a Christian life is about not committing any sins, but you’re going to sin. It’s just the way that it is. Sorry, everybody: you’re going to sin. And, sure, we try not to commit sins, but the Christian life, a lot of it, actually is: what do you do when you sin. And doing that does not make you a bad Christian; it makes you—a Christian. [Laughter] That’s what being a Christian is about; it’s about this life of repentance—as a sidebar, although it’s not about “earning” salvation either, but we’ll get to that to some extent.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and it also, frankly— This idea that God gave a bunch of rules to the Israelites that he knew they would never be able to keep, just to make a point… Like, you can kind of make it work in this… A lot of times theological discussions end up in this weird, abstract place, this weird, ideological place, where it’s just ideas battling against each other, and if you try and put them into the real world, you quickly realize that the whole conversation makes no sense.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and this is one of the polemics sometimes that ex-Christians particularly have against Christianity, is: “Well, God set up all these rules that he knew no one could follow, and then he sends us to hell for not following them.” If that’s you, listener, if that’s what you think Christianity is—I don’t believe in that either! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Right, so over against this idea that ancient Israel was a giant Fallout Vault is the… What you’re saying when you say that—when someone says that, and you look at it as this abstract idea, and you say, “Well, yeah, I know it’s really hard for me. I mean, I sin, so, yeah, that seems to make sense to me.” Okay, but let’s take it outside the realm of ideas. Let’s take this into the world of—we’ll say again, because I don’t want to argue about it, 1500 years of history, 1500 years of actual humans, of humans being butchered, enslaved, disemboweled, taken into exile as judgment for having not kept rules that God gave them that he knew they couldn’t keep.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: That’s what you’re saying. That’s the God you’re talking about.

Fr. Andrew: Because that’s what happens to Israel.

Fr. Stephen: All to make a point, that point being: “Oh, you Gentiles, you should just believe in Jesus and not try to keep commandments.” This is bizarro-world when you take it outside the realm of ideas, when you take it outside of a theology textbook. It doesn’t make sense. And the bigger problem is, then, people try to structure their actual lives according to a set of ideas that don’t make sense in the real world, which is not something God has ever called us to do.

So when God gave the Torah, the world was already full of violence. It was full of vengeance-taking. It was full of consequences of sin and wickedness playing out in people’s lives and destroying them. The Torah doesn’t bring that into the world. The Torah comes into the world in order to bring forgiveness, in order to bring the presence of God into the world, safely, for the people in whose midst he’s living. It is, as St. John says in the Prologue to his gospel, “The Law came through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. Therefore we have received grace after grace.” The Law is grace; the Torah is grace: it is not the opposite.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because grace is the action of God in this world, and that comes from God. It is his act.

Fr. Stephen: And there are other things going on through the Torah, too, because the Torah is a way to practice holiness and it’s a way to live and be in the world—go listen again to our blessings and curses episode—where you have a life in this world that is blessed rather than cursed. That is not rewarded versus punished. This is consequences.

Fr. Andrew: It’s like keeping a garden. If you plant the particular plants that you have in the right way and water them in the right way and take care of them in the right way, they’re going to do well, but if you neglect them or you plant them too close together or you put it next to something it shouldn’t have or water it too much or not enough, then it’s going to do badly. It’s not that God is saying, “Ah! I see what you’re doing! I will smite your vegetables!” [Laughter] It’s that this is what happens when you live in a certain way.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and all of these things were still wrong before the Torah.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Yes, sin wasn’t invented by the Torah being given.

Fr. Stephen: God had not said, “Thou shalt not murder,” before Cain killed Abel. It was still murder. It wasn’t God saying it that made it a sin. It wasn’t God saying it that made it evil. It wasn’t God saying it that gave it consequences.

Fr. Andrew: It’s sort of written into the fabric of creation itself.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And so revealing—

Fr. Andrew: That’s why you can’t just revise morality, by the way.

Fr. Stephen: That’s right. And that’s why the Torah is teaching: it’s God revealing that, making that plain to people. The Law is given, as our liturgy says, as an aid, as a guide to aid us. Instead of being in the dark like the Gentiles, fumbling around, trying to figure out how to live their lives, Israel is told: “Here’s how to live in the world in a state of blessedness.” That’s a help; that’s a good thing. And the whole wisdom literature tradition, both inside and outside of the Old Testament Scriptures, is based on meditating on that, on working that out, in various practical ways in human lives.

The other thing that we’ve been hinting at already is that salvation is not—and we’ve talked about this a lot when we’ve talked about this before, but salvation is not just having your sins forgiven. It’s not returning to a state of innocence.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, nor is it just: “I get to go to heaven when I die instead of going to hell.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. Salvation is theosis. Salvation is becoming like God, which is what humanity was created to do before sin came into the world.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. The first commandments that God gave, to cultivate the earth and to fill it, are exactly the things that he himself had just been doing in Genesis 1. So he’s saying, “These are the works I did. I want you to continue my works. Become more like me.”

Fr. Stephen: And then, as now, sin is obviously an obstacle to that, but it’s an obstacle along a road that we’re still walking, that’s going in a positive direction. And that is salvation that’s accomplished in Christ.

Fr. Andrew: Which the Law was never set up for.

Fr. Stephen: Through his incarnation, through his death and resurrection. His death and resurrection is removing another one of those obstacles, death. Christ removes all the obstacles, but he also fulfills the path that leads to God.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. So, all of that lengthy throat-clearing done— [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Ahem.

Fr. Andrew: So what exactly is forgiveness, then?

Fr. Stephen: Forgiveness is just forgettin’ about stuff. [Laughter] No.

So when forgiveness is talked about in the Scriptures, it is talked about in the context of purification, being purified of uncleanness. Uncleanness, over and over again, starting in the Torah, is paralleled with—it wasn’t just that God was super concerned about mildew—

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I love that example every time. I’m sorry!

Fr. Stephen: —to have an ugly bathroom. It’s not that he’s super concerned about mildew. This mildew represents something. It’s not that the skin conditions called leprosy are like the worst diseases. It’s that it’s an image of how sin works.

Fr. Andrew: Well, and, I mean, I think for instance about 1 John 1:9, very famous verse where it says that if we confess our sins, God is faithful and just; he’s going to—and these are paired together—forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. There’s that purification as part of the whole action.

Fr. Stephen: Right, or Psalm 51, which is 50 in the Greek numbering: “Cleanse me with hyssop and I shall be clean. Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.” This is over and over and over again.

Fr. Andrew: “Though your sins be as scarlet…” Yeah, this washing connection goes along with forgiveness of sins everywhere.

Fr. Stephen: And you notice what that isn’t. This isn’t about crime and punishment. This is about purification, because, as we’ve said before many times on this show, sinning—committing sins—and sin does something to you; it changes you, and that needs to be healed and corrected. So today’s word of the day—so any time you hear it, scream real loud—

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Wow. That’s a throwback!

Fr. Stephen: —is agos.

Fr. Andrew: Agos.

Fr. Stephen: You probably won’t hear it that— Well, you’ll hear it a few times in this episode, but beyond that, I don’t know how many times you’ll hear it. But as a kid I actually did that… The rest of the day I would scream at my parents.

Fr. Andrew: Scream real loud after you watched Pee-Wee’s Playhouse?

Fr. Stephen: Oh yeah. In restaurants, it didn’t matter.

Fr. Andrew: Wow. I’m sure everyone else was watching it so they understood what you were doing. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Probably not. I tried to lead my younger sister into my same evils and indignities by screaming along with me. But anyway, agos is a Greek word, not to be confused with agios, although they’re spelled very similarly—the latter means “holy.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there’s one iota’s difference.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. [Grumbling] [Laughter] They are not— I’m going to go ahead and say they are not etymologically related. There are a couple of guys who argue they are, but I don’t think they are. And so this word has several usages, because of course meaning is derived from usage with words. One of them is “awe” or “reverence” or “fear,” and this is in the “fear of the Lord” sense.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, the fear of the Lord, the beginning of wisdom, all that stuff.

Fr. Stephen: Or in the Liturgy when we talk about the “dread mysteries of Christ.” We’re not talking about scary or macabre; we’re talking about this kind of sense of awe or reverence. It can also mean “impurity” or “uncleanness.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so it seems like— [Laughter] It’s like the English word “mullet” which can mean so many different things that don’t—

Fr. Stephen: Mostly it means a sweet haircut.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] —that don’t seem to have much to do with each other. I mean, on initial blush, “awe, reverence, and fear,” okay, and then “impurity or uncleanness,” like: But… What’s the relationship between these concepts? If you are impure or unclean, then the appropriate attitude for you to have as you approach God is awe, reverence, fear. So there’s—

Fr. Stephen: And that’s what instills that, that sense.

Fr. Andrew: So that’s what connects that together.

Fr. Stephen: Think of Isaiah during his vision.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, man of unclean lips.

Fr. Stephen: And the third use is related to the second one, and that’s an abomination. That’s the word that’s used to translate the word “abomination.”

Fr. Andrew: It’s really like a thing that’s thrown out or cast away.

Fr. Stephen: Polluted thing, yeah. And then it can also be used to refer to a sin-offering type of sacrifice, the sacrificial ritual that’s seen to remove the impurity and uncleanness.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so there’s this kind of this whole network of meanings that are all used in various ways with this one word.

Fr. Stephen: Right. Probably the most common place it shows up is in Second Temple Jewish literature, in a vast swath of it; it’s the word in Greek that’s used to talk about impurity, both ritual impurity in terms of the Torah and moral impurity. Once you understand that concept and the conceptual link in this word, it helps you understand a lot of texts in a new way in the Scripture, like “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” It’s not about “don’t be an atheist or you can’t know anything.”

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Right. No. The cool thing is you can kind of use a few of these different meanings there. So “awe, reverence, fear”—okay, so that sense of approaching God reverentially—but also the repentant act of sin-offering and sacrifice is the beginning of wisdom.

Fr. Stephen: So, yes: repentance. The idea of repentance being the beginning of wisdom, of a kind of humility being the beginning of wisdom.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. I’m reminded— I think it’s in On the Incarnation, St. Athanasius at one point says—and I might be slightly paraphrasing here, but he says unless one has a pure mind and is trying to imitate the lives of the saints, he can’t ever understand their teachings.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and also: “True love casts out fear.”

Fr. Andrew: So it casts out—

Fr. Stephen: It’s not just: “If you love God enough, you won’t be afraid of him any more.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it casts out that impurity, that uncleanness, the abomination…

Fr. Stephen: Right, that love purifies.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, cool!

Fr. Stephen: The love of God purifies. But so this is—that pollution, that impurity idea is closely related to—and I think we may have even talked briefly about the word back in the blessings and curses episode when we were talking about curse, that that purification that is forgiveness is the removal of that cursed state and of the stuff, the kind of residue of sin that kind of brings it about. This is transformational. In the same way that sin corrupts, forgiveness brings sort of new life and restoration and a new way of life.

This is part of why—and you see this especially in the gospels—healing and forgiveness are always closely linked together as being parallel with each other, that healing and forgiveness work in the same way. This is where you get St. John Chrysostom’s favorite famous saying, that the Church is not a courtroom; it’s a hospital. And a place where you especially see that in these terms, and to kind of wrap up what we’ve been talking about in this first half, in Matthew 8:16-17, which is a short little bit that gets skipped over really fast, because there’s sort of a story before that in Matthew 8 and a story after that in Matthew 8, and this is kind of a transitional two verses, but it’s actually very important in terms of the topic we’re addressing.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and I think another reason this gets skipped over probably is that it’s like: “Oh, yeah, Jesus did some more good. He’s doing good all the time; here’s some more good that he’s doing.” [Laughter] Yeah, so Matthew 8:16-17:

That evening, they brought to him many who were oppressed by demons, and he cast out the spirits with a word and healed all who were sick. This was to fulfill what was spoken by the Prophet Isaiah: “He took our illnesses and bore our diseases.”

Fr. Stephen: Notice there— So Jesus is doing all of these healings, and then there’s this quote from Isaiah. Real easy to read over that, but if you go look where that quotation from Isaiah is from, it’s from Isaiah 53. It’s the Suffering Servant passage. Some of the folks we were addressing at the beginning of this half, Isaiah 53 is a go-to. “Christ has borne our iniquities. By his stripes we were healed,” talking about: “See, this is saying he’s being punished for our sins.”

But that’s not how Matthew 8 reads it. St. Matthew reads this totally differently. St. Matthew reads this as this scripture being fulfilled. “He took our illnesses and bore our diseases.” Took them, bore them. This obviously doesn’t mean that when Christ healed someone who was paralyzed, he became paralyzed.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Right, he sort of absorbed their—

Fr. Stephen: Right, or that he healed a leper and got leprosy, like he took the leprosy for them. It’s clearly not what it means! It means he took them away. He bore them away. They’re gone. Since in Isaiah the healing language and the forgiveness of sins language is all mixed together, why—on what basis would you disagree with St. Matthew and say, “No, forgiveness of sins works entirely differently than the healing of diseases”?

Fr. Andrew: Right.

Fr. Stephen: Even though St. Matthew and Isaiah are both paralleling those things.

Fr. Andrew: How many times do we see in the gospels Jesus saying, “Your sins are forgiven you,” and he’s healing them of a disease while he does that? [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yes. “Which is easier: to say, ‘Your sins are forgiven’ or to say, ‘Rise up and walk’?” He just forgives people their sins.

Fr. Andrew: You’re admitting that? [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: He’s God. He can do that. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: He can do that. He’s not bound by any kind of necessity.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and you notice the objection of the rulers in the synagogue is not: “Wait a minute! All sin must be punished or God is unjust!” The objection of the synagogue rulers at that point is: “Who does he, thinking he can forgive sins? Only God can do that!”

Fr. Andrew: Right. Leading us to all ask that Christological question—

Fr. Stephen: —which means God can do that. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: “Wait, he’s God! Oh, that’s right.”

Fr. Stephen: And so partially here to wrap up the first half, just to bring back to mind some of the things—and we’re not going to laboriously go through it all again—a lot of the things we’ve talked about in terms of sin on the show that are then connected to this idea of forgiveness, as we’ve already mentioned at least, this idea of sin in the singular that St. Paul uses that goes all the way back to Cain. “Sin is crouching at your door. It wants to master you; you must master it.”

Fr. Andrew: The demonic force of sin.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and as St. Paul later says, “All things are permissible to me, but I will not be mastered by anything.” That sin is this power in the world, sins are passions because they make us passive, and when we yield to them and allow them to take control of us, that is transformative to us in the direction of the demonic, and we give the demonic a place in our lives. Therefore, on the flipside—this is why we’re summarily bringing it up again here—on the flipside that means that forgiveness represents being set free from that, being healed from that.

Fr. Andrew: Saved from it.

Fr. Stephen: Regaining freedom to allow for self-mastery and self-control in the future.

Fr. Andrew: Saved from and saved for, both at the same time. Yep. All right, we’re going to take a short break, and we’ll be back with the second half of The Lord of Spirits

Fr. Andrew: Thank you for that, Voice of Steve. This is the second half of The Lord of Spirits, our episode on confession. We’re not taking calls unless somehow you know that we’re recording right now. We’ll wait for you… Okay, you didn’t call. [Laughter] This is a pre-recorded show. Fr. Stephen and I are both in Texas on undisclosed official business. But welcome back!

Fr. Stephen: Does not involve smuggling barbecue sauce across the border.

Fr. Andrew: No, because, I mean, I spent a significant amount of my life in North Carolina, and there’s not such a thing as “barbecue sauce.” [Laughter] At least in eastern Carolina barbecue!

Fr. Stephen: There is in Texas.

Fr. Andrew: I know, I know, and, honestly, I have said this many times, but it’s true. I have room in my stomach for all of God’s barbecues—but there is a hierarchy. There is a hierarchy.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, I should say the greatest culinary achievement of my time in Texas was when I was at the prison—I’ll just leave it at that. Let people who don’t know speculate. [Laughter] Folks used to, when they were making a bit pot of chili, spray pepper spray into it for seasoning.

Fr. Andrew: Are you serious?

Fr. Stephen: I am dead serious.

Fr. Andrew: Ahh! Wow! That’s kind of horrifying!

Fr. Stephen: Pepper spray is just concentrated capsicum, the same stuff that’s in hot sauce; it’s just super concentrated.

Fr. Andrew: I hope so. But still… I mean…

Fr. Stephen: So hit a big pot with just a little, stir it up… Good chili! [Laughter] Rock your socks.

Fr. Andrew: It’s not food grade! [Laughter] Wow. I’m glad you were able to confess that sin right here on Lord of Spirits.

Fr. Stephen: I don’t know that that was a sin. Texans don’t think it was, clearly. That and having jalapeños in cornbread. That was an ingenious plan somebody came up with, too.

Fr. Andrew: Well, yeah, I mean, that’s…. Yeah, I’m on board with that.

Okay, so in our first half we basically established and talked about that God can, indeed, and does forgive sins. We kind of started moving a little bit toward how that works, and now in this half we’re going to talk about how God forgives sins. Let’s start with the Old Testament, right? That’s always a good place to start.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. Eventually this evening we will actually get to confession. Promise. As is our wont, that will be very late in the episode.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. I mean, you know, even though our episodes do tend to be… of leisurely length, the truth is that almost all of the Christian practices that we talk about are built on thousands of years—thousands of years!—of…

Fr. Stephen: So really, our episodes are very short compared to what they could be.

Fr. Andrew: Lightning fast! Little quick summaries.

Fr. Stephen: In the great cosmic scheme of things, an eyeblink.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: This is another one we’re not going to super-belabor, but we’re going to hopefully remind folks, mostly, and that is that through— obviously in the Old Testament, at least once you get to the patriarchal period—so at least for the vast majority of the Old Testament, and I would say pretty much the whole thing—that forgiveness primarily comes through sacrificial ritual. That is the primary sort of way that God works forgiveness in people’s lives. The part that we’re going to kind of review and not belabor, because we did three episodes on this, is that sacrifices come in the context of hospitality. Hospitality’s sort of central form, the main form of hospitality is the sharing of a meal, and so sacrifices are such meals, and those meals are celebrations and actualizations of restored or deepened communion and relationship between peoples. So if I invite you to sit down for a meal, it might be we’re reconciling; it might just be we’re already good friends and we’re going to become closer friends by sharing some more time together.

The important part for us here tonight, with our topic tonight, to reiterate, is that the meal part of the sacrifice, that’s after the fact of forgiveness.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s not that if you give God this— If you say, “Okay, God, we’re going to have a meal. I hope you’re going to come and forgive me,” that’s not what’s going on.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and it’s also not— There’s a difference between a ritual sacrifice and ritual magic.

Fr. Andrew: Right, because ritual magic is: “If I do this, then I will get this result. If I do this, then God must respond in the following way.”

Fr. Stephen: Right, and even among pagans, by the way, there was a distinction between ritual sacrifice and ritual magic, in that the pagans understood that with a regular sacrifice, the god could tell you to buzz off; whatever they were sacrificing to still had free agency, whereas with magic they didn’t. But God had to reiterate this, and he reiterates it over and over again in the Hebrew Bible, in the Old Testament, that this doesn’t work by magic; that if the sacrifice isn’t following on repentance, then it doesn’t do anything.

Fr. Andrew: There’s all these places where God says, “Your sacrifices are not acceptable to me, and it’s because you’re unrepentant.”

Fr. Stephen: Right. He literally gets to the point where he says to the prophets, “Just stop. Stop offering sacrifices, because this whole ‘I’m going to live however I want to live and then go and offer sacrifices so that I’m good, in the clear,’ sort of that mobster-religion kind of thing…” [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Weregild. It’s weregild!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, you’re going out as a mobster and you’re having people whacked and engaging in all kinds of graft and corruption and everything, but then you go to church on Sunday…

Fr. Andrew: Pay off the right government officials.

Fr. Stephen: ...and receive Communion! [Laughter] Yeah, and it’s sort of okay then. That dog don’t hunt. And a place where you really see this after-the-fact nature is when Christ says, “If you’re bringing your gift to the altar, and you realize that someone has something against you, leave it, go be reconciled with your brother, and then come back—”

Fr. Andrew: And then

Fr. Stephen: “—and make your offering.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and this makes sense just on a kind of human relational level, too. If you are going to share a meal with somebody that you’re in an antagonism with, you need to make that antagonism right before the other person’s even going to be willing to go to lunch with you.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. [Laughter] So this is an after-the-fact— And by the way, Christ talking about bringing gifts to an altar kind of implies that someone reading that text would have an altar they were bringing gifts to.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, sacrifices in the New Testament. How about that?

Fr. Stephen: Yes, but so it’s afterward. So in the case of the— within the Torah, within the functioning of the Torah, the fact of after-the-fact, of what you were doing, was generally restitution. Most sins involved some kind of restitution. “I killed your goat; I’m going to give you a goat. I did this amount of damage to you; I give you the money. I stole from you; I give it back, plus four times more.” So there’s this restitution that’s made, and then after the restitution is made: then the meal, then the sacrifice, then the ritual that sort of seals it.

But this means that sin is being treated not as an individual, personal, private matter. The problem is not between you and God only. And I know there is someone out there who, as soon as I said that, they were already typing a social media post somewhere, to say, “Well, wait a minute. In Psalm 51 (or 50 in the Greek), David says: Against you and you only have I sinned.” There’s somebody doing that right now. Stop typing. Think for a second. Is a literal interpretation of that true?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, there are other hurt parties involved.

Fr. Stephen: He didn’t sin against Uriah? He didn’t sin against Bathsheba? And he’s not denying that. In his great psalm of repentance, David is not denying that he didn’t hurt anyone else.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s a kind of emphatic. “Only” gets used in the Scriptures as a kind of emphatic.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, this is a poetic description. So stop typing. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Don’t “at” us, bro.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. The point is—and that’s true, because sin always involves hurting others. Even if you sin completely by yourself, you hurt others in ways that you may not immediately realize. If you are a married person or a person in a relationship, just to give an example, and you secretly watch pornography, your spouse or the other person may never find out about it, may never know, but the damage that sin has done to you will affect your relationship with that other person.

Fr. Andrew: Yep, because it changes you.

Fr. Stephen: And therefore it will affect them.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it changes who you are.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, so there are always consequences and ripple effects. No man is an island. So there is always restitution in the sense of repair and healing that has to happen beyond just you yourself in order to make things right. And repairing that damage within yourself and with other people is what needs to happen for the forgiveness to happen that’s going to be celebrated in the sacrifice.

Another example—and I know I overuse this example—is, again if you’re a married person and you go and commit adultery; you cheat on your spouse. You can’t just come home and say, “Well, you know what, I’ve— Metanoia, the word for repentance in Greek, means to think again, and I’ve rethought, honey, and what I did was wrong and I will never do it again. So just go ahead and forgive me.”

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah, try that—no, don’t try that!

Fr. Stephen: Don’t try that! Because that’s not going to work. And neither is, by the way, “Well, I confessed to God that I’ve committed adultery, and he’s forgiven me, so now you forgive me, too, honey.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah…

Fr. Stephen: That’s not going to work.

Fr. Andrew: Or, you know, as Ulysses Everett McGill says in O Brother, Where Art Thou, “It might put you square with the Lord, but the State of Mississippi can be a little more hard-nosed.” [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: So this is a reality of restitution, of repairing the damage done. And we see a positive example of this really clearly in the example of Zacchaeus. So Zacchaeus is a tax collector. Nobody likes the IRS, but tax collectors were way worse! He’s a Roman collaborator, siding with them against his own people, helping them oppress them. He’s extorting money from people, robbing them, quite literally. That’s how he makes a living, a very good one.

So Christ goes to eat with him, and Christ is going to end up saying, “Today salvation has come to this household,” but he doesn’t do that when he walks in the door. He could’ve, because he’s Christ; he is salvation: he could have said that when he walked in the door of Zacchaeus’s house, but he doesn’t. And this story shows us something for that reason. He says that after Zacchaeus has stood up publicly, in front of the other people there, in front of the community, whom he’s been sinning against, and he says, “Half of what I have I’m going to give to the poor, and everything I stole I’m going to pay back five times.” And it’s after he says that publicly to the community that Christ says, “Today salvation has come to this house, because this, too, is a child of Abraham.”

Fr. Andrew: Because a change has been made.

Fr. Stephen: Now he is a child of Abraham. Now salvation has come, because of that restitution.

And then another sort of note in terms of how this works in sacrificial offerings is because we made the point that forgiveness is about purification. You can see this element of purification distinguishable from the element of the sacrificial meal in that purification takes place through what you might call the by-products of a sacrificial offering.

Fr. Andrew: Sort of given off.

Fr. Stephen: Right, exuded. [Laughter] So if you’re offering incense, that’s smoke. It’s the smoke that has this purificatory quality, as we’ve talked about before on the show. With an animal sacrifice, it’s blood; it’s the blood of the animal, which expressly is not eaten. It’s separated from the meal, but that blood has that purificatory quality, i.e., on the Day of Atonement. And the fact that that particular animal or that particular incense has been offered sacrificially is what makes that by-product—the blood or the smoke—sacred, holy, and gives it this purificatory effect, tied into the offering.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s not that the thing itself, that blood is purifying or that smoke is purifying; it’s that in the context of it being offered as a sacrifice, it has that effect. It’s not a medicine, so to speak, in the sense of “Swallow this pill and it’ll all be good.” It’s within the relationship with God.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and this is touching upon some of the things we said in our episode on the Eucharist. This is why we have body and blood: body, participating in the sacrifice; blood, purification of the person from sin.

So now we’re going to talk to the rock.

Fr. Andrew: So, Dwayne Johnson, if you’re listening, please call in.

Fr. Stephen: Rock “the Dwayne” Johnson, if you feel a twitching and raising of the eyebrow…

Fr. Andrew: I don’t remember if we’ve ever talked about him on the show before, but I do have to point out a little sort of local pride, is that he went to high school in nearby Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. So we claim him as a Lehigh Valley-ite—I don’t know that that’s the right word. I don’t know!

Fr. Stephen: Allentown was a wrestling hub back in the day, in the territory system.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s amazing. So, Dwayne, call in… All right, well, we just edited out the 20 minutes we waited for him to call. He never called!

Fr. Stephen: Shockingly.

Fr. Andrew: I know.

Fr. Stephen: I thought his Rock-sense would tingle—

Fr. Andrew: Disappointingly.

Fr. Stephen: —eyebrow would rise, and he would pick up a phone and call us, but…

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so we’re even going to have to talk about some other Rock.

Fr. Stephen: I even like Black Adam. I mean, come on, man. [Laughter] Not the actual Rock we were talking about, go figure. So we are talking about Moses and the rock, which may or may not have been one rock, but we won’t go down that rabbit-trail now.

Fr. Andrew: And may or may not have been the name of your first band. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: There are two instances… “Everybody wants a rock to tie a piece…”

Fr. Andrew: Hey, there we go!

Fr. Stephen: And I am largely cribbing this understanding of these stories from a now-departed man who is probably one of the people most responsible for me being here talking to you today—

Fr. Andrew Say, wait, William Shatner isn’t dead, is he?

Fr. Stephen: —but whom I will not identify. He is not; he is 91 years young.

Fr. Andrew: I was going to say, it’s not William Shatner, all right. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: So, no, this is more directly responsible than that. There is this first episode where Moses is going to bring water from the rock. The details of this sometimes get lost in the telling of the story, sort of the Sunday school version. I’m not going to ruin the Sunday school version of it, but I’m just going to add to it and nuance it a little, so I’m being nicer today. But people, remember, they don’t have water. They’re in the desert; they’re in the wilderness. The people start grumbling again, and in their grumbling they decide what they really ought to do is kill Moses and go back to Egypt, because they had it better there.

And so in the midst of that, Moses and God are speaking to each other, and God says that the way he’s going to handle this, and what happens is, that we’re told Yahweh comes and stands on the rock. So this is another one of those episodes where God apparently has a body and stands somewhere (cf. previous episodes). And the Moses is told to strike the rock with his rod.  Moses’ rod, as we’ve talked about as recently as last episode, was this symbol of authority and of judgment. So the idea here in this image is an image of God voluntarily taking upon himself the hatred, the judgment, the slander directed against him by the people, and in return giving them water to drink, giving them life in return.

This is taken to be, in the New Testament, St. Paul being the most obviously place, where he says, “The rock was Christ”—you can’t get more obvious than that—to be Christ. Not just an image of Christ, but first of all that that was Christ who was standing on the rock, but that this image of Christ taking upon himself the scorn, the hatred, the judgment of the people. And one of the things that often gets left out is there’s so much… And I understand why there is, because of the way in which texts have been weaponized against people, especially in western Europe but not only in western Europe, over the centuries—but over who’s responsible for Christ’s death, that we kind of lose out on the fact of the whole point of having both the Jewish leaders and Pilate there emphasized in the gospels is that it’s the Jews and the Gentiles; that it’s everybody, in agreement. But Christ takes all of that upon himself and gives life in return.

But then there’s this second episode, at the other end of the wilderness journey, and we won’t go down this rabbit-hole, but St. Paul refers to a tradition in the passage we just quoted in 1 Corinthians; he says that not only was the rock Christ, but the rock followed them in the wilderness, so it’s the same rock for St. Paul and for a lot of other Jewish writers in that period. But there’s a second episode with the rock—and hi, Pete Enns, if you’re listening— there’s this second episode with the rock, and in this case, where the people are grumbling again, God tells Moses to go and speak to the rock.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, but he gets mad, and he hits it instead.

Fr. Stephen: Right, he’s mad at the people; he’s kind of mad at God. And he strikes the rock again with his rod, meaning he, in his anger, joins the people in sort of casting this judgment at God. That’s why this is such a serious sin on Moses’ part, that it would be that he would not be able to enter the promised land because of it, that he would not get to because of it. It wasn’t just “I gave you instructions and you didn’t follow the instructions.” This is why it’s treated so seriously.

The idea there, if we understand again the rock to be Christ, is that Christ suffered and died once; now he offers forgiveness when we speak to him, and that this is part of that understanding that really gets fleshed out, for example, in Hebrews: this shift from repeated sacrifice to participation in the one sacrifice of Christ, and Christ then, his intercessions as High Priest. This is one little piece in the background of that.

But it’s important to note, as we get ready to move into the third half, where we will finally actually talk about confession, that making restitution entailed confession. So it’s not laid out like “This person must go and admit what they did and then make restitution”; it just talks about making restitution, but the confession part is implied. Like, someone has robbed you, I show up at your house and give you five times what was stolen, you’re going to kind of figure out I’m the guy who took it. [Laughter] You’re sort of admitting it by making restitution. You can’t really have one without the other.

The reason we want to reiterate that here as we go on is that confession, that we’re now going to move into talking about, also entails restitution.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, you have to make things right.

Fr. Stephen: That, again, like in that adultery example, just admitting what you did all by itself does not fix the situation. These two things always go together. But what doesn’t have to be there is more suffering. Now, sin causes suffering. When you sin against someone, you probably are causing them to suffer. The consequences of that may cause you to suffer. But infliction of suffering does not—of more suffering, beyond that, does not make it better.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and there’s no point in any of the commandments in the Old Testament, for instance, or anywhere in the New Testament, where it says—and correct me if I’m wrong with this, because I’m not super certain about what I’m about to say—but there’s no point where it says, “And let him be flogged” or “Let him be tortured.” There are things that require someone be removed from the community, whether through exile or death…

Fr. Stephen: Right. Now there is a practice that develops of lashes being given at synagogues, but that’s not prescribed in the Torah.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, God doesn’t say to do that.

Fr. Stephen: And in part this is getting back to where we were at the beginning of the first half, in that there’s no punishment required, and that punishment, at any rate, would not involve the inflicting of suffering. So you never see animals that are going to be sacrificed being tortured, being treated cruelly: that in itself would be a sin. And so the restitution we’re talking about is not whipping yourself, self-flagellation; it’s not degrading yourself; it’s not inflicting harm on yourself. It is about fixing the harm you’ve already done through sin. That’s what restitution is.

And so, brief note to my fellow priests. We’re going to talk more about—this is part of our segue—we’re going to talk in the third half about confession as it’s practiced in the Orthodox Church now—well, from the New Testament until now—but don’t— My fellow priests, don’t make things into punishments through confession. Here’s what I mean by that. Sometimes—and this isn’t always the priest’s intent, but sometimes people will read whatever they’re told to do after confessing a sin as being a punishment anyway.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because this is just the way that our culture tends to think.

Fr. Stephen: And so if you go and—sorry to our Roman Catholic friends, because I know this is super common, but if you for example say, “Go say so many prayers, because you did Thing X,” well, number one, you’ve made prayer a punishment. I don’t know that that’s the message that we want to send. And once they’ve said that many prayers, it’s like: “Whew! Good, now I’m done with that whole praying thing. Won’t have to do that again until I screw up.” [Laughter] That’s not good. Or, from my perspective, though this may just be my personal perspective, even worse: “Go and read so much of the Bible every day for a certain period of time, because you did this thing.” And it’s like: “Oh, great, making reading the Bible a punishment.”

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah, I mean, there’s… Or occasionally my kids will say something like: “Do I have to go to church?” particularly if they’ve just lost their minds, and my wife will sometimes say, “Bring them to vespers” or whatever, and they’ll like: “I’m being punished by being sent to vespers!” Like: “No, that’s not… You’re not being punished. I go to vespers and no one’s punishing me! I love it! No, you get to do this.” And that’s not ironic. That’s not ironic. This is how we’re supposed to be living, so let’s move into—

Fr. Stephen: This is going to help you do better.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Let’s move into where we’re supposed to be. Exactly. Just a brotherly admonition. I think mainly—

Fr. Stephen: And to everyone else: Don’t take things as punishments.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. And I think mainly the main thing— I mean, you and I are both confessors. I think the main thing especially is to— I try to communicate to people: “Look, this is to help. This is not to punish. This is not because you did something wrong and now you have to do this onerous thing. No, this is—” And if it’s too much; if it’s too much for that person, then the question might be like: Well, what is going to bring them into the good habits? So, yeah, it’s supposed to be healing and beneficial, just like even taking medicine is not a punishment; it’s for health.

All right, we’re going to take another short break, and we’ll be right back with the third half of The Lord of Spirits!

Fr. Andrew: Welcome back, everyone. It’s the third half of The Lord of Spirits, and this is a pre-recorded episode, so we’re not taking any calls this time around. We’re talking about confession. We just—

Fr. Stephen: You know, some people complain that the show has three halves.

Fr. Andrew: I know.

Fr. Stephen: And I must point out, as Aristotle said, everything that comes in threes is perfect.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I know. I mean, it’s… We could call them three thirds, but—

Fr. Stephen: No.

Fr. Andrew: I don’t know…

Fr. Stephen: Because a half is more than a third.

Fr. Andrew: That’s right, exactly, and I really feel like people are getting a show and a half, at least. And there was that one episode we did that had four halves. That was a double show.

Fr. Stephen: That is true. That did happen once. That’s because we’re Orthodox, so for every rule there’s an exception, right? There’s a Sunday of the Cross, if you will. There are like five liturgy nerds who just got excited about that reference.

Fr. Andrew: “Wait, wait! I’m working this out! I’m working this out!” [Laughter] We know who you are. We’re happy for you.

All right, so in the first half, we talked about the fact that God can and does indeed do for—does forgive, and then the second half…

Fr. Stephen: He does a forgiveness.

Fr. Andrew: He does a forgiveness. He did a forgiveness! [Laughter] And in the second half, we talked about how that is enacted, especially in the Old Testament, but of course edging into the New Testament, but now we’re going to go fully into the New Testament and speak about the way that forgiveness is given by God, starting then and continuing on, now, in the Orthodox Church, even here in 2023.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and not only how but through whom.

Fr. Andrew: Through whom, yes! This is where it gets uncomfortable for some people.

Fr. Stephen: And in part the answer is: Through youm.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Wow, you almost spoke Lithuanian!

Fr. Stephen: Oh, really?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Jums.

Fr. Stephen: Does that count as speaking in tongues?

Fr. Andrew: Jums is the second-person plural accusative maybe? I don’t know.

Fr. Stephen: Or I could have been speaking Pennsylvanian and gone for y’uns.

Fr. Andrew: Well, that’s western Pennsylvania. Y’uns, yinz, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: They don’t count?

Fr. Andrew: Eh, I mean, it’s the other Pennsylvania. What can I say?

Fr. Stephen: Is there like an East Coast, West Coast rap beef within the state of Pennsylvania itself?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, pretty much.

Fr. Stephen: Okay.

Fr. Andrew: Out here you will hear some people—not everybody, but some people—actually say youse. That’s the plural out here, youse. Occasionally you hear “youse guys,” but youse.

Fr. Stephen: That’s more Jersey. That’s Jersey bleeding over.

Fr. Andrew: Right, I know. I’m only 25 miles from New Jersey. But, yeah, you would think also there would be a divide with the Eagles on this end and the Steelers on the other end, but it actually is not so much east-west. The Steelers seem to have actually most of the state, and then sort of the southeast is the Eagles, roughly, but I think the line runs through the Lehigh Valley. But, yes—

Fr. Stephen: A lot of that I think is related to the win-loss records of the respective teams also, to be fair.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] It’s probably true.

Fr. Stephen: Sort of like the Mets and the Yankees, you know.

Fr. Andrew: It’s true.

Fr. Stephen: Well, as far as your east-west feud goes, hit ‘em up. [Laughter] So: confession in the New Testament.

Fr. Andrew: Right.

Fr. Stephen: The first place, as you read through the New Testament, that you get to, one of the most important places this is talked about, is in Matthew 18. This is— The part that we’re going to talk about is within a passage that’s well-known in a lot of circles, in that it’s a passage that sort of talks about what gets called “church discipline,” that if there’s someone who’s sinning in the Church, this is the part that is more well-known, that you should first go to them individually, privately, then bring someone else to them, and then if you still can’t work it out, that you bring it before the whole Church. That part people are very familiar with. But in the midst of that, there’s a statement that kind of gets glossed over, but is probably the most important part of it.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so verse 18, and I’m going to go ahead and use Southern American plural rather than throw myself into the epic Pennsylvania feud of the second-person plural.

Truly I say to y’all: Whatever y’all bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever y’all loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, and you used “y’all” there to point out that the “you” is plural.

Fr. Andrew: Plural, that’s right. [Laughter] As opposed to “all y’all,” which is what I like to call the pervasive plural, meaning every single last one of you.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. All y’all.

Fr. Andrew: All y’all.

Fr. Stephen: So the idea here is that—and this is within that passage—whatever you as a group—the community, the Church, ekklesia the assembly—whatever you-all bind on earth will be bound in heaven; whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven. So this means that—there is obviously implied here that there is an agreement, that there is a mutual agreement that is taking place, and that this has the effect of the forgiveness or not of sin.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and I mean, the reason why I think this is uncomfortable for some Christians is that, as Christ says here, whatever you—and he’s talking to the apostles—whatever you bind on earth is going to be bound in heaven, whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. In other words, that their action has a corresponding action in the kingdom of God, and that they’re connected and they’re not separable. I think the problem that some people would have with this is: “Well, my forgiveness is not in the hands of some person, some human person!” But, I mean, you can’t get around it. Jesus is actually saying this, and the way that some people try to get around it is they’ll say, “Well, you know, that was for the apostles, and then kind of… not, after that.” But then that sets up another set of questions, like: “Well, why would Jesus give that to just them, and then it just stops when the last one dies?” I don’t know.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and why would St. Matthew bother recording it, then, if it wasn’t going to mean anything to later generations at all? But also you have the basic problem of the context, because this is talking about in the context of the Church. You’re bringing this issue with this brother or sister in Christ before the whole Church. And, in fact, our German friends used the fact that this passage is talking about the Church to say that Jesus couldn’t have possibly said it, because it’s about the Church.

Fr. Andrew: Right, because their theology means that there’s not a Church at this point, and so therefore he couldn’t be talking about the Church.

Fr. Stephen: Right, but it seems very clear to pretty much all readers who aren’t trying to get around it that this is talking about how things are going to be done in the Church. Now, it’s ridiculous that Jesus didn’t say it, because, you know, these are folks who want to say that Jesus is just a human, didn’t know the future, or couldn’t have possibly have predicted that there would be a Church. And they’re also ignoring the fact that ekklesia was also used for the assembly in the Old Testament, to mean Israel.

Fr. Andrew: There is this Greek translation of the Old Testament that uses the word… Yeah. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: So, you know, our 19th-century German friends are wrong as usual, but the point just being this is very clearly the text associated with the Church. [Laughter] And so what this means is that—is not that, independent from God, some kind of Church authority, which isn’t what’s being talked about here—it’s talking about the Church as a whole—or even the Church as a whole controls your eternal destiny. That’s not what it’s talking about; that’s taking it in the wrong direction. What it’s saying is that, as we were talking about last time in the episode about ordination, God works through people in the world. And God forgives people—it’s God who’s doing the forgiving—but he forgives people through the community of the Church. That is where that forgiveness is received and experienced, is within the community as a whole.

Fr. Andrew: Yep, can’t get away from that communal aspect. It’s not just “me and Jesus.”

Fr. Stephen: Yes, as opposed to: “Me off by myself, and whatever sins I may or may not have committed is nobody’s business at the church. In fact, every time I go to the church, I’m going to dress as nicely as possible and pretend as hard as I can that I am completely sinless, because otherwise they’ll all judge me.” We’ll get back to that later. [Laughter]

So it’s in this communal context, and so, because forgiveness comes in that communal context of the community, confession takes place in that same community context. Martin Luther’s favorite book of the Bible, the epistle of St. James, talks about this. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, St. James writes this:

Therefore, confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another, that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working.

Again, that’s the ESV, so you may be used to: “The prayer of a righteous man availeth much,” which is the way it is in my head.

Fr. Stephen: Or “...is powerful and effective.”

Fr. Andrew: Yes, right.

Fr. Stephen: I think that’s the NIV maybe, “never-inspired version.” [Laughter] But so, notice, it’s “confess your sins for one another and pray for one another”: that’s given as a command. Why do you do that? “So that, in order that you may be healed.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s conditional.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. That is the means by which you will experience healing from your sins. And notice again: healing is what’s being used, not juridical terminology. Healing is used, but the way that happens is through confessing your sins to one another within the Christian community.

Another example—there are a lot more we could do, but another example that’s good, in Acts 19:18.

Fr. Andrew: “Also, many of those who are now believers came, confessing and divulging their practices.” [Laughter] That’s a colorful way of putting it.

Fr. Stephen: Okay, so in case there’s any ambiguity about what confessing means: “divulging their practices.” Divulging, like secrets, like “This is the stuff I’ve been doing secretly.” They’re now making public and confessing.

And the reality is—we’re not running through every single passage; you can if you want to.

Fr. Andrew: I was just going to add, by the way, if you read the next couple verses after that, in case you wonder what those “practices” they’re divulging are, it talks about—

Fr. Stephen: Magic.

Fr. Andrew: —magic and burning their magical books and all this kind of stuff. They’re confessing the occult in this particular case! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yes, they had some practices going on! But we could keep going on with these examples, and you can do this study yourself, but no one in the New Testament confesses their sins to God privately. There’s not a single example.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so if you believe in sola scriptura, and especially if you’re the kind that says it’s not written in the Scripture you’re not allowed to do it, then you have kind of an issue there. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Right, because the New Testament pattern, the biblical pattern, is public confession within the Church community. That’s what we’re to do regarding sin, according to the Bible.

Fr. Andrew: And the word itself, the basic sense of the word—and I’m not just talking about etymology here, although it does kind of work out that way—but the word itself means— Exomologesis is to proclaim something out publicly.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, and if you do a— If you want to go the word study route and do it on that word in the New Testament, you will notice something. It’s that there are two ways that that word is used. One of them is confessing sin; the other one is confessing Christ.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and you’re not confessing—

Fr. Stephen: “We confess with our mouth that Jesus is Lord.”

Fr. Andrew: You don’t just say, “Well, I privately, within my heart, confessed Christ.” [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: “If he who confesses me before men…” [Laughter] So in every case where it’s talking about—in that usage of confessing Christ, it always means publicly, vocally. And so to say, “Oh…” And then, as in the examples we gave, in a whole bunch of cases, it clearly means that about confessing sins also, publicly, verbally. “But, well, there’s a few cases I can find here that are ambiguous, so I’m just going to assume in those handful of ambiguous cases that it means something completely different than all the other usages, and that here it means ‘privately in my heart at home by myself’…” That’s not a very good argument.

Fr. Andrew: And we should say that there’s— We’re not saying you should not confess your sins to God in your private prayers. We’re not saying that, but that’s secondary to this.

Fr. Stephen: I might be kind of saying that.

Fr. Andrew: Oh really? Oh. Okay, well. [Laughter] I mean, there are some of the prayers—

Fr. Stephen: Let me be an extremist. Let me be an extremist!

Fr. Andrew: You’re such a rigorist, Fr. Stephen, I swear. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yes. Oh, no, I’m a radical!

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah, but I think the main thing I would say is— I mean, there are, like for instance, daily prayers include prayers that are about confessing sins and so forth.

Fr. Stephen: Right, but.

Fr. Andrew: But it’s secondary. It’s secondary.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And they’re mostly asking for healing. But, well, let me put it this way. I don’t know that that’s actually confessing. I don’t think that that’s the verb we should use for it, because part of what’s going on here is: God already knows.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, of course.

Fr. Stephen: You’re not giving him new information. And you already know, because you did it! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Hey, don’t accuse me, man! I know what I did.

Fr. Stephen: It was you!

Fr. Andrew: I know what I did.

Fr. Stephen: J’accuse! [Laughter] Anyway… Whereas the practice of publicly and verbally saying out loud what it is that we did is a different thing. It has a different function than: I who already know thinking, I guess, to God who already knows. That’s not the same thing; it’s a different thing, and that other thing may have value, too. We won’t get into that. Sure, that other thing has some value, but that’s not confession in the same sense. Verbalizing, putting it out there, in some kind of public, at least with someone else there, is a different thing. It’s a different experience when you do it, as someone who’s done both. And it accomplishes different things. So, yeah, I wouldn’t say the other—I’m not saying the other thing has no value; I’m saying maybe the best thing to do is use a different verb for that.

Fr. Andrew: Okay.

Fr. Stephen: Talk about praying for forgiveness on one hand and talking about confession on the other hand as a public act.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, so we say it’s public, but the way that we actually practice it these days is not someone standing up in front of everybody and saying, “Okay, everybody…”

Fr. Stephen: Although that’s how it was done in the early Church, we must say, and that’s what the New Testament reflects, is what was actually done for the first few centuries.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and, honestly, I think even now, even though this is not sort of the normal way we do it, I’m not suggesting that parishes take up this practice, but there are some kinds of sins that someone needs to stand up and say to everybody, “This is what I did.” There’s some kinds of—

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, like Zacchaeus.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right. That there’s—

Fr. Stephen: Because he had sinned against all those people.

Fr. Andrew: And it’s interesting, at least in American society, that’s kind of the one thing that public people almost never do. They may say something like, “I apologize if anyone was hurt.”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, oh yeah.

Fr. Andrew: That kind of nonsense.

Fr. Stephen: They’re professional apologizers, but it doesn’t exactly ring true.

But let me be a radical again. I think it would be great if we brought it back, but I don’t think we ever will.

Fr. Andrew: No, I can’t see that happening. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: And one of the things that’s cemented to me that we never will is I actually did an experiment once.

Fr. Andrew: Oh?

Fr. Stephen: And so if you were one of the people who ended up being part of my experience, meaning you live in Charleston, West Virginia, and you’re listening to this, I apologize. Kind of. I mean— I don’t totally regret doing it, but I’m sorry that you were a part of the experiment, if you were and you’re listening to this.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Wow. This is going to be the part that’s going to be excerpted and go viral.

Fr. Stephen: I’m sure. There was a point when I was at the cathedral in Charleston where I was going to talk about confession, and I’m like: “Need to encourage people to go to confession.” So I just gave my confession in a homily to the congregation.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, wow. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: I just did it. And… I felt a certain rush while doing it, but there were a lot of people looking at me awkwardly. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: I can imagine.

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: I know many of those people.

Fr. Stephen: And shifting in their pews.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, yes, I’ll bet!

Fr. Stephen: It’s a church that has pews. Yeah. And so… I can’t honestly say I totally regret doing it, but—

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I thought you were going to say you made other people—

Fr. Stephen: —I feel bad for the people I did it to! Let me put it that way. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: I thought you were going to say you made other people do it, so this is not quite the same level.

Fr. Stephen: No. No, no, no, no, no.

Fr. Andrew: Whew.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. So that happened once. [Laughter] But the reason I think it would be wonderful if we got back to it is that one of the things I encounter in hearing people’s confessions is that everyone who comes to me for confession thinks they’re the most, like, hideous, malodorous pervert in the world.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: And just they’re wicked and evil and everyone else in the church is so holy and pure and wonderful and not like them.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and this kind of thing is just exacerbated by—especially by the experience of social media that everyone has, where it’s like: well, in many cases there’s this beautiful, curated version of people’s selves that they put out.

Fr. Stephen: Of everyone’s life, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: “My Instagram life.” And everyone else’s marriages, everyone else’s child-rearing, everyone else’s careers, all this kind of stuff. I’ve even had people say to me, “Wow, you live such an amazing, great life!” or whatever, and I’m like: “Well, you can ask my wife about the reality of the way that I am.” I mean, but that’s the reality of the way these things work, whether it’s social media or just behavior in public, because we all behave publicly. It’s all curated on some level. We’re all holding back and putting out particular things.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and being well-mannered and everything is not the problem.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s not bad to be polite. It’s not bad. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: I don’t think we’ll ever— Like I said, I don’t think we’ll ever bring that practice back, but if all of us within the church community could be more open with each other about the realities of the things that we’re struggling with so that we would all realize, “Hey, wait, there’s a bunch of other people struggling with the same thing, and so I’m not alone…”

Fr. Andrew: Right, we’re doing this together. Yeah. I mean, and that’s one of the value—

Fr. Stephen: ...that would be of great benefit to all of us.

Fr. Andrew: We like to make our Protestant friends feel uncomfortable, but one thing I will say, especially for certain sectors of Evangelical Protestantism that have small groups who do this kind of thing with each other on some level—I mean, not that it’s always healthy, not that it’s always healthy—but there are! When I was Evangelical, now—oh, wow, this is almost 30 years ago now—but when I was, I remember experiencing that, where people would openly talk about their struggles with each other, which can feel super cringe for a lot of people—and can be: it can be distorted and abused and all that kind of stuff; it can be, but—

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and sometimes that’s even curated.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: People look for sympathy or…

Fr. Andrew: But when it’s done with actual real trust and love and friendship, it actually is pretty great. It actually is pretty great.

Fr. Stephen: But as you said, that’s not the current practice, and there are all kinds of reasons for that, many of which are springing to people’s minds if they’re thinking about would they ever do that. [Laughter] So right now, the way it’s done in the Orthodox Church is that you confess at the front of the church, but that only the priest is there present with you hearing it, but the priest is there representing the whole community, representing the congregation. And we talked—see our last episode about ordination. So that’s what the priest is doing there. And I try to emphasize to people, you’re not really confessing to me as an individual person.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and the way… I mean, not always, but the way that the sort of architecture of confession often is set up is you have a person facing maybe an icon of Christ or facing a cross or facing a gospel book, and the priest is beside them. I mean, there are cases in which confession is face-to-face or whatever, and that’s nothing wrong. That’s not wrong, but the architecture is kind of set up to really reinforce this idea that you’re confessing your sins to Christ, and the priest hears confessions. That’s the verb: hears confessions.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and is there as a witness, as [he’s] representing the congregation, and praying with them as the congregation. So within that context, in terms of the modern Orthodox practice— And why are we going into the modern Orthodox practice as much as we are? I think a lot of, if not all, non-Orthodox people probably have a lot of assumptions about how confession works in the contemporary Orthodox Church that are based on… partially on how it’s done in Roman Catholicism, more on how it’s done in movies and TV shows of Roman Catholic confessions!

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that’s what I was going to say, probably mostly based on what people see in movies and stuff.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yeah, not even what actually happens in Roman Catholicism. But even if you are aware of how it actually functions in Roman Catholicism, it’s different in the Orthodox Church in different ways. So one of the things that functions very differently than most people probably think in the Orthodox Church is what gets called “penance.” Even in the Orthodox Church it gets called “penance”: I don’t think we should probably use that term because…

Fr. Andrew: Some people just throw out the Greek term, epitimia, because no one knows what that means, so… [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Right, and it doesn’t have the freight that “penance” does. Because, as we were mentioning at the end of the second half, “penance” has this connotation of punishment or suffering or now something you have to do or you won’t be forgiven and you’ll go to hell or something. And all those assumptions get shoved in there. Whereas what actually happens in terms of Orthodox confession is that you and your spiritual father, the person you’re confessing to, have a conversation, long or short, about what it is you’re struggling with, and form kind of a treatment plan, to use the medical metaphor, or a game plan of how to be more successful in that struggle in the future and continue to work on it and try and replace bad habits that are causing you to fall into sin with good habits that will help you, and give guidance in terms of that restitution stuff we were talking about: When people have been hurt, what do you need to do to try and make this right?

So that’s what “penance” is in terms of the Orthodox practice. It’s trying to get at that restitution piece, and sometimes that can be complicated in real-life situations. There can be a lot of people involved in different ways.

Fr. Andrew: And a lot of the kind of conversation that happens within confession is about trying to help the other person think about their life in a different way so that they can interpret it in a way that’s going to enable that repentance.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. So that’s kind of talking about loosing and God forgiving sins, but we’ve got to go to the other side of that, the less-nice part to talk about, and that is the “binding on earth and binding in heaven” part, which basically is excommunication.

Fr. Andrew: And it’s a response to not repenting.

Fr. Stephen: Right, a lack of repentance, a lack of willingness to make restitution and try to restore.

Fr. Andrew: And a lot of people, especially if they don’t have any concept of how things work in the Orthodox Church, again, from movies and TV depictions of Roman Catholicism—

Fr. Stephen: And/or Puritan settlers.

Fr. Andrew: Right, right. [Laughter] —excommunication is often understood as “We’re throwing you out and we never want to see you again.”

Fr. Stephen: “And/or we’re going to burn you at the stake.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right. And literally neither— Excommunication in the Orthodox context can mean a couple of different things, and none of them is that.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, there’s excommunication and there’s excommunication.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. So there’s the sense of “Okay, you’re going to remain part of the Church community, but you’re going to refrain from Communion for a while.” And it’s for a while; it’s not permanent. It’s for a while.

Fr. Stephen: Right, because, again “leave your gift, and go and be reconciled.” So the work of repentance and restoration has to happen before it’s safe for you to again approach God in that way.

Fr. Andrew: There has to be this purification on your way to have a meal with God. And the other sense, really, probably the better word is “anathema,” which sounds even worse, like: Anathema! [Laughter] But even— So when solemn anathemas are laid down by ecumenical councils or repeated in the Synodikon of Orthodoxy, it’s not—

Fr. Stephen: We pronounce them accursèd!

Fr. Andrew: Accursed, yeah. It’s not pure rejection. It’s not. It’s about “Okay, this person’s unrepentant sin is so great that they have to be put outside the Church community until they are repentant.” See, it’s still got that “until.” It’s not “We’re sending you to hell.” We can’t do that! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Right. It’s got nothing to do with who goes to heaven and who goes to hell.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly.

Fr. Stephen: Even the anathematized person, we’re hoping… When we get up on the Sunday— If you go to a church on the Sunday of Orthodoxy where they read the anathemas, I should say, when they say that the Arians are accursèd, if you are an Arian, there’s a solution for that: Repent of Arianism. Now you’re not an Arian any more, and you’re not accursèd.

Fr. Andrew: Most of those anthemas are leveled against “those who teach…” or “those who say… XYZ.”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so stop teaching that and stop saying it.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] That’s what it’s aimed at: trying to get you to stop!

Fr. Andrew: And also, I should also point out, it’s not “to those who think”; it’s not leveled at opinions. They’re directed to those who are actively doing something public. That’s what’s going on.

Fr. Stephen: Because this is— Okay, yeah, I’ve probably done this on the show before, but this is one of my hobby-horses. The word “heresy” doesn’t mean to choose; stop with the etymologies.

Fr. Andrew: Aw. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: The word “heresy” was used in the Greek at the time to refer to a sect. To be a heretic means to be a sectarian. It means to draw people off after yourself, to make your own little following, to develop a cult of personality around yourself. That’s why these are named after a person. And so you don’t become a heretic by being wrong. Arius was not a heretic because he was wrong; Arius is a heretic because he would not repent. He would not accept it when his bishop told him he was wrong; when other bishops told him he was wrong. When all the bishops of the Church got together and told him he was wrong, he still refused to admit he was wrong, and continued to teach the same things and tried to convince other people he was right.

That’s what makes you a heretic, not just not getting something right—because if that was the case, we’d be in a lot of trouble, because almost everybody, if you ask them to explain the Trinity, is a heretic. But most people are not going out and saying, “No, my understanding of the Trinity is the correct one and everyone who disagrees with me is a heretic, and you need to come and join my church that I’m starting, for the real trinitarians”—that person is a heretic.

Axe ground.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] It’s a nice, sharp axe now!

Fr. Stephen: Right? But that’s— When we’re anathematizing someone as a heretic, that’s what we’re talking about. This isn’t about proclaiming hatred for particular people or groups of people. It’s the exact opposite. It’s because we love them that we’re calling on them to repent of their false beliefs and practices.

But the reason for—why is this, this sort of removal from the community for lack of repentance, why is this a thing? Well, it’s because sin is still a communal issue, just like it was in the old covenant.

Fr. Andrew: You’re hurting other people when you sin, as we said earlier.

Fr. Stephen: And there are examples of this in the New Testament. 1 Corinthians 5 may be one of the most infamous ones, where St. Paul has to write to the Church in Corinth because there’s a guy who’s sleeping with—it’s not totally clear in the text whether this is his mother, his step-mother, his mother-in-law… It’s bad any way you slice it.

Fr. Andrew: It’s gross; it’s wrong.

Fr. Stephen: It’s incest, any way. Yes, it is incest under Leviticus 18, in any case. But St. Paul’s writing to the whole Church about it, not just sending him a letter, and he’s writing to the whole Church about it because the whole Church knows about it and isn’t doing anything. It’s just sort of letting it happen. And he implies in the text that they kind of think they’re being open-minded and good and understanding by not doing anything about it. Like, they think positively of themselves for not doing anything about it—“Oh, how non-judgmental we are”—rather than addressing it. And why does St. Paul want it addressed? Because he hates that guy? Well, no, because that guy will never repent if someone doesn’t confront him, clearly. So it’s about the salvation of that man’s soul.

Jude 1:12 talks about a certain group of people within that community whom he calls sort of a stain on their love-feasts. When they get together to celebrate the Eucharist, having these people there is sort of tainting the whole thing, sort of wrecking the whole thing.

What St. Paul prescribes in 1 Corinthians 5, and he makes reference to this again in 1 Timothy 1:20, is that that person be handed over to Satan. That sounds really crazy. That sounds like he’s saying, “Send him to hell. Give him to the devil,” but—keep reading—he’s handed over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh and for the salvation of his soul. He’s being put out of the community, back into the world, that’s under the influence of the power of the evil one, but as we’ve talked about many times on this show, what are the demons out there for? Why does God let them stay out there? To afflict the wicked and drive them to repentance. So the idea here is that this person is being put out, is being put out there into the world that’s under the curse, anathema, so that this ultimate step may finally, to use terminology, help them hit rock bottom: bring them to repentance finally.

And there’s even— St. Paul’s even picking up here on a Jewish understanding. It’s kind of hard to explain. It’s kind of an inverted kind of martyrdom, where the person’s death itself and everything related to it in a way may offer some kind of atonement for their sin. Like I said, it’s hard to totally explain other than that obviously they’re going to be enduring hardship and that kind of thing. There’s a certain kind of—it’s kind of a weird, inverted ascesis or something. That’s part of what St. Paul is getting at with the death of the flesh and the death of the body there. But the core thing, even if you can’t quite wrap your head around that, is that this is being done for the sake of that person’s salvation; even this ultimate act of throwing them out of the Church is for that purpose.

So one of the effects of this, though, this understanding of both forgiveness being brought about by the community and this understanding of binding and of excommunication, this is part and parcel of what the Church does here in the New Testament, and how forgiveness and excommunication work is that the Church has to have definable borders.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, you can’t put someone outside of the Church if there is no “outside.”

Fr. Stephen: Right, if there’s no border. So the Church has to have a border. There has to be Church and not-the-Church, and there has to be Christian and not-a-Christian. There has to be a border so that there can be this kind of understanding of Church discipline.

Fr. Andrew: I was going to say, it’s worth pointing out that no one in the Scriptures or even in the early Church says, “I made a decision to become a Christian, and so I am one.” Indeed, you get, like early Church canons, for instance, talking about how to receive various kinds of heretics or whatever. There’s this line which is very memorable to me, which is: “On the first day, we make them Christians.” Becoming a Christian is something that happens to you! It’s not something you sort of—“In my heart, I became a Christian,” which is not a meaningless thing to say. I’m not saying that, but in terms of your actual participation and membership in the Church, it’s something that the community does to you.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And this may sound like I’m verging into picking on our somewhat-beleaguered-after-this-episode Protestant friends, but I want to make clear: this isn’t that, because historically there is a Protestant ecclesiology. There is a Protestant sense of the Church that includes a Church that has borders that includes concepts of Church discipline, and this particularly—particularly if you read John Calvin—this is for him one of the marks of the true Church, what makes a local church part of the Church for him is that there is Church discipline, specifically talking about this element of excommunication. Less on the forgiveness part. I won’t go too far into that.

Luther’s marks of the Church are a little different. Luther also has a sacrament of absolution, so he kind of has a version of public confession, sort of, and some Lutherans still do consider that a third sacrament; some don’t.

But so they had this firm idea, and this is where the idea of denominations comes from. The idea was this is the Church of Christ de nomine… whatever: the Church of Christ which is called… Lutheran, the Church of Christ which is called Reformed. But, from those traditional Protestant perspectives coming out of the Reformation, there were groups that got together and called themselves churches but were not churches; they were false churches. There were three categories, actually: true church, false church, and a sect, sect being what you definitely didn’t want to be. [Laughter]

That would be— The equivalent today for most… like, from an American Evangelical perspective, the sect the way talked about would probably be the way a lot of American Evangelicals would look at Mormons or Jehovah’s Witnesses or Seventh-Day Adventists.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, they would probably use the word “cult” for that.

Fr. Stephen: Right. They wouldn’t use “cult”; they would say “sect.” But so they had these categories. Those categories have kind of honestly fallen away, at least in American Evangelical practice. This is even true of a lot of people, at least publicly—I don’t know privately. I don’t think any confessions have been changed, but publicly we get a lot of folks, even from Calvinist or Lutheran churches, who just—there’s only an invisible church; it’s just all the believers; there are no borders, etc., etc.

And that creates a big problem from the perspective of traditional Protestantism. Bluntly, if we went in the Tardis and got John Calvin in Geneva and brought him to the United States, and he saw how Calvinist churches function in the United States, he would not think they were churches. One reason would be the Eucharist, but that’s a whole ‘nother issue for another time. But the biggest issue would be there’s no church discipline, because the way things are now in American Evangelicalism is there can’t be, because…

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, if you get thrown out of a particular local congregation, and if you’re still serious about being a Christian, you just go to some other one.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, down the block.

Fr. Andrew: Down the block. And the people in Congregation A would not say, “That person is no longer a Christian.”

Fr. Stephen: Right, and they couldn’t. And they couldn’t even say he’s not a member of the Church, because he’s a member of a different church down the street that they also acknowledge is a true church. So it can’t functionally happen, and it rarely even gets to that thrown out level. As soon as a pastor says something I don’t like, I can just go to the next church down the block, and it never even gets to that! So there is no discipline and authority structure, at least for laity—there’s more with clergy, depending, in some Protestant denominations…

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because the skin in the game is different.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, but for a layperson there’s no church discipline, so John Calvin would say that’s not the Church: it doesn’t have one of the marks of the true Church. And it’s progressed so far in the United States that I’ve seen people complaining online, seeing it as a critique of the Orthodox Church or the Roman Catholic Church, that we consider ourselves to be the Church and that someone who’s excommunicated is now not part of the Church. And it’s not just— I don’t have to go way back in Church history. For John Calvin and Martin Luther, that wasn’t a bug; it was a feature of the Church.

In case this still doesn’t seem problematic to some of our listeners, let me tell you about—I won’t give a lot of detail, but a leftist I know who’s an atheist, who is one of the people who responded to—and I’m not going down this culture-war road; don’t worry—was responding to the “What is a woman?” question going around. It was basically presented to him: “Well, if you just say anyone who identifies as a woman is a woman, then that makes the term ‘woman’ meaningless; it doesn’t mean anything any more.” And his response, his honest, straightforward response—now, he’s an atheist—was: “No, being a woman is like being a Christian. Anyone who identifies as one is one.”

Fr. Andrew: Wow.

Fr. Stephen: He said, “But I wouldn’t say that the term ‘Christian’ is meaningless.” So I hope folks find that troubling! [Laughter] And I think, frankly, we are at a point in American culture where the term “Christian” is meaningless. I’ll be blunt.

Fr. Andrew: Doesn’t mean we should stop using it, but—

Fr. Stephen: No, I’m not saying we should stop using it! But I’m saying it’s become— It doesn’t mean anything any more, because— precisely for that reason, that just anyone who calls himself one is one and there’s no way to say— There’s no border to it. There’s no way to say, “No, you’re not.” And there’s no way to define it that would cover all those people. So if I say, “Well, to be a Christian, you have to believe the contents of the Nicene Creed,” you’d be amazed at how many people in American Evangelicalism that leaves out, because they’re social trinitarians, or any number of other things. Or if you want to say— Or if you go the other way and just say, “Well, anyone who loves and tries to follow the teachings of Christ is a Christian,” that includes a lot of Muslims and Jewish people and Buddhists as Christians now. Muslims believe in the virgin birth; they believe Jesus was a prophet; they believe… right? [Laughter] But we wouldn’t say they’re Christians. So, yeah. It’s really problematic on the American scene.

In addition to calling people to kind of think about that, I want to say to our Protestant friends that when you hear Orthodox people refer to the Orthodox Church as the Church or the true Church or the visible Church, I think it would be helpful if, instead of hearing us trying to say something negative about you, which we’re not—we’re not trying to say you’re going to hell; we’re not saying you’re not really a Christian; we’re not saying any of that—that you would see that statement in this light, that the Church, as it is talked about in Scripture, has borders, and, rightly constituted, it has the ability to exercise Church discipline. And so when we call ourselves the Church or the true Church, that’s what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to reflect biblically, historically, traditionally, the Church’s understanding of itself, not to say anything about you negative. That’s what we’re attempting to say.

As I said, 16th- and 17th-century Protestants would not have had problems with us using that language.

Fr. Andrew: No.

Fr. Stephen: They might have disagreed with us, but there wasn’t a problem with the language.

Fr. Andrew: I mean, even most 19th-century Protestants… You don’t even have to go that far back to have this sense of… that each person within his religious community believes that it’s true and that all others are therefore at least somewhat false, maybe totally.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. So that’s my appeal there, and something we need to think about because— And this isn’t just our Protestant friends, because our Roman Catholic friends and all of us Orthodox folks, we live in American culture, too.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, we’re all affected by it.

Fr. Stephen: We’re all affected by this, and how even the term “Christian” now is used and heard. In Britain I guess it’s a little different. In Britain, “Christian” just means “proper” now. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Again, yeah. I think C.S. Lewis complains about that at some point.

Fr. Stephen: Your Christian name is just your legal, proper name.

As a last note here, or a couple of notes, related notes here on this episode, there are a couple of things in the Scriptures—in the New Testament—where we are told that certain things that we can do are means by which we receive forgiveness of sins from God. I phrased that the way I did on purpose. This is not “what to do to earn forgiveness,” but these are things that we can do that will cause us to experience forgiveness of our sins from God. One of those that I know we talked about in a previous episode is 1 Peter 4:8.

Fr. Andrew: Yep, which says: “Above all,  keep loving one another earnestly, since love covers a multitude of sins.”

Fr. Stephen: That “covers” language is atonement language, and we talked about it in that context, in St. Cyprian’s On Almsgiving, where he talks about how acts of love are a means by which—towards others, are a means by which we experience the forgiveness of our own sins and our own failings.

And then another one, though, that’s also important, comes once again from the epistle of St. James.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so this is about—if someone sees someone sinning, and then goes and brings them back. So that’s the immediate context. James 5:20: “Let him know—” That’s the person who’s doing the retrieving.

Let him know that whoever brings back a sinner from his wandering will save his soul from death and will cover a multitude of sins. The implication being there his own sins, too.

Fr. Stephen: Right, that when you go out and someone is sinning and you bring them back—you bring them back to Christ, you bring them back to repentance—that person experiences salvation, and you experience the forgiveness of your own sins and being a part of the forgiveness of God that’s brought to this person whom you’re helping.

And notice also that “will save his soul from death,” this is another place where the verb “save” is used in the New Testament, not directly referring to God or to Christ. You don’t have to freak out about that.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yes, just do a word search. There’s actually a bunch of places.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, because we understand that that salvation is ultimately coming from God, but that God works through people. So you can say… St. Paul can say that he’s all things to all men, so that by all means he might save some. He doesn’t mean he’s saving them instead of Christ, but he’s saying, “I do this so that I can be the instrument through which Christ saves some of these people.”

Fr. Andrew: Right. So, to wrap things up for this episode on confession, we ended up talking a lot about ecclesiology. That might be a little surprising. You turned on the episode, and you probably didn’t think it would be about that. But I think that ecclesiology is really, really important for us to ponder particularly at this moment in our cultural history. So what do I mean by that? Well, I think at least especially here in America, and maybe in other places in the West, too—I can’t speak to that quite as well—maybe other places in the world, but especially here in our own country of America, people’s isolation from each other has been increasing. We can blame social media, we can blame the pandemic, we could blame a lot of things, but isolation— Things that you could track, so, for instance, people’s participation in groups, whether it’s church or the Rotary Club, whatever it might be—people’s participation in social activities has been going down for a long time, actually. A long time. I think it’s decades now it’s been being tracked. So while we could try to put the blame on certain things, I think mainly we can just say that they haven’t helped; they’ve made it worse. So we live in a time where isolation is increasing, and a lot of people are suffering ill effects from that: mental health effects, definitely spiritual effects, bodily health effects. There’s a lot of suffering as a result of that.

And what exactly is ecclesiology within the frame of this problem? Ecclesiology is how we are the Church. It’s what it means for us to be the body of Christ. We’ve talked about— Some of our earliest episodes were about God’s body and how the Church is Christ’s body, that is, the Church is the collection of his powers, his abilities, his works in this world, that he works through the Church. And ecclesiology, therefore, in many ways, is the cure for this isolation and this degradation that many of us are experiencing. And confession in particular, as we saw, especially here near the end of this episode— confession actually is a very ecclesiological experience.

On the one hand, the negative side, there’s a sense that you can, if you’re unrepentant, find yourself outside the ekklesia, outside the Church. Now, it’s for the purpose of repentance. It’s not like: “Just get out; we don’t want you here any more.” But it’s also for the purpose of protecting those who can be potentially led astray at the same time, so there’s both things going on with that. But also, on the other side, confession is about healing. It’s about that restitution, about making things right, about repenting of our sins. That’s the program. That’s the Christian life. And it happens in relationship within the body of Christ.

There’s a lot of people who are feeling very isolated, who certainly also do things like praying alone at home and reading their Bible alone at home—and those are good things to do, but they cannot provide the ecclesiological dimension, the ecclesial dimension. They cannot provide churchliness, because church is precisely a gathering; church is precisely relationship. As Fr. Stephen said earlier, the experience of standing at home and saying to God, “I did the following,” versus having that experience in the church and having a priest standing next to you and you say, “I did the following,” those are not the same experience; they’re just not. The second one calls you out of yourself in a way that the first one simply doesn’t. And it’s not that God is not enough—by no means would we ever say that God is not enough—but we do know that God does work through his body, the Church. We do know that God does work through other people.

And while we might be scared of that— I think, for instance, a lot of people have a kind of, I don’t know, knee-jerk anti-Roman Catholicism I think is what it comes down to, because of this scary idea of clergy that can “stand between you and God”—we’re not teaching that, that clergy or whoever stands between you and God. There’s nothing that can stand between you and God. But when we fixate on that, then what we’re doing is we’re saying, “You know what? I don’t need or want—I don’t want other people in my Christian life. I don’t want what God himself has provided. I don’t want the way that God is working through other people. I just want my own isolated experience.” When we do that, that’s very, very destructive, and we’re letting our phobias—we’re letting our fear of abuse get in the way of using the good things that God has provided. God has provided confession. We read it right there in the Bible; we’re not making this up. It’s right there in the Scriptures: God has given it.

And God has given forgiveness of sins through confessing to other people. Does that mean if the other person says, “Well, I don’t forgive you,” then God says, “Well…” No! That’s not what that means at all. But again, abuse does not prevent the true use. There’s this basic principle in Latin: abusus non tollit usum. I’m sure I’m mispronouncing that, but it is a basic principle that the abuse of something does not mean that the good use is no good. We clean up abuses, but we don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater. So it is a little scary—all relationship is scary—but there are experiences, there is goodness, there’s wholeness, there is healing, as we see in Scripture; there’s forgiveness that’s received only within that context.

So let’s step outside of ourselves and let’s go to confession. Let’s be a part of the body of Christ, and let’s not excommunicate ourselves. It sounds scary to be excommunicated, but if we’re not participating in the body of Christ, we’ve excommunicated ourselves. We did it to ourselves; that’s the worst! Let’s step outside of that. Let’s go show up; let’s go be the body of Christ together. And maybe if it’s been a long time since you did it or maybe you had a bad experience, it’s going to be uncomfortable. Okay, I get that. I get that—but you don’t let that rule— Don’t let the wound become who you are. It’s still the body of Christ. It’s still the body of Christ, and that means we do this together.

And that means we have access to this beautiful, beautiful, holy mystery of confession, of absolution, of forgiveness of our sins. It’s one of the most powerful experiences that Christians can have. And there’s only one context in which it really comes to its fullness. So let’s show up. Let’s do the thing. Don’t live in your head. Don’t think that being a Christian is about stuff that you read or stuff that you think or having the right opinions—it’s not. Those can be important, but being Christian is about participation in the body of Christ, and confession is one of those key ways that we participate. Fr. Stephen?

Fr. Stephen: So as we mentioned back when we were talking about the giving of the Torah originally, there are a lot of things that have been present in the world since sin entered the world, things like pain, suffering, shame, humiliation, loneliness, emptiness, meaninglessness. These things have been out there—violence. These are just facts of sinful human reality. Those aren’t the things that God brings into the world when he draws near to humanity, not at Mount Sinai and definitely not in Christ.

That said, churches—and I’m using “churches” here with a small-c and in the loosest possible way: Christian communities, so I’m including everybody: all our friends and a lot of Orthodox parishes, too—have typically not done a great job of manifesting that fact to people. So we tend to fall into one of two poles. People come into our church gatherings and all those things that they were already experiencing out there in the world, like shame, isolation, embarrassment, humiliation, just feel exacerbated to them. They walk in the door and they feel judged and condemned. Or, on the other side, on the flipside of the coin, they come in and they feel welcome and fine in the gathering, but that gathering doesn’t present them any hope, any means of change, any means of bettering their situation, and sort of everyone commiserating: nobody expects any better out of anybody else, but also there’s no drive to do any better. There’s no cure for the meaninglessness, there’s no cure for the shame, there’s no cure for any of these things.

And so the core of what we were talking about tonight, which is repentance and forgiveness, that’s a new thing that has come into the world, and that should be the earmarks of the Christian community. This should be what sets us apart, frankly, from every other organization or anything else on earth, is that this is the place where people can come to hear the words of life. This is the place where people can come to find Christ. This is the place where they’ll find a path of repentance that will lead to forgiveness, that will lead to healing and freedom and transformation of their life. So on one hand, anybody who wants to can walk in the door, and, on the other hand, nobody is going to be just left the way they are when they first walk in the door, unless they choose to turn around and leave themselves.

Both not judging and condemning and calling to repentance are possible at the same time. Both experiencing forgiveness and taking sin seriously are possible at the same time. Part of it that I think particularly in some of our Orthodox parishes we need to get more through our head is that joylessness is not a sign of holiness. St. Paul says the exact opposite. He says joy is one of the fruits of the Spirit. So if in your parish you’re not experiencing joyfulness—the joy that comes from having your sins forgiven, the joy that comes from not having to be weighed down by guilt and shame any more, the joy that comes from knowing Christ—if you don’t have that, something is deeply wrong; it is deeply wrong. You can focus on repentance at the expense of forgiveness, where it’s all about being morose and moribund about how sinful we are. It’s all about the way you feel walking into confession and not about the way you feel walking out. You should leave confession feeling 50 pounds lighter. You should walk out with the knowledge that now you have been reconciled to God in Christ and that you’re in process of reconciling with your brothers and sisters, who are all supporting you in this.

People, if the Church is a hospital and not a courtroom, then we should all be happy that we’re getting better and recovering and being healed. I don’t think when Christ, as we read about in St. Matthew’s gospel, when he was out healing crowds of people, that the people who had been healed of ailments that they’d sometimes had for years were walking away with a grim look on their face. There was joy there. So I think we need to kind of refocus. We need to refocus as people and thereby help refocus our communities, on being communities that are about repentance and forgiveness.

You don’t know—I’ve had a lot of conversations recently in various contexts, with people who aren’t Christians, some of whom are atheists, and you do not know how much they long for— When I’ve told people who are atheists and know nothing about the Orthodox Church about Forgiveness Vespers, where once a year we gather together and ask each other forgiveness for what we’ve done in the past year, how many of them tell me they long for something like that, to be able to have an opportunity to just be honest with their friends and family about how they’ve been and ask for their forgiveness and experience forgiveness—because there’s no forgiveness out there in the world now. No one gets forgiven for anything. You get canceled, it gets brought up for the rest of your life, things will follow you for eternity, and we’ve got a generation and a half now, who almost every moment of their life has been recorded on the internet which means forever.

This is something only we have and we can only offer. It’s a kind of freedom that only comes through the Holy Spirit and through knowing Christ. That’s where our focus needs to be. And when we do that, that’s when what we have to offer the world is not moral principles or theological principles, but the salvation that comes in Christ.

Fr. Andrew: Amen. Amen. Well, that’s our show for today. Thank you very much, everyone, for listening. We weren’t live this time, but, God willing, we will be live next time, and we’d like to hear from you. You can email us at lordofspirits@ancientfaith.com; you can message us at our Facebook page; or you can also leave us a voicemail at speakpipe.com/lordofspirits.

Fr. Stephen: Or you can send hate mail to Fr. Andrew Damick at…

Fr. Andrew: Yep. [Laughter]

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

Fr. Andrew: And if you are on Facebook, like our page, join our discussion group, leave reviews and ratings wherever it is you listen to this podcast, but, most importantly, please share this show with a friend who is going to benefit from it.

Fr. Stephen: And finally, be sure to go to ancientfaith.com/support and help make sure we and lots of other AFR podcasters stay on the air. And I do have to say, Fr. Andrew, you act like you’ve got nothing to lose, but I’ve already lost my patience.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Thank you! Good night, and God bless you all.