Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick: Good evening, giant-killers, dragon-slayers, serpent- and scorpion-stompers. You are listening to The Lord of Spirits podcast. My co-host, the Very Reverend almost-double-doctor Fr. Stephen De Young, is with me from Lafayette, Louisiana. I’m Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick in Emmaus, Pennsylvania, with considerably fewer academic degrees. If you’re listening to us live, you can call in at 855-AF-RADIO; that’s 855-237-2346. And Matushka Trudi is back on the job tonight, taking your calls. We’re going to get to those in the second part of our show.

Fr. Stephen De Young: And of course, Elijah just disappeared. Perhaps he got taken up…

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Poor Elijah. You can come back, Elijah! Everything is fine! We want you back!

Fr. Stephen: We’ve got this open chair for you.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Tonight we’re going to consider— Consider. We’ll consider continuing our series on eschatology with the dawn of the year 2000, just 23 years in the rearview mirror, which makes me feel a little like I’m shriveling a little bit.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, bones turning to powder.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, yeah. It might seem like the much-prophesied millennium bug is old hat. I also remember the halcyon days of 2012, when we were told that the Mayan calendar had reached its spicy end, yet the end remains an element to Christian theology because it’s in the Bible. Funny how that works. So that’s what we’re going to talk about tonight: what exactly is this millennium? Why do the British like to say “world without end” at the end of their prayers? A lot of people have been wondering that, I bet. What is the ancient heresy of chiliasm? And is it true that St. Irenaeus of Lyons was actually a chiliast and the Church swept that under the rug or just had a general agreement not to talk about it? So—

Fr. Stephen: No.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Man, spoilers, dude! Come on!

Fr. Stephen: Spoiler!

Fr. Andrew: That’s not until the third half!

Fr. Stephen: Oh, okay. Sorry, sorry.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I guess we’ve got to make sure we hold everybody’s attention.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, we don’t want to startle anybody. We’re just talking about how old we are.

Fr. Andrew: [Gasp] My stars! Pearl-clutching! St. Irenaeus wasn’t a chiliast! [Laughter] I mean, we’re Gen-Xers, though, so are we even allowed to talk about our feelings about the millennium?

Fr. Stephen: No, there are only two appropriate things to do with feelings. Number one is to tamp and stomp them down until they build up pressure and you explode like a volcano, destroying everything around you; or, two, drown them in hard liquor until they’re as dead as you are inside.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Wow! We’re going to get emails about that one. That one, like— You’re always like: “I’m going to get canceled for this!” No, it’s going to be that. It’s going to be that I’m going to get the emails about.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, last episode it was the Great Online Pasta Wars of 2023.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I think that that may have spawned more comments than any other throw-away comment!

Fr. Stephen: And this week it’s going to be my tongue-in-cheek—or was it?—anti-feeling tirade.

Fr. Andrew: Getting very Dutch right from the get-go.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, so some say the end is near; some say we’ll see Armageddon soon. But we’ve been told a lot of lies about the millennium. I don’t know if you remember back in the year 2000, one [Willard Carroll] Smith told us all that this was going to be the Willennium.

Fr. Andrew: Wow! Wow. I don’t remember that. I remember Will Smith, but…

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, that hasn’t panned out so well for him.

Fr. Andrew: I’m told there was a Robbie Williams song about the millennium as well, but I don’t…

Fr. Stephen: Yes, Lance Henriksen’s hair turned white, yeah. Also in the year 2012, we were told by John Cusack that you can flee the crumbling earth in a Winnebago successfully.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I mean… It checks out!

Fr. Stephen: No, I think that is also a lie. [Laughter] That’s what Maury Povich told me, at least.

Fr. Andrew: Glad we have Maury Povich to tell us these things.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, yes! If you want to find out if the baby’s yours or if someone is lying, you go to Maury Povich. He will adjudicate all such matters.

Fr. Andrew: He would never lie to us.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. I mean, he’s married to Connie Chung! But, you know, if you can’t Connie Chung, whom can you trust?

Fr. Andrew: Well—

Fr. Stephen: Maybe no one?

Fr. Andrew: There’s so many people I could trust in front of Connie’s husband. Just, anyway. Millennium, yes! What are we talking about again?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, the millennium. And so the main place in Scripture that talks about the millennium as such is Revelation 20. So, as is our wont, we will be talking about that dead last at the end of the show.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] As one does.

Fr. Stephen: But until then, we’re going to be laying groundwork as again is our wont. So we’re going to start with the whole concept of an age in Scripture, because ultimately what the millennium is is an age. So before we can get to that particular age, we have to understand the concept of an age in general.

The most common way in which an age is referred to in the Hebrew Bible is with the term “day,” yom. And so just connecting the idea of “day” and “age” I know has triggered a bunch of Young Earth creationists, but that’s not where we’re going, so relax.

Fr. Andrew: I think we lost them a long time ago, honestly.

Fr. Stephen: That may be, but that’s not where we’re going with this at all. But the word “day” in addition to just referring to a day—it does sometimes in the Hebrew Bible just refer to a 24-hour period, or to the daylight hours, like day/night—but there are also more specialized usages of it. So when you see “day” with the definite article, ha yom or “the day,” as it’s usually translated in English, that is in most cases a reference to the day of the Lord, the day of Yahweh.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, when God shows up and puts everything right.

Fr. Stephen: Right, he visits his people and settles things and things are resolved. So this is true, by the way, though we’re not going to go too deep into this right now— This is true also in Genesis 3. There’s that weird phrase that gets translated in all kinds of weird, contradictory ways in English as, like, “the heat of the day”: God goes walking in the heat of the day, or “the wind of the day” or “the cool of the afternoon.” [Laughter] It gets translated in all these— What it literally says there is ruach ha yom, “the spirit of the day.” And God comes walking after Adam and Eve have transgressed, and he comes walking in the spirit of the day. So this is deliberately, in the Hebrew, evoking the idea of judgment, and that’s what’s happening. This is sort of an early intrusion.

Now, of course, the day of the Lord, the day of Yahweh, the day, is this pivotal transitional moment. It is— When we’re talking about the day of Yahweh in the Hebrew Scriptures, we’re talking about this transitional moment from one age to another. That’s why it’s relevant here, because, as we’re understanding the concept of an age in Scripture, we have to not only understand that there are these ages, but that there are these pivotal and decisive moments where things happen that inaugurate a new one, where there’s passage into a new one.

Fr. Andrew: And sometimes the Bible will use the same word to refer to the period, but also to that moment.

Fr. Stephen: Right. So another way in which “day,” yom, is used in this context is a reference to that day, and that will take the form in English translation of “in that day.” And “in that day” can be sort of retrospective, talking about the past. “In that day, the city of Dan was called Laish.” Or it can be prospective: it can refer to the future. “In that day, no man will teach his brother, saying…”

Fr. Andrew: The first one, “back in the day,” as we say colloquially in English.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, retrospectively, “back in the day,” or “in my day, kids, we didn’t… express our emotions, yeah.”

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] You’re triggering a lot of people with that now.

Fr. Stephen: It’s okay. I already told them what to do with those feelings I’m triggering.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] There you go!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and so this is a reference to an age or an era, and it’s referring to it as a whole, just referring to it simply: that era, that time period, that age as a whole. You also get “the days of” fill-in-the-blank. “The days of Noah” is a very common one in Scripture, to refer back to the days of Noah, meaning the period when Noah was alive. It’s taking that age or era and associating it with a particular person and, through that person, with particular events in the life of that person, what is going on with that person. “The days of Sodom, the days of…” And you can associate then an age in that way with a person, with a concept. We do that poetically in English as well, like “days of wine and roses.” “These are the days of miracles and wonders. This is the long-distance call.”

Fr. Andrew: Nice! That was the first cassette tape I ever owned, was Graceland by Paul Simon.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah! Digging in the grave. And so it’s associating them, then, with this particular character or characterization, connecting the age to that.

There’s also then the phrase “in those days,” and so you have “in that day” using the singular, and you have “in those days” which is plural. Both of those are essentially the same kind of reference in that they’re referring to a past or future age or era, but when it’s singular it’s sort of referring to it as a unit, whereas when it’s plural, “in those days,” it’s referring to it in terms of extent over time.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there was a plurality. And the way that I kind of work that out was in terms— I mean, this is a rough analogy— in terms of grammar. So you’ve got the past perfect, “at that time, in that period, in those— in that era,” versus sort of past imperfect, like “it used to be the case, it was ongoing…” Even when we just use the singular definite article in English versus a plural one, it can make a big different. We talk about the United States versus these United States. That’s a different concept, and it’s the sense of, in this case, its plurality: the states all together, where was the United States is a singular unit that’s one country.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and if people have a little Greek, this is the difference between the aorist and the imperfect in Greek. “In that day” might be used to refer to something, like I said the name of a city: “In that day, Dan was called Laish.” It’s just being used, that period as a whole, to locate when you’re talking about the city had that name. Whereas when you get “in those days,” the plural, to refer to the extent, you’re talking about how something was true over a period of time.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, kind of an ongoing basis.

Fr. Stephen: “In those days, there was no king. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes.” So you have ongoing is the idea that’s being stressed there, either in the past or in the future.

So that’s sort of the Hebrew use, and since that’s centering around the word “day,” that obviously is an analogical use of the word “day,” that denotatively is referring to a twelve-hour period, give or take, depending on time of year.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, versus the night.

Fr. Stephen: To refer to another time period, which generally would be considered to have a beginning and an end.

Fr. Andrew: I mean, we do that with other units of time, like we talk about something happening “in a hot minute,” or “in that hour, such and such,” we don’t mean in those 60 minutes or in those 60 seconds. It’s extended outwards to mean “a period.”

Fr. Stephen: And “hour” is even used that way in Scripture, Christ saying, “My hour has not yet come.”

Fr. Andrew: Right, he doesn’t mean: “Look, it’s going to be at 3:25 on Friday…”

Fr. Stephen: “...to 4:25.” [Laughter]

So in Greek what we generally have for age is aion, from which we get the English word “eon.” And aion is usually literally translated “age,” and that’s why we’ve been using the term “age” so far. But “age” obviously— I mean, on the face of it, when you talk about “this age” and then there’s “the next age” and then there’s “the age to come,” that language de facto is a way of periodizing time, of taking time in all of its extent and dividing it into finite periods, to say “this age” and then “that age” and then “the next age,” in the same way that you could take a desk and say, “Okay, this is the left side of the desk, this is the middle of the desk, this is the right side of the desk.” You are dividing it. And in that sense, periodization can be arbitrary. So in the sense that we— To use an example from time, we talk about, oh, Late Antiquity, the Dark Ages, the Middle Ages, the Early Modern Period. You could, of course, argue and publish journal articles about where exactly those begin and end, and were there even dark ages, because those are somewhat arbitrary divisions based on various things.

But the word aion or “age” includes more than just the concept of a division of time. So that word conveys more than that, that takes it out of the realm of the arbitrary, because ultimately it has the resonance of a particular order, a particular state of things that prevails for a period of time. And when the terms like Middle Ages, Dark Ages, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, Neolithic—when these are used quasi-scientifically, in a scholarly manner, that’s what they’re actually being used to refer to, not an arbitrary number of years but a period during which a certain ordering of the world prevailed.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, like Bronze Age is specifically about that metallurgical accomplishment and its effects on civilization.

Fr. Stephen: And there are certain political forms that prevailed during that period, and we talk about the end of the Bronze Age and the Bronze Age collapse: that was the collapse of the sort of world order that had developed during that period and then comes to an end. When we talk about Late Antiquity, it’s Late Antiquity for a reason: the Western Roman Empire is collapsing and there’s a shift happening in the whole order of things.

This is really included in this idea of aion. It’s a world order or state of things. So this, then, in Latin translation, is where we get into the word saeculum. And the word saeculum really conveyed that same kind of idea of a world order, of a world structure. St. Augustine really develops the way the word saeculum is used, really innovates, in terms of how that word is going to be understood going forward in the West in City of God, because he, being the Platonist he was, uses the sort of Platonic schema of being and becoming and applies it to the City of God, the sort of age in which God eternally exists on the one hand, and then on the other hand on the earth there is this constant sort of churning and turning of one saeculum, one order, one world, into another. And that’s very much the point he’s wanting to make in City of God. He’s like: “Yes, those of you who think because the Western Roman Empire is collapsing, the world is ending—it sort of is, in a way, in a sense. That world, that ordering of things, that had prevailed until now for centuries is now dying and dead.”

Fr. Andrew: Yes. All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again?

Fr. Stephen: Yes. And now a new order will rise, and that will continue to happen over and over and over again in this world; meanwhile, the age above, the age in which God dwells, is eternal.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which is then why— I don’t remember exactly how the phrase goes in Latin. Is it “saeculus saeculorum” or am I getting the grammar wrong? I don’t remember.

Fr. Stephen: Something like that. I’d have to look it up.

Fr. Andrew: Which, you know, in Latin translates, “eis tous aionos ton aionon” from Greek, which we usually translate in English as “unto ages of ages.” But that [saecula saeculorum] in some of the early modern English translations becomes “world without end,” because it’s the idea that it’s a world without end, versus these worlds upon worlds, one world upon another, that characterizes this world in the Augustinian conception.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And that’s going to have some consequences that are relevant to what we’re talking about tonight, because in that Platonic schema, this then sees God as being, in very Platonic fashion, unmoving, pure act, separate. And then, when humans leave this life in this world, we escape from this becoming and this material world, enter into this sort of eternal now in which God dwells, this age in which God dwells, and this plays into the whole idea of the beatific vision. And then the problem becomes: How do you match that up with the bodily resurrection?

So that becomes a tension. I know I’ve commented on this on the show before. You see this tension all the way through the third part of Thomas’s Summa—which I know he didn’t actually write himself; it was compiled from his notes, but then maybe he had a resolution to the tension, but there’s still a tension there between the beatific vision and the bodily resurrection in the Western eschatology that then develops. And it’s really because of this Platonic understanding of St. Augustine, when it gets kind of followed out. I don’t see a lot of evidence that St. Augustine ever followed it out that far, but other people do, like Boethius and Anselm.

But, yeah, so then we have this idea of world without end, and a similar idea to that world without end is expressed in some of our Orthodox liturgics when it talks about “the day that has no end,” in some of our liturgics. And that “day” there is being used in this sense of age, that there will ultimately be an age that has no end. This is reflected in Revelation 21, when St. John says that in the new heavens and the new earth there is no night. If there’s no night, that means there’s no end to the day, meaning it goes on forever.

So certain folks who are of a certain bent and may be primarily identified by three initials…

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Sorry, I appreciated the “of a certain bent.” That was— I couldn’t let that pass by.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] They would very much like to argue that when the Scriptures in the New Testament in Greek— They point out that when it talks about eternal death or eternal condemnation, what we might colloquially call “hell,” that what it actually says in Greek is “death (or condemnation) of the age, of the aion.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, meaning it has a beginning and an end.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so they then point out: “Well, see, it’s of the aion. Aions have beginnings and ends; days have beginnings and ends.” Well, yes, usually they do, but that doesn’t mean that the concept of a day without an end or an age without an end is inconceivable. Ultimately where that kind of argument falls apart is that sometimes, literally in the same verse—in the same sentence—in the original, it will talk about life of the aion, of the age, which we translate as “eternal life.”

Fr. Andrew: Meaning that if condemnation has a beginning and an end, then you have to translate it that way about life as well, that there’s— If condemnation is not eternal, then life can’t be eternal either.

Fr. Stephen: Right. If we can’t conceive— And if they’re used [in] parallel, it’s kind of hard to argue when someone parallels eternal life and eternal death, that they mean different things by “eternal.” It seems to me. It doesn’t stop some folks with three initials…

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Some say...

Fr. Stephen: Yes. Someone, somewhere, has said… Yeah, so that argument, that particular argument, without wading into the whole thing of universalism— That particular argument just does not work. It just does not work. So “age,” aion, does not imply a beginning and an end any more than “day” implies a beginning and an end. Yes, in its normal usage it does: it has a beginning and an end. But one can certainly conceive of, and the Scriptures do conceive of a day that has no end and an aion that has no end, a life that has no end, which means they can also— It is also possible for them to conceive of death or condemnation or what-have-you that has no end. Yeah. So, we won’t go further down that rabbit-hole, because that’s a whole can of worms. Maybe in a future episode we’ll make everyone mad.

Fr. Andrew: Let’s do it!

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] So there are a bunch of ages that are talked about in the Scriptures.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, the first age, which is when the silmarils are made… [Laughter] Sorry, wrong scriptures.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, yeah. Enh, Bible, Wrath of Khan… [Laughter] So there are these ages described in Scripture. Most of these are in the Old Testament period, for reasons that are probably obvious. And they’re described, and the transitions are described. These are worth going through because they kind of exhibit different things that help us understand what we’re talking about when we’re talking about an age.

Fr. Andrew: I think one thing that’s really important to note about this is that there’s not a sense that they’re all the same length, and they couldn’t— There’s no way to make them all the same length, looking at what’s in the Scripture. So it’s not a discrete unit of time.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. The first one is sort of: creation, sort of Genesis 1.

Fr. Andrew: The period where God is actually making the world.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, before humans are created. Before humans are created: so there are no humans having human experiences and experiencing time the way humans experience time. This is an age which sort of has no beginning. You say, “Well, wait, creation sort of had a beginning.” It’s like, well, sort of, except it’s not like God was sitting around— I mean, “sitting.” God was alone. God was the only thing that existed through this sort of infinite succession of moments of time.

Fr. Andrew: And then one day…

Fr. Stephen: And then one moment decided, “This is the moment when I’m going to make everything.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. I mean, creation is not uncreated; it’s not without beginning. But when we think of beginnings, we tend to think of moments in time, but there wasn’t time, in any sense.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so before God created time— I just used the language “before,” but that’s temporal language. Like when I say, “So there’s this moment of creation, the first moment of creation,” you and I can conceive of “well, there’s a moment before that, there’s a second before that.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, we can think that.

Fr. Stephen: Before that moment—but there wasn’t, because moments were created in that moment! [Laughter] So this is something we can’t wrap our head around, because, as we’ve said before on this show, this is a really important— That’s why we talk about not knowing what it’s like to be a bat so much. We have to keep this sort of epistemological point, this point about how we know what we know and the fact that we can only see things from a certain human perspective, etc. We have to sort of always keep that in mind.

Fr. Andrew: It could be said that some things are true only from a certain point of view.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] So when we focus and we try to think, we try to imagine the moment of creation, we are imagining ourselves being there, watching it.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah… I mean, who is there, writing it down? “Ooh! God is making— He’s separating out the land from the waters! Write that down, somebody!”

Fr. Stephen: Yes. And you were not there, standing there watching it, as God points out to Job most emphatically. [Laughter] “Where were you when I was doing all this?” And it’s: “I wasn’t.” Right, so there is no human observer to this. So the concept of a first moment— To even try to comprehend that, we’d have to understand how God experiences time, which, again— That’s right off the table, completely off the table.

When we talk about this age, this age of creation, being before the next age, which begins when humanity was created, it’s before in relation to the first humans. It’s referring to when they weren’t. But that is sort of an apophatic statement. It’s a statement that there was “when Adam and Eve weren’t.” [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: And even Brian Williams wasn’t.

Fr. Stephen: But we cannot make any kind of what we call cataphatic, any kind of literal statement about what that was or what it was like. And so that’s why I told the Young Earth creationist folks they didn’t have to worry about the day-age thing, because the day-age thing fundamentally doesn’t make sense, that there’s a period of time being denoted literally by the days of creation. A period of time: there’s no humans, so what does that even mean?

But then the next age is paradise. So humans are created, on day six, as described in detail in Genesis 2. Humans get created, and this is the time in paradise before humanity is expelled from paradise. The fact that there are now humans mean that humans experienced time in some way, but it doesn’t mean that they experienced it the same way we do now.

Fr. Andrew: Right, it’s a very different world.

Fr. Stephen: It’s a different age. It’s a different world. It’s a different ordering of things in creation. It’s the same creation, but the creation is ordered differently before. Well, and humanity is ordered differently before the expulsion from paradise as opposed to after. And that causes— That’s going to change how humanity experiences it. That’s why, on one hand, we have in Genesis 2 and 3 a narrative story of the creation of Adam out of the earth, naming of the animals, the creation of Woman from his side when he is split—

Fr. Andrew: Because we can’t tell a story in another way. And even when we try to tell a non-linear story, what we’re really doing is telling linear stories, just in different bits and in different orders.

Fr. Stephen: Out of order, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: We can’t tell a non-linear story. It’s just not a possibility.

Fr. Stephen: So we tell this story in a linear fashion, leading up to temptation, sin, the expulsion from paradise, because that’s the only way we can tell a story. A lot of times we fall into literally: It’s literally a tree; it’s a fruit, a pomegranate or something. I don’t know where the commercial’s getting that, by the way, for pomegranate juice, and why that would be a selling point either. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Right, I’m like, because that brings— There’s the whole Persephone and Hades things there going on, too, for me.

Fr. Stephen: “You, too, can rebel against God! Drink our juice.” [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: It was an apple, though. In the garden, it was an apple, because “apple” just used to mean “fruit.”

Fr. Stephen: Well, plus it’s stuck in my neck. Yeah, so we have this narrative, and we tend to think of that in a very literal way. So then we’ll read some of the Church Fathers like St. Maximus, who says that Adam fell as he came into being, and you’re like: “Wait, what?”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which makes no literal sense. If you’re— That’s not a statement that’s bound by the linearity of the Genesis story.

Fr. Stephen: Right. But what St. Maximus is pointing to there, as other Fathers do in different ways, like with the “garments of skin” that we’ve talked about before, the difference in the human body, is saying this is a different order of things, and that carries with it a different way in which time is experienced by humans. The fact that we have to describe something using words and syllables and that then recounting and reading aloud those words and syllables takes place over a period of time does not necessarily mean that what we’re describing was experienced over a period of time in the same way. Think about— I could— If I witnessed a car accident, I could write you a 1500-word super-detailed description of the moment of impact. It will still only be a moment of impact, even though it might take you five minutes to read what I wrote in the description. And that wouldn’t mean that I was lying to you about— “All this stuff couldn’t happen in one moment!” [Laughter] “So many minutes worth of material!” So that’s an example. That’s just an analogy; that’s not exactly what we’re talking about, but that’s an analogy.

So then the expulsion from paradise is this transitional moment. When we talk about the expulsion from paradise, that’s really what we’re talking about; or if we want to call it the fall, or one of the falls, we’re talking about this transitional moment to now this new age, this new era, this new world [which] comes into being, which is the world outside of paradise leading up to the flood, the days of Noah, what’s recounted in the genealogies of Seth and Cain, so everything with the nephilim, everything with Lamech and his wives, and the spread of sin, and all of those things happening. This is a very differently-ordered world, a differently-ordered humanity than paradise, very obviously. There’s a stark contrast between that age and the age which preceded it.

And then, when we come to the flood, the way the flood is very deliberately described— So the flood comes—this is our big transition event again—and the flood is very deliberately described in terms of the uncreation of the world.

Fr. Andrew: Right, it’s the opposite order of the— There’s death that comes in, removing the life, and then the unstructuring happens.

Fr. Stephen: God separated the waters above from the waters below, and we read the springs come up and the water comes down from the firmament that he put there to separate them. The dry land disappears back into the sea. The world gets unmade; it lapses back into the primordial chaos outside of the ark, in which the order of the world is preserved. That’s part of what’s signified, by the way, by the fact that there are clean and unclean animals on the ark, even though the Torah hasn’t been given yet. That order is part of what’s being preserved there: not just the life but also the order is preserved in the ark, as sort of a microcosm.

And then the world is re-created. The water recedes from the dry land. Everything is separated again and put back in order, but it’s a new order, and so this new age begins after the flood, leading up to Abraham, meaning we’re talking about what happens with the Tower of Babel.

Then we have this other transitional moment. And then a big important one, obviously, that’s going to be very important as we go forward: the critical age in the Old Testament, because really Genesis and all these ages we’ve been discussing—Genesis is the prologue to the Torah, which begins in Exodus. And so we have this very critical moment for the age that is going to predominate in the— Well, which is going to be basically the Hebrew Bible and predominate in the Christian Old Testament, which is the age that’s initiated by the giving of the Torah at Sinai, because when the Torah is given at Sinai, there is a fundamentally new order of things.

Israel now exists as a nation when the covenant is given, when the Torah is received at Mount Sinai. Israel, as it comes into existence, now has a different relationship to the 70 nations, and a role to play. There is an order within Israel, of the high priest, the priests, the people. They have the concentric circles we’ve talked about of holiness that has to be maintained, leading out into the nations. Israel comes to serve as priest for the nations, even as the priests, proper, serve as the priests for Israel. This order is established when the Torah is given. That world, that age, then, is initiated. That age ends when Judah goes into exile. The Temple is destroyed, Judah goes into exile, and the return from exile then initiates this new age, this post-exilic age, this post-exilic period, which Daniel refers to as the Great Tribulation. So I know we’re already upsetting— This is going to be a rough night for our dispensationalist friends, if they’re still listening.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I’m here for it. Everybody, get out your Clarence Larkin-illustrated manuals!

Fr. Stephen: Get your wall charts. So when Daniel talks about the Great Tribulation, he’s talking about his own era, and the era to come in his prophetic visions that describe the coming of Alexander, the coming of… ultimately, the coming of the Romans. This period: why is this a great tribulation? Well, because this is the period when what’s left of Israel—Judea, the tribe of Judah, the tribe of Benjamin, some Levites: that’s sort of the remnant that’s left—in which they are not in control of their own land, they’re under the oppression of foreign powers, the abomination of desolation happens.

When you do get some kind of independent Judea under the Hasmoneans, they’re throwing the Torah out left and right, to the point you have John Hyrcanus being both king and high priest at the same time. They’re playing fast and loose with the Scriptures. The Temple gets rebuilt but then gets built upon by Herod, who’s an Idumean, also not a great guy morally. [Laughter] So from the perspective all the way up until the time of Christ—the time of Christ’s incarnation, the time when he calls his disciples, the time when he’s preaching in Galilee and Judea—all the way up to that time period, this is what is considered the Great Tribulation. The idea is that this great tribulation is going to be ended when the Messiah comes to deliver his people. When the Messiah comes to deliver Israel, that’s going to be the hinge-point again that’s going to inaugurate the next age. And until— From their perspective, all they had to do to prove that the Messiah hadn’t come yet was kind of look around.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] “Things are terrible!”

Fr. Stephen: And this is still— If you talk to an Orthodox Jewish person today, this is their biggest point of counter-evidence when they’re going to say that Jesus is not the Messiah, is they’ll say: “Look around. Does this look like… to you?” [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: We’ll talk about that.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. From their perspective, they’ve continued to be afflicted, oppressed, a tiny remnant. So they’ve kind of maintained this view that predominated in the first century. So the Great Tribulation that’s ended by the Messiah is not a future thing in Daniel; it is a current state of affairs in Daniel. It was what was going on that that time and would continue going on. Everything with Antiochus Epiphanes, everything with the Romans, everything— all the beasts in sequence that Daniel describes, that we talked about a little bit last time. And all of this is then looking forward to this messianic age that’s going to be inaugurated by the coming of the Messiah, of the Christ, when he comes.

Fr. Andrew: And that’s what we’re going to talk about in the next half, so we’re going to go ahead and take our first break, and we’ll be right back with The Lord of Spirits.

Fr. Andrew: Thanks, Voice of Steve. He promises, he delivers—immediately! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yes. Well, I mean, to be fair, he does do that read live every single time, so sometimes he gets a little distracted or something.

Fr. Andrew: He’s calling in from Queens, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Also, let me say this. One of our previous metropolitans, at a certain point, said, “You know what? No more churches named St. George or St. Nicholas. We’ve got too many. We need to vary this up a little more. We need our churches to be named after different saints.” I’d like to issue a call to all of the Orthodox bishops in the Americas: No more Fathers Stephen. [Laughter] I was Fr. Stephen before it was cool, but now it’s getting really confusing.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] They’re everywhere!

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: It’s not that you can’t ordain a guy named Stephen, it’s just you’re going to have to change his name.

Fr. Stephen: Change it! I don’t know any Fr. Barsanouphi…-i. [Laughter] Right?

Fr. Andrew: I’m sure there’s somebody out there. I mean, there’s lots of names!

Fr. Stephen: I’m just saying, there’s lots of good saints’ names!

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there’s plenty. It’s actually great. We are live. I had someone ask me on YouTube, “Is this pre-recorded, or are you, like, multitasking or something?” But we are live. We actually have, right now, live listeners from Japan, Australia, and Costa Rica, at least, and I’m sure plenty from the good ol’ US of A as well. So, yeah, it’s pretty— Oh yes, our Costa Rican listener says that their mission is named St. Nicholas. [Laughter] He’s apologizing for that.

Fr. Stephen: Ask our Japanese listener if he’s excited about Forbidden Door.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, well, we’ll see what he says to that. So, meanwhile, we actually do have a caller here. Erin, we have you calling, and are you on the line?

Erin: Yes! Yes, I am. Can you guys hear me?

Fr. Andrew: We hear you! Welcome, Erin, to The Lord of Spirits podcast. What are you thinking about?

Erin: Well, I’m surprised I got in, first, but—

Fr. Andrew: You’re in! You made it, man!

Erin: Yeah! So I have been thinking a lot lately about— I really like the movie Metropolis. It’s like 19th century leading into the 20th century, just on the topic of kind of like millennium hysteria. But that movie had this conceptualization of Molech as this symbol of industrial society, like, eating people. I always— I mean, lately, I’ve been thinking about how similar, in this way, Molech as the old idea and then Mammon as the idea of money over everything, greed, this kind of spiritual pollutant. So I was thinking about how these two kind of come together. I know often the ¿Por qué no los dos? answer, but are these things to be thought of as symbols of sin or entities unto themselves? Are they the same? Are they different modalities of the evil of this century now, or are they just the same thing?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Well, there are lot of demons around—fewer than there were, thanks be to God; fewer than there were. But, yeah, there’s a lot of demons around. As we said before, they’re lying chaos monsters, so how can we tell if there’s one particular spirit that’s doing one thing and then another one that’s doing something else? That’s super hard to tell. And even— They’ve got Moloch, Molech, Mammon, etc., that are mentioned specifically in Scripture as names, but those could represent a bunch of different spirits, potentially. We just kind of don’t know. They don’t stand up and show us their IDs. [Laughter]

Erin: We couldn’t believe them if they did.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Right, exactly! Because they’re lying chaos monsters! So, I don’t know. Father, do you have anything you want to add or subtract or whatever?

Fr. Stephen: Well, I mean, first of all, kudos for liking German expressionist cinema.

Erin: My favorite genre of film.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. You’ve seen M, I assume?

Erin: Of course.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, great movie. Anyway, we won’t turn this into a movie podcast, but yeah. I think it’s incontrovertible, if we’re trying to determine what are the gods that our society is inadvertently worshiping— And I agree with you that that movie is kind of insightful in that respect, that there is this worship of profit and success and indulgence, which is basically what we’re talking about when we’re talking about Mammon. And it is a kind of worship that demands the sacrifice of children and family and social bonds. It is sort of: everything solid melts into air. It’s just this corrosive aspect.

I mean, I think there is definitely something there. As Fr. Andrew said, we can’t— Demons don’t wear a nametag that says, “Hello, my name is… Mammon.” “My name is Moloch. I’m the exact same guy as was in the valley of Hinnom.” [Laughter] But that is definitely the thread that has been behind a lot of the drive of our society. This has a concrete thing. In the United States, Roe v. Wade gets overturned and immediately Amazon steps up and says, “Oh, we’ll pay for abortions. We don’t want people taking maternity leave. We want to keep them at work.”

And you look at the way, at a certain point in the mid-20th century, women get told, “Hey, we’re going to empower you; we’re going to liberate you from being chained to the oven. You’re going to be able to go out and have a career.” And then women entering the workforce creates an abundance of labor, drives down wages. And now everybody needs to have a two-income household, go figure. And now instead of being free, now everybody’s enslaved to have to work just to try to support themselves, when they used to be able to be supported on one income, and what that’s done to the family. And now in states all over the US at least, they’re trying to repeal child labor laws and lower the working age. So soon it’s going to be all the teenage kids who are going to have to go out and get jobs to support their families, too.

So when I talk about the corrosion of social bonds, I’m not just talking on a theoretical level; I’m talking about at a really practical level, that our worship of this prosperity and success and indulgence and a lifestyle is destroying our social bonds and destroying our humanity. If that’s not demonic, I sort of don’t know what is. So all that is to say yes.

Erin: [Laughter] Great!

Fr. Andrew: That’s not depressing at all!

Erin: No, not great! Not great, but good to know.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, I gave you the long answer first and then the short answer this time. Varied it up a little bit.

Erin: I will just say, I am eagerly awaiting Forbidden Door.

Fr. Stephen: Okay, good. What match are you most excited about?

Fr. Andrew: I think Okada-Danielson.

Fr. Stephen: That’s obvious, yeah. If you said anything else, I would have questioned you. [Laughter]

Erin: Match of a lifetime.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, seriously.

Fr. Andrew: All right. Well, thank you very much for calling in, Erin. I’ve just gotten notes that we have a listener from Sweden right now, which— That’s dedication, because it’s two in the morning in Sweden. You know, the people out in the Pacific Rim, it’s just 9:00 a.m., 10:00 a.m., depending on where they are. We have an Alaskan listener as well, so I think it’s still afternoon there, but, good for you, Björn from Sweden! That is the most Swedish name ever.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, that is pretty Swedish. That’s legit.

Fr. Andrew: I won’t mention his last name, because I don’t want to out him, but his last name is very Swedish as well, so an actual Swede.

Fr. Stephen: It’s not Björnson, I hope.

Fr. Andrew: No. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Björn Björnson would be a little too typical.

Fr. Andrew: But amazing!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, we do have a couple more callers, so next is Phil. So, Phil, welcome to The Lord of Spirits podcast.

Phil: Oh, hey, Fathers! I called back during one of the Q&A sessions. I’m a fellow from South Carolina that you talked to.

Fr. Andrew: Welcome back!

Phil: I had a question about— You mentioned a word, aion? Am I pronouncing that right?

Fr. Andrew: Sure.

Fr. Stephen: Roughly, give or take.

Phil: Is that related to the word “eon” as a period of time?

Fr. Andrew: Oh, good, a philological question! [Laughter] I got this.

Fr. Stephen: And you could do etymology.

Fr. Andrew: That’s right! I don’t have my jingle ready to roll. [Laughter] Oh, well. I don’t! Man, I feel lost. So, yes, “eon” is— It gets spelled in different ways in English, like “eon,” e-o-n, but also a-e-o-n, which betrays its roots. So in English we get it from Latin, and Latin just borrows it straight from Greek, aion, so it’s directly descended from the Greek term that we were talking about earlier. And ultimately it comes from a Proto-Indo-European root that seems to have meant something like “lifetime” or “a long time,” but also even used to mean things like “eternity” as well. So there’s another related Greek word, aei, spelled alpha-epsiolon-iota, which means “always.” There’s a good old archaic English word, aye, a-y-e, which isn’t really used very much any more except to mean yes, but like in a naval context, like “Aye, aye, sir!”

Fr. Stephen: Or in the old comic books that came with Masters of the Universe figures. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Oh, that’s true. But it also meant “forever.” So, yeah, the English word “eon” is directly descended from the Greek aion.

Phil: Okay, so it really is kind of the same word.

Fr. Andrew: Well… yeah. I think that the way that it is used in English even now, yes. I mean, words do change over the centuries, but I think that English “eon” is essentially what we mean by it: a period of time, an age. I might say, “I’ve been doing this for eons,” which is hyperbole—I don’t mean I’ve been doing it for thousands of years, but a long period of time. Or “it’s been an eon since we were speaking Middle English,” whatever.

Phil: Oh, okay. All right, that answers that question. I appreciate it. I listened to myself the last time I called, and I realize that I had laid on my accent a little too hard and I sounded like Foghorn Leghorn, so I was trying to tone that down today.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] By no means!

Phil: So anyway, I appreciate y’all, the show—and this is a good show.

Fr. Andrew: Thank God. I’m always happy to hear from Southerners. I lived in the South for a good long time, and I love the South. Love it.

Phil: Well, I’ll go eat some grits for you.

Fr. Andrew: Aw, thank you!

Fr. Stephen: Crack open a Cheerwine for me.

Phil: Yeah!

Fr. Andrew: See, I’m surprised you didn’t say— “Grits,” really, right. See, in certain parts of the South, that’s a multi-syllabic word, like: “gri-yuts.”

Phil: “Gri-yits,” yeah. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: I don’t know how you say it in South Carolina, though, but I’ve heard “gri-yits.” Alamabans will say that, I think. Yeah.

Phil: Well, you can’t just talk about a “grit.” There’s no such thing as a “grit.”

Fr. Andrew: A single grit, yeah. [Laughter]

Phil: Yeah, you don’t eat a grit; you eat grits.

Fr. Andrew: No, it’s not a thing! How would you do that, with tweezers? [Laughter] All right, thanks very much for calling, Phil. We’re going to take one more call before we continue on, and we’ve got Brett on the line.

Fr. Stephen: I’m going to be honest, I was kind of hoping for a follow-up on Æon Flux.

Fr. Andrew: Oh. Well, yeah. Sorry. [Laughter] So, Brett. Are you there, Brett?

Brett: Yes, Fathers, I’m here.

Fr. Andrew: All right! Welcome to The Lord of Spirits podcast. What is on your mind?

Fr. Stephen: This is a person I know.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, is it?

Brett: This is a person you know, Fr. Stephen.

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: Is it that Brett, or—? [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: It’s that Brett, but— Yeah, you’ve met him, I think, Fr. Andrew.

Brett: We did meet at the clerical retreat, about a year ago now.

Fr. Andrew: Okay.

Fr. Stephen: At least it’s not the— Go ahead.

Brett: My true question is getting Fr. Stephen’s opinion on something in the 41st millennium, since we’re talking about millenniums today, but I’ll refrain from asking that and focus on this current millennium. So in the show before, you have related Rome to America, and you just finished mentioning about the visions in Daniel and that relating to the fall of Rome and the fall of that age. Since Rome was an icon of that age, we could say maybe America is an icon of this current age? Would the fall of American then bring the downfall of this current age and the welcoming of a new one?

Fr. Andrew: Wow. How important is America? What do you think, Fr. Stephen? [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Not very, so no.

Fr. Andrew: There you go.

Fr. Stephen: Now that’ll tick some people off! There’s probably some people freaking out about that.

Fr. Andrew: No one ever asks about the place of Latvia in biblical prophecy!

Fr. Stephen: Yes, exactly. Do the Latvians not even?

Fr. Andrew: I don’t know, honestly. I didn’t want to throw out Lithuania because I didn’t want to be ethnocentric.

Fr. Stephen: Because I know the Serbs think they were the first-created humans.

Fr. Andrew: That’s true, they say that! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: From Hubal, other humans are descended.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] The garden of Eden is somewhere in Kosovo…

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yes, Adam and Eve were Serbs. Yeah, so the answer to that is no, in that… So it’s correct that America is sort of an instantiation of the beast, a world empire in the present day, in our present day. But your core question is really about how the lifespan of the United States of America relates to the age as a whole. And within the age in which we’re currently living, which we’re going to be talking about more here in the second half, America is even— The US as an existing thing is a relative newcomer. I mean, you had the British Empire before that, you had other colonial empires, which were also instantiations of that same sort of reality. In fact, America really became an imperial kind of state after World War II, when the British Empire finally keeled over after long death throes. So I don’t think it has that kind of pivotal role.

Now, as we were talking about with the antichrist in the last episode, I mean, eventually there will be a last one. Eventually there will be some embodiment, some kind of world empire embodiment of Leviathan, of the beast, when Christ returns, when Christ’s glorious appearing happens. But we have no necessary reason to believe that that’s still going to be the US. The US could cease to exist; the US could just cease to be an empire the way Britain did, and things could roll on without us. Yeah. For all those folks who are listening who aren’t in America, I’m sure they think America is weird in this respect, that we think we’re that important! [Laughter] In fact, I have seen photos of a textbook used in German schools where they use American patriotism as an example of government indoctrination and propaganda.

Fr. Andrew: Nice.

Fr. Stephen: The Germans.

Fr. Andrew: Wow! [Laughter] Wow.

Fr. Stephen: But yeah. We think we’re very exceptional and that, you know— Just like in St. Augustine’s day, the end of that world order was the end of the world, period, to them, and he’s kind of like: ehhh… We need to hear the same message in the United States: the end of the United States is not the end of the world necessarily.

Fr. Andrew: It might be the end of our world. We might get onto the Fall of Civilizations podcast! Hey!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah.

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

Brett: Thank you for the answers, Fathers.

Fr. Andrew: Yep. All right. The messianic age. That’s what we’re doing on the second half of this here podcast. Not for an age, but for all time!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. So the age to which, during the Great Tribulation, as we said, the people at the time of Christ were looking forward to is the messianic age, the age of the Christ, of the Messiah. So when they talk about it in Jewish literature, when they talk about the transition, they tend to compare it to previous transitional events. So they’re looking forward to this transition. They’re like: this event is going to happen, the coming of the Messiah; that is going to transition us into this messianic age. As a way to understand it before the fact, they look to previous transitions.

For example, when you read the Enochic literature, the Enochic literature is all using the days of Noah and the approaching of the flood to talk about the coming of the Messiah and the coming of the day of the Lord, the day of Yahweh, by way of comparison. This is narrated in 1 Enoch, to a lesser degree in 2 Enoch, where— In 1 Enoch repeatedly, because 1 Enoch is this composite of several different texts, but we have— There’s a book of Noah that’s incorporated into 1 Enoch, that’s sort of directly dealing with this: the birth of Noah, and Noah being portrayed as this messianic figure through whom the world is going to be saved and they’re going to transition into this new age, free from all the sin and wickedness of that age.

Fr. Andrew: Is that the one where he’s born glowing and talking?

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah!

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] And so we get this idea that— And they portray Noah’s day— We don’t actually see described in the text of Scripture that there’s this sort of direct persecution of Noah and his family, that sort of the surrounding people are out to destroy him, but that does become a factor in the Enochic literature, because again this comparison is being made to the Great Tribulation and the things that are happening to Judea during this period from which Noah’s going to deliver them. And so, looking at: Okay, let’s look at that transition and use that as a window into this transition that we’re hoping and praying for as we go through this period of tribulation.

So that’s in the Enochic literature; that’s pretty much extra-biblical. But bits of that do come into the New Testament. As in the days of Noah, when people are married and given in marriage before the flood came, so will it be in the day of the Son of Man, when Christ returns. So you see some of those themes get picked up and used in a slightly different way in the New Testament once Jesus of Nazareth has come as the Messiah.

Probably the most well-known way this is known, though, this is described, prospectively, looking forward from the Old Testament, is as a new covenant, that a new covenant is going to come. And when it’s talked about in terms of a new covenant, we have to remember that what’s being talked about here, what’s really happening here, is that this transitional event that’s going to lead into the messianic age, is being compared to the giving of the covenant at Mount Sinai, which was that transitional moment into the age of the Hebrew Scriptures, into the age of most of the Old Testament. And so this is again a comparison being made to a transitional event, in this case not the flood but the giving of the Torah at Sinai and the ordering of the world and of Israel’s place in it that happened at that time. Probably the most famous Hebrew Bible/Christian Old Testament text regarding the new covenant comes from Jeremiah 31.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. So this is verses 31 through 34.

“Behold, the days are coming,” declares the Lord, “when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah, not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt—my covenant that they broke though I was their husband,” declares the Lord. “For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days,” declares the Lord. “I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people. And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest,” declares the Lord. “For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.”

It’s interesting to me, one of the things I noticed about this is that the new covenant is described as being with Israel, not with some other entity.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. With Israel and Judah. So it’s explicitly talking about here the northern kingdom of Israel, which has ceased to exist, because it’s been scattered out among the nations. And so this is a promise of reuniting, because then he switches to— First he says new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah; and then he says, “This is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel,” because once they’re reunited, they’re Israel. So the New Testament authors, especially St. Paul in Romans 9-11—this is what Romans 9-11 is actually about, especially 10 and 11—[are] going to see the Gentiles being grafted in as this restoration of the northern kingdom. But, yes, in terms of our poor dispensationalist friends who are going to be battered over the course of the evening, the new covenant is not with a new group. [Laughter] This is not: “This is the new covenant I will make with this new group of Gentiles that I’m going to call the Church.”

A couple more passages that talk about the new covenant are in Ezekiel.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so the first one is Ezekiel 11:19-20.

And I will give them one heart, and a new spirit I will put within them. I will remove the heart of stone from their flesh and give them a heart of flesh, that they may walk in my statutes and keep my rules and obey them. And they shall be my people, and I will be their God.

There’s that covenant language again, “they shall be my people and I will be their God.”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And the other one is a little later in Ezekiel.

Fr. Andrew: And it repeats some of the same kind of language. So this is Ezekiel 36:26-32.

“And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my spirit within you and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules. You shall dwell in the land that I gave to your fathers. And you shall be my people and I will be your God. And I will deliver you from all your uncleannesses. And I will summon the grain and make it abundant and lay no famine upon you. I will make the fruit of the tree and the increase of the field abundant, that you may never again suffer the disgrace of famine among the nations. Then you will remember your evil ways and your deeds that were not good, and you will loathe yourselves for your iniquities and your abominations. It is not for your sake that I will act,” declares the Lord God. “Let that be known to you. Be ashamed and confounded for your ways, O house of Israel.”

Fr. Stephen: So that last little bit is kind of countering what would become the predominant at the time of Christ Pharisaic view, which— The Pharisaic view of that time makes pretty good sense. On a logical level, they said, “Look, sinning got us into this mess. Violating the Torah got us into this mess. So if we could all just obey Torah, then God will respond by sending them Messiah.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, but he says, “It’s not for your sake that I will act.” [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Right. And so this runs sort of counter to that. But it’s important to keep in mind what is reflected here, because these are all prophetic not in the sense of being uttered by a prophet but also in the sense in which we commonly use it, of talking about the future. This is God talking about what he will do when the new covenant comes, what he will do when the new covenant comes. And he is not characterizing this as abolishing the old covenant. He is not talking about this as abolishing the Torah. Quite the opposite.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s that it becomes internal now. It’s going to be in your heart, because the Spirit is going to be within you so that you can live out the Torah.

Fr. Stephen: Right. The Spirit is going to empower. The Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God, capital-S Spirit, is going to come into you and empower you to keep it. That’s how it’s going to be different [from] last time. It’s not going to be different [from] last time because last time you had all these rules and now we don’t worry about rules any more; now we just go: “Hey, man. It’s all good; it’s cool.” It’s different in that before they failed to keep the Torah because they couldn’t do it under their power, and now the Holy Spirit is going to be placed in them. They’re going to receive a heart of flesh, and the Holy Spirit in them is going to empower them to keep what St. Paul will call the righteous requirements of the Law. [It] will be kept in them.

So in the new covenant there is no lowering of the bar.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] If anything, there’s a raising!

Fr. Stephen: Yes! There is no scrapping of the— There is an empowering to do. That’s what’s going on here. And so when St. Paul talks about the letter and the Spirit or he talks about the Law and the Spirit, he’s not contrasting these in the sense of saying, “Law bad, Spirit good.” He’s saying the letter, trying to keep the Torah, historically Israel failed, but now, walking by the Spirit, now we can keep Torah; now we can keep the righteous requirements of the Torah that God has for us, empowered by the Holy Spirit. This is what he’s getting at when in Galatians he lays out the fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against these things there is no law. That by the Holy Spirit dwelling within us and producing those fruit, it has the effect of us keeping the Torah. If we love our brother, we’re not going to harm him or to do evil to him. And we’re not going to be envious and jealous. If we’re at peace, we’re not going to be at strife. And so this is the Holy Spirit empowering us to go further.

This isn’t just something Fr. Stephen came up with to argue against Protestantism or to hang out with his cool Paul-within-Judaism buds in scholarly circles; this is how St. John Chrysostom reads Romans. If you want the key element, you can go and read them, his homilies on Romans. The key element of his interpretation all the way through that St. John Chrysostom points out is that the Holy Spirit empowers us to keep the Law, the righteous requirements of the Law, as Christians. Over and over again he says that, as he’s interpreting and reading St. Paul. I know we’re not supposed to quote patristics on this show. [Laughter] There’s like a rule. We never do it, but, oopsie, I just did.

Fr. Andrew: Take that, Twitter! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: So now, of course, within this concept of the new covenant, there comes to be that the shifting light at the end of your tunnel is just a freight train coming your way—no, that’s another— There comes to be a whole school of theology called covenant theology, and if you’re like me and you grew up in Reformed circles and you use the word “covenant” online as an Orthodox priest, you will be accused of being still secretly a Calvinist. Let me just tell you from personal experience. You can’t even use the word “covenant,” because then they’ll say, “Augh! You hold to covenant theology!”

Fr. Andrew: It’s in the Bible. The word is in the Bible.

Fr. Stephen: Berith, people. Diathiki. So what covenant theology is is—and this is particularly popular in English Reformed circles more than continental Reformed circles, though there’s some of it in continental Reformed circles, but it’s primarily in English Reformed, meaning Presbyterian circles— Covenant theology takes this paradigm of the age inaugurated by the giving of the covenant at Sinai and then the messianic age is inaugurated by the giving of the new covenant; and then takes that covenant framework and uses it as the lens through which the whole Scriptures are read. Doing that in some cases provides helpful insights, and in some cases is reductionist, meaning it causes you to miss things, because when all you’ve got’s a hammer, everything starts looking like a nail—you start trying to hammer screws in, it doesn’t go so well—and you start missing things, because you’ve got this very narrow grid that you’re looking at things through.

And then in actual Reformed covenant theology, it kind of gets out of control and gets to the point where you’re talking about intra-Trinitarian covenants in eternity, like a covenant between God the Father and God the Son in eternity.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah… That’s… Like, it just blows my mind to even conceptualize that.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. And even when I was studying this stuff in a Reformed seminary at one point in my life, I kind of thought the idea that God the Father, in eternity past, issued God the Son a Hittite suzerainty treaty was a little weird. [Laughter] And maybe, again, a little reductionist. And this is something to which all scholars are prone and to which I am probably prone. I probably have blind spots related to this that I’m not aware of, where you find a good insight and it’s really helpful for understanding certain things, and you latch onto it, but then you just try and use it like a skeleton key everywhere. So some of your results are often weird. Some of the places where I’m wrong, I’m sure that’s why, so I’m not criticizing… I am admittedly prone to the same criticism, I’m sure, in various ways, but that’s ultimately where covenant theology kind of goes sideways, as helpful as it is in some cases, in some instances, for understanding parts of Scripture.

Dispensationalism proper is a sort of subspecies of covenant theology. The word “dispensation” is being used in place of the word “covenant.” Thomas Darby, who is credited with sort of inventing dispensationalism, was a Presbyterian and was coming out of a covenant theology milieu. And so part of what separates, then, dispensationalism as such is a question of the level of continuity and discontinuity between the covenants or the dispensations.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. I mean, I was raised with this stuff. It was taught in most of the churches that I grew up in. At least the way that it filtered down to me as a kid, I guess—but I think this is still generally true with dispensationalists—the key part is the idea that God sets up this dispensation of the Old Testament, and this is how you get salvation, is by obeying the Law. And that dispensation is still in play for Jews now: they can obey all the Law and they’ll be saved. And then there’s another dispensation, which is the dispensation of grace, and that’s how Christians get saved: you become a Christian by doing that. And so there’s this idea— It’s not just the idea that there’s different eras, but that there’s different deals that you can attain salvation through. You can either go obey all the Law or you can accept Jesus into your heart and acknowledge him as the Lord of your life. I mean, there’s a lot of people that still— They’ll say things like, “Judaism is completely valid, and if you really do that, then you can be saved, but Christianity also,” and so there’s this sort of side-by-side, two different paths that you can potentially take.

And that’s the way that it kind of plays out for a lot of people. Of course, this not only has big theological implications, but it has geopolitical implications and all kinds of other stuff that we don’t need to get into, but, I mean, dispensationalism is really—

Fr. Stephen: That whole thing is really Lincoln’s fault, but I’m not going to say any more than that.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] See, it’s always some Yankee! No. But, yeah, it’s not just some weird little corner of Protestantism; it has a huge impact actually on the way a lot of people think.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and so there’s this fundamental discontinuity between the dispensations, rather than continuity. They are fundamentally different; they are separate. There’s no overlap; the Venn diagram is two circles next to each other, of the dispensations.

So how is a dispensation, or even a covenant, really, in the way it’s talked about in covenant theology—how is that different from what we’re talking about when we’re talking about these different ages? So when we talk about different ages, we’re talking about different metaphysical realities, even though “metaphysical reality” is kind of redundant. [Laughter] We’re talking about different structurings of the cosmos, different fundamental structurings of the human person, the world in which humans live, and therefore the relationship between and the experience of the world that those humans have. There’s a metaphysical element; there’s a real element to it that is transformed in these transitions from age to age.

This is, by the way, since we’re in this new covenant context— Every once in a while I get asked the question, especially around Pentecost—we’re talking about Pentecost— Well, now everyone has the Holy Spirit. In the old covenant, only these certain select people had the Holy Spirit. We’ve talked about this on the show before. “Well, how’s it different?” Like, in function: Does it feel different?” I get asked this question! [laughter] Did humans in the old covenant who didn’t have the Holy Spirit within them feel differently than I feel now, having been chrismated?

Fr. Andrew: I mean, how would you know how to—?

Fr. Stephen: Exactly! Because, to an extent, humans were different then; humans were ordered differently then. This transition has taken place: this is a different world in a sense—not a materially different world, like that world ceased to exist and was destroyed and a new one was created ex nihilo, like the matter. But it’s been reordered.

Fr. Andrew: And human consciousness, I would say, has a different character. That’s evident even now between cultures. Now, we have more in common now with each other than we would with an ancient person, but there is a different sense— Now, I learned this recently, and I’m sure I’m getting this wrong on some level, but I learned recently that Korean, the Korean language, has different sets of verbs and vocabulary that you use depending on the formality of the relationship of the other person you’re talking to. English has nothing like this except for there’s a sense that there’s certain words you shouldn’t say in certain situations, like that they’re bad words.

Fr. Stephen: Profanity, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: But you’re not using fundamentally different grammar and nouns to talk to your superior versus your kid. So that’s a very different way of thinking, and that’s just between cultures that exist now.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And so we’re talking about a whole different metaphysical structure, whereas, as Fr. Andrew was kind of indicating, the idea of a dispensation or even of a covenant is it’s sort of a deal. It’s a set of conditions leading to the reward of salvation, meaning it’s not metaphysical. The difference is not how a human is ordered or the nature of the human person or the nature of the world around them; the difference is just: “Well, this person living at this time needs to do this to inherit eternal life, and this other person living at this other time needs to do that.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s like the laws have changed, like getting a green card in 2023 to the US is different than getting it in 1940.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And so that means transitions—the transitions between ages as we’ve talked about are these transformations, sometimes kind of apocalyptic in the more common, modern sense of the word, transitions from one world, one ordering of things, to another. Whereas in covenant theology or dispensationalism, it’s sort of— Literally with covenant theology it’s the issuing of a new document, the cutting of a new covenant. “Here are the new terms of it.”

This is not coincidental. This is built into the different ways in which classically Protestantism, especially Reformed Protestantism, and Orthodoxy see salvation.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because the big question in Protestant soteriology is: What is my relationship to God? And it’s broken, so I need to fix it—which is just another way of working through the satisfaction theology that was already present there when the Reformation came on the scene.

Fr. Stephen: Right. It’s a relational, it’s not a metaphysical, it’s not an ontological transformation.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which is why you can even get Luther’s snow-covered dung thing. [Laughter] You’re still garbage, but God sees you differently now. I mean, that’s… I said it nicer than he did.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and this is across the board. We’re talking about transformation; we’re talking about theosis. What we were talking about before with St. John Chrysostom: “Christ kept the Law so you don’t have to, because you couldn’t anyway” versus “the Holy Spirit keeps it in you.” Those are two very different positions, and two very different ways of reading St. Paul, in Romans in particular. And so that plays out in our understanding of even history in this sense and of ages, that that same basic difference is reflected.

So the new covenant is one way that the messianic age gets talked about. Another way it gets talked about is in terms of this being the age of the Holy Spirit as we were just kind of mentioning. This is the age in which the Holy Spirit is going to be poured forth on all flesh. Of course, the locus classicus for that is in Joel 2.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. So Joel 2:28-32.

And it shall come to pass afterward that I will pour forth my spirit on all flesh. Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy. Your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions. Even on the male and female servants in those days I will pour out my spirit. And I will show wonders in the heavens and on the earth, blood and fire and columns of smoke. The sun shall be turned to darkness and the moon turned to blood before the great and awesome day of the Lord comes. And it shall come to pass that everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved, for on Mount Sion and in Jerusalem there shall be those who escape, as the Lord has said, and among the survivors shall be those whom the Lord calls.

Fr. Stephen: Obviously, this gets quoted at Pentecost in Acts as being fulfilled at that time. You can see how—we read a couple extra verses there in Joel—how the pouring out of the Spirit on all flesh is tied to this day of the Lord imagery, the day of Yahweh imagery, with the sun turning to darkness and the moon to blood. St. Luke of course applies that imagery to Christ’s crucifixion, and then of course at the end of his gospel and at the beginning of Acts we get the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.

It’s important to remember that this is Pentecost. Pentecost is the feast at which the giving of the Torah at Sinai is commemorated and the people recommit themselves to keeping the Torah. This imagery of the age of the Spirit is not sort of at odds with the new covenant imagery, the covenant at Sinai. This is looking at the same reality of the messianic age from another angle. And of course, those quotes on the new covenant talk about the Spirit coming and dwelling within people, too.

So we would be remiss in talking about the millennium and in talking about the age of the Spirit to not talk about Joaquin de Fiore.

Fr. Andrew: Whom everybody knows about: Joaquin de Fiore.

Fr. Stephen: Well, I thought folks did, but… you didn’t.

Fr. Andrew: I didn’t! I realized I had heard of him, and I was like: “I don’t… remember who this guy is…” Yeah, he’s late-12th, very, very early 13th: his dates are 1135-1202. And with a name like that, of course, he is Italian. So what’s his deal?

Fr. Stephen: And “Joaquin” is a form of “Joachim.” That’s the saint he’s named after. Joaquin de Fiore had a theory. It was a theory about the ages of the world, about how to periodize the history of the world and the future from his perspective at the very dawn of the 13th century. So he divided the whole history of the earth, of the world, into three ages based on the Holy Trinity. So this seems like an interesting thing to do. We like having things in threes, right? [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Sure!

Fr. Stephen: It’s good; it’s Trinitarian. And parts of this may even sound kind of intuitive. So he says the Old Testament period, from the creation of the world through the whole Christian Old Testament, this is the age of the Father.

Fr. Andrew: Okay. I mean, there’s people these days that kind of talk that way! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, that’s why I say it may even seem kind of intuitive to some people. You might see why he did this. Now, it is a little problematic when we start going into details as we have on the show before to say, “Oh, the God in the Old Testament is the Father.”

Fr. Andrew: Right, because sometimes God shows up and talks to God.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah! [Laughter] But okay. And then, beginning with the Incarnation, up until the year AD 1260—

Fr. Andrew: 1260, which happens to be—

Fr. Stephen: After his death.

Fr. Andrew: 58 years after Joaquin de Fiore dies.

Fr. Stephen: He says this is the age of the Son. Christ is born, lives, dies, is resurrected, ascends into heaven, and the Gospel goes out to all the nations of the world.

Fr. Andrew: And this period ends in the medieval period.

Fr. Stephen: In 1260.

Fr. Andrew: In the year 1260.

Fr. Stephen: He predicts it will end in 1260, and now here’s where things get a little interesting, because Joaquin de Fiore believes that in 1260 this will begin the third and final age, the age of the Holy Spirit, which is going to be this sort of utopian age, and it’s going to sort of be the end product of the Gospel having gone out to all the nations. Just in my description of that, some of our listeners who are familiar with more modern post-millennialism may see shades of that here: you’re not wrong. [Laughter] Joaquin de Fiore’s thought sets a bunch of these sort of theological thought-trends in the West in particular that then take these little currents and branch out in different ways. I at one point had a professor who swore that one of those rivulets down at the end of one of those branches was George William Frederick Hegel. But we definitely won’t go there right now.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I mean, one thing that’s kind of amazing to me is that if this utopian— I mean, I would hope it would be obvious that de Fiore is wrong about these things? If only because 80-some years after his utopian age commences, the Black Death sweeps through Europe and kills a third of the population! Not so good.

Fr. Stephen: Right, but you’ve got to remember what history has shown us. Humans have a great ability to look at something like this and say, “This guy had great ideas. He just got the dates wrong.” [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Right! My personal favorite being what was called the Great Disappointment in the 19th century, where Jesus was supposed to come back in—what was it?—1844, in October of 1844. And he doesn’t. And they’re like: “Oh, actually, he did, but it was… a thing that happened in… heaven! Yeah. It was a thing that happened in heaven.”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. So that’s sort of what happens here with Joaquin. And Joaquin himself is never condemned as a heretic, but just about everybody who picks up where he left off with his ideas does end up getting condemned as a heretic. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so there’s some interesting groups. There’s the Amalricians—A-m-a-l-r-i-c-i-a-n-s—the Dulcinians, and then—this is my favorite—the Brethren of the Free Spirit.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, all of which were condemned by Rome. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because all were in the medieval West.

Fr. Stephen: But also there’s shades of this in post-millennialism, and even in things like utopian socialism, and there’s even shades of it, I think— I think you’d have a better case for this being an influence on Marx and some of the early Marxists than on Hegel himself, this idea that— Although they take it in a material way— This idea of there being—humanity growing toward this utopian end, that all of this is going to resolve itself into utopia being brought about by the spread of the Gospel.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. As an interesting side-note, apparently there are some— And I’m not a scholar of this stuff, but there are some who say he influenced Dante. Kind of an interesting read, I guess.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. So he’s a fascinating guy, and his thought is fascinating, but there don’t seem to be a lot of really strong, cohesive tethers of it to, say, Scripture or preceding Christian tradition.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s just sort of a neat model in a certain way, but what is he basing it all on?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And especially once— So, I mean, if you really dig into it, there’s a reason why he picked 1260. He was working with numbers in the Bible regarding ages. And even though it’s very easy for us to say, “Hey, these are cool ideas; he just got the numbers wrong,” eventually if the numbers are wrong, the whole theory falls apart, because some of it is based on the math, so you can only kind of do that to a limited degree, unless, again— unless you take it in a purely materialist way, and then it’s like: yeah, it doesn’t have to be connected to the Bible or anything. It’s just: this is a good idea; let’s bring about a utopia on earth, through education or revolution or whatever. That hasn’t worked so well either, historically.

Fr. Andrew: I’m sure it’ll work this time. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: And that’s… I mean, I think that has to color how we then look at the views that are downstream of his, including post-millennialism. That there sort of isn’t a strong tether in Christian tradition for them.

Fr. Andrew: No. Yeah, I mean, from his point of view, he thinks that his age is going to end in just a few decades, so this sense of: “It’s all coming!”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. “We’re in this transitional period.”

Fr. Andrew: I mean, this is a thing that’s still with us. There are even, God bless them, some Orthodox people who are like: “Aw, yes! It’s the age of the antichrist!” or whatever. We talked about that last time. But that’s— This is where this stuff comes from. Millennarianism is not Orthodox.

Fr. Stephen: There are Orthodox sources, especially modern ones, that are probably clearly under some German influence, where you can see shades of this kind of thing. In Brothers Karamazov, Elder Zosima’s speech about how the Church will expand to encompass the whole universe is this kind of post-millennial, de Fiore kind of thinking a little bit.

Fr. Andrew: Interesting.

Fr. Stephen: So that did rub up against the Orthodox Church, too, in a few places in the modern period.

Those are a couple of ways that the messianic age is talked about, but obviously the most common way the messianic age is talked about is that it’s the age of the Messiah—hence “messianic age.” [Laughter] That is kind of clearly talked about and described with reference to the Messiah in a couple of places in Isaiah, or at least a couple of representative places in Isaiah.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. So one is from Isaiah 2:4.

He shall judge between the nations and decide disputes for many peoples, and they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning-hooks. Nations shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.

It’s that sense of peace and the nations no longer going to war with each other, and God himself deciding disputes between them.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and this is the “He” being the Messiah: the Messiah judging between the nations. So he’s governing the world; he’s governing over all the nations of the world.

Fr. Andrew: So there’s another one from Isaiah 11:6-9—

Fr. Stephen: Which spawned a thousand cheesy paintings and sculptures.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] It’s true! Yeah… So this is going to be very familiar.

The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the young goat, and the calf and the lion and the fattened calf together, and a little child shall lead them. The cow and the bear shall graze; their young shall lie down together, and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. The nursing child shall play over the hole of the cobra, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the adder’s den. They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain, for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.

You know, it’s interesting in a lot of the cheesy paintings, you never see kids sticking their hands in snakes’ holes. I don’t know why they don’t paint that.

Fr. Stephen: No. But more importantly, what you usually see is a lion lying down with a lamb.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, rather than a wolf.

Fr. Stephen: Rather than a wolf. This—I don’t know if you know this, Fr. Andrew—this verse is an example of the Mandela effect.

Fr. Andrew: Ohh! [Laughter] Is it?

Fr. Stephen: Where everybody remembers it “the lion shall dwell with the lamb,” but when you look it up in all the bibles, it’s “the wolf shall dwell…”

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I have to imagine that somebody out there that’s claiming that the bibles are being— This is a thing that people say! That bibles are being edited by some mysterious force.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, no, it’s the Hadron Collider! It caused a number of us to transition from one parallel world to another, and so we become aware of these small differences now.

Fr. Andrew: Wow.

Fr. Stephen: From the world in which we previously lived before the Large Hadron Collider shifted us, like “Berenstain Bears” was spelled different, and Sinbad was in a movie called Shazaam that came out at the same time as Shaq’s Kazaam movie. [Laughter] And this verse said “lion” instead of “wolf.” And Nelson Mandela died in prison and was never released, in that universe. This is well-documented. That’s why it’s called the Mandela effect. This is well-documented. I’m not serious—or am I?

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] What a world we live in.

Fr. Stephen: Compared to the one we used to live in. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: But only some know!

Fr. Stephen: Look it up! It’ll trip you out! There’s all kinds of things you remember that aren’t actually true.

But, that aside, the image here is a re-ordering of the cosmos. There’s still all these animals, but things have been re-ordered so that there’s no longer enmity between animals and animals, and humans and animals. This is an image of that re-ordering. And this is not just— There’s this language here again of the—which is going to become important; we’re going to talk about this more as we go forward—of the knowledge of God covering the earth as— or the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. This is parallel to that that we saw in the new covenant language: “No one shall teach his brother saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ because everyone will know, from the least to the greatest.” We’re going to come back to that, but, again, we can see again this same language being used here, even though now we’re talking about that age in terms of the Messiah and his ruling and governance of the earth; the same kind of language is being used. So again, this is another perspective on the same reality, of this re-ordered messianic age.

There is this sort of trope where ages are reflected in thousands of years, as in “a thousand years.” And this is a tradition that you find throughout Second Temple Judaism, and this is—again, don’t worry, Young Earth creation folks, this is not the day-age view as you have come to know it—but that associates ages with the days of creation in such a way that the history of the world, they believe, will be 6,000 years.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, six days of creation, 6,000 years: it kind of nicely lines up.

Fr. Stephen: With the seventh thousand years being the messianic age. And this is not something that kind of gets given up after Second Temple Judaism. In fact, among a number of Hasidic groups within contemporary Rabbinic Judaism, they have pegged this date when the sixth thousand years ends at 2240, AD 2240.

Fr. Andrew: Wow, so Joaquin de Fiore was only wrong by 980 years.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, a little less than a thousand years. So they’ve got it pegged there. But this kind of thinking is why, in the year 1000, in the year AD 1000, people all over Europe sold their belongings and possessions and went on these pilgrimages, because they were expecting, in the year 1000, for Christ’s glorious appearing to take place. That was the first Great Disappointment, when nothing happened. And then, of course, those of us who are elderly, as covered in our introduction tonight, remember the year 2000 and Y2K, and how this was definitely going to be the end, because round numbers. And we had spent the whole previous year partying like it was 1999. [Laughter] With the presupposition that we were doing so— We were eating and drinking and being merry because tomorrow, January 1, 2000, we were all going to die—and then it didn’t happen.

Fr. Andrew: Because of the way that Unix counts time.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And people who weren’t there don’t understand this.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] They don’t remember! It really was this sense of apocalypticism even in the— And what was great was even in kind of non-religious discourse, there was this apocalypticism going on.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. I had a person yell at me and say I was sinning against the Lord by not having food supplies and generators for Y2K when civilization collapsed, because I was being irresponsible.

Fr. Andrew: Nice! Yeah, man, if you’re not a prepper, you’re not—

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yeah, people don’t realize. People really thought, “Oh, man. This is it.”

Fr. Andrew: I remember when I was in seminary, there was a guy I lived next to for a year who had— Literally what he was doing— I started seminary in 2004, and he was eating down his Y2K stash in 2004! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. It was a weird time.

Fr. Andrew: It was. It really was.

Fr. Stephen: But it’s because of this “thousands” thinking. Now, if you’re like an Orthodox Young Earth creationist, you can just ignore all that because you think, following the Byzantine chronology, that the earth is already, like, 7500-and-something years old.

Fr. Andrew: Whoops!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, that whole thing’s out the window. [Laughter] You don’t have to worry about that. But that’s been sort of this tradition and it’s been in people’s thinking, producing sometimes wacky results. But the core here is the idea that this is going to be the age in which the Messiah reigns over the earth.

So the question, classically, between— that we need to answer here is: Is the messianic age—because some of what we’ve said already may have caused people to think, and some of the quotes we’ve read from the Old Testament, to think that, “Well, the messianic age is the age to come; it is the final age; it is the age that has no end; it’s the ultimate age.” But—

Fr. Andrew: Which means “final,” by the way, everybody. It does not mean “the greatest.” “Ultimate” means “final”!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, even though this will be the greatest day we’ve ever known.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, true.

Fr. Stephen: There is plenty in the Scriptures to indicate that, no, the messianic age is actually the penultimate age.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, next-to-the-last, unlike Final Fantasy, which— There’s nothing final about it! What are we on now? Final Fantasy XVI or XXIII or whatever?

Fr. Stephen: Oh, it’s not just that! It’s not just that! They’ve made sequels to earlier games.

Fr. Andrew: [Confounded noises]

Fr. Stephen: It’s like: Final Fantasy XIII 2. [Laughter] Which is a different game [from] Final Fantasy XIV.

Fr. Andrew: Right! So it’s even more complicated than: Is the messianic age the ultimate or the penultimate age? Is it the ante-penultimate, the pre-ante-penultimate?

Fr. Stephen: Yes, yes. No, but we’re talking about whether it’s ultimate or penultimate.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, that’s all. Is it final or next-to-the last?

Fr. Stephen: And so the texts, the Scriptures tell us, if we read them closely, that it’s actually the penultimate; it’s the next-to-last age.

Fr. Andrew: Next-to-last, right.

Fr. Stephen: And a good example of that that I know we’ve mentioned on the show before—because we come back to Daniel 7 an awful lot, it seems—is in Daniel 7.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. So, Daniel 7. I’m going to skip a little bit, so it’ll be verse 12, and then I’m going to skip to verses 26-27. Verse 12:

As for the rest of the beasts, their dominion was taken away, but their lives were prolonged for a season and a time. But the court shall sit in judgment, and his dominion shall be taken away, to be consumed and destroyed to the end. And the kingdom and the dominion and the greatness of the kingdoms under the whole heaven shall be given to the people of the saints of the Most High. His kingdom shall be an everlasting kingdom, and all dominions shall serve and obey him.

Fr. Stephen: Right. So there we see there’s this moment where the Son of Man is enthroned, and the dominion is taken away from the beasts and given to him, and he’s ruling. But the lives of the beasts [are] prolonged “for a season and a time.” Then at the end of that season and a time, that’s when the final judgment happens, of the beasts.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so the messianic age, and then there’s this final judgment.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And so another very clear example comes from Psalm 110 (or 109 in the Greek) in the first two verses. This is, by the way, as I know we’ve mentioned before on the show, Psalm 110 (or 109) is the most-quoted text in the New Testament.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah! So everyone should know this one.

The Lord says to my Lord, “Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool.” The Lord sends forth from Zion your might scepter. Rule in the midst of your enemies.

Fr. Stephen: So this was, even before the writing of the New Testament, clearly accepted as being the— Literally it says, “Yahweh says to my Lord,” but the “Lord” here is talking about the Messiah, such that, remember, Christ can ask the question of the scribes, “Whose son is the Messiah? Well, if the Messiah is David’s son, why does he call him “Lord” when”—and then he quotes this verse. And they don’t say, “Oh, well, that’s not talking about the Messiah!” [Laughter] They all agree it’s talking about the Messiah; they’re kind of confounded by the question.

Fr. Andrew: Because they’re like— Yeah, the point being: Why would David call his own son “Lord”? Fathers don’t call their sons “Lord”; it goes the other way.

Fr. Stephen: Right. Meaning there’s a broad acceptance this is the Messiah, meaning there’s going to be a period during which the Messiah rules in the midst of his enemies.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, until they’re all put at his feet.

Fr. Stephen: Where his enemies are still around. And then there’s going to come a time when they’re going to be fully subjected to Christ, to the Messiah.

Fr. Andrew: Which then— So this gets referenced in Hebrews 2:8, which starts with the end of a sentence.

“...putting everything in subjection under his feet.” Now, in putting everything into subjection to him, he left nothing outside his control. At present we do not yet see everything in subjection to him.

Fr. Stephen: Right. So Hebrews here is identifying the age in which Hebrews is being written as being this age when the Messiah is ruling over the nations but his enemies are still active, this penultimate age.

Fr. Andrew: Which, by the way, is an answer to a question that we get a lot, which is: Why are there demons still around? Because this is the period we’re in. Some of them are still around.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. And so this is why, as much as it is often framed as a problem now, especially in some conversations between Jewish people and Christians, that there’s not really a problem within the Scriptures themselves about there being two comings of Christ, two comings of the Messiah, that there’s a separation between the coming of the Messiah and his enthronement, and the ultimate day of the Lord and the day of judgment. Because this idea that there is this age between those two events is here in Psalm 110, which is getting referenced all the time in the New Testament. It’s there in Daniel; it’s there in other texts as well. We could have gone through more, but the show’s long enough, come on.

Fr. Andrew: Is it really? [Laughter] I don’t ever want to say that: Is it really long enough?

Fr. Stephen: Never! No. At some point— I’m now calling this out live on the air.

Fr. Andrew: Oh no.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and Fr. Andrew’s getting nervous. At some point I want to pick a charity, and I want to do a Lord of Spirits marathon. [Laughter] Where we just pick a night and we just keep going.

Fr. Andrew: Until people stop giving.

Fr. Stephen: We just broadcast for, like, eight or ten hours or something.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, see, the problem is that we have people in other countries who are listening and will get up and will keep going. Meanwhile, I will not be going to sleep!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah? We can do this! Not soon. Not soon—

Fr. Andrew: Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow…

Fr. Stephen: Yes, but someday—and for the rest of our lives! No. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: That’s right, because I will die on the air! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: But what a way to go out! What a blaze of glory!

Fr. Andrew: Raising money for a good cause.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah! I mean, that’s way better than, like, collapsing in a dance marathon, right?

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Which—you’ve done that, right?

Fr. Stephen: A dance marathon?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: No, I’ve not done a dance marathon.

Fr. Andrew: But you are like a gold medalist in dance, though.

Fr. Stephen: I am a gold medal-winning ballroom dancer, but you’re thinking of Fonzi winning the dance marathon. Remember, he did the Russian Cossack dance at the end when he got his second wind?

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I do remember that! Why do I remember that!? Okay, we’re going off the rails.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: The messianic age is the age that’s between these two events, but it’s not in the future still. The messianic age is not in the future, because, again, if everybody pulls out their Clarence Larkin posters, dispensationalism has to invent this other age called “the Church Age.”

Fr. Stephen: Right, this parenthesis, this sort of weird interjection, because the biblical timeline of Great Tribulation in Daniel, messianic age, age to come is so clear. So if you’re going to push the messianic age into the future, you’ve got to find a way to put this square peg into the round hole that’s left of this present age in which we’re living, despite the fact that—again, we saw Hebrews; there are plenty more examples—brethren, these are the last days; this is the last age; this is the last time period—again and again in the New Testament Scriptures, clearly identifying us as being in this messianic age. And part of the character of the messianic age is that Christ is ruling, but he’s ruling in the midst of his enemies.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. It ain’t over. It ain’t over. All right, we’re going to take our final break, and we’ll be right back with the third half of The Lord of Spirits.

Fr. Andrew: Welcome back, everybody. So, you know, related to all of this, I actually just have to share a text that my wife just sent me while we were on the air here, because it’s very related. I don’t know that she’s listening to this show— [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Was it a gif of Fonzi doing the Cossack dance? Because that would be an amazing coincidence.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] That would be great, wouldn’t it! No! So she apparently was talking to our six-year-old son and told him the story of Adam and Eve, and then, you know, paradise and so forth, and explained that in the life of the age to come we get to be in paradise again. And she told him that we get to eat all the fruit. Apparently, he got really upset when she said this, and so she asked him why: “Why are you so unhappy?” He said he doesn’t want fruit. And so she asked him, “What do you want to eat in heaven?” And he said, “Corn dogs.” So there you are: paradise from the mind of my six-year-old son is about corn dogs.

Fr. Stephen: Corn dogs are good. [Laughter] They are a staple. If you go and get the State Fair corn dogs in the freezer section of your local Wal-Mart, they’re best if you oven bake them.

Fr. Andrew: I can feel my arteries stopping right now.

Fr. Stephen: If you put them in the microwave, it’s just this spongy nitrite-cicle.

Fr. Andrew: How about deep fry? Deep fry.

Fr. Stephen: Deep fry is good. If you have an air fryer, that’s really peak.

Fr. Andrew: There you go. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: And if you’re one of those people who knows—and if you know you know—you’ve got to get the lemonade and the mustard going for the hot dog on a stick.

Fr. Andrew: There you go.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah.

Fr. Andrew: So. Someday, if he ever listens to this show… He probably won’t, but if he ever does, I’m sure he’ll giggle. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: This was the moment he became famous.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: All right, part three.

Frs. Andrew and Stephen: The third half!

Fr. Stephen: And so we sort of ended talking about the difficulty of projecting the messianic age into the future, which not just dispensationalism does, but any form of pre-millennialism does, sort of by definition, moves that messianic age forward and creates this middle part.

So what we’re mainly going to be talking about in the third half is chiliasm. Chiliasm, as we’re going to explain, is not exactly pre-millennialism, but chiliasm is really a category of views in early Christianity—by “early Christianity,” we’re talking about second, third century, and even into the fourth and fifth centuries—Christianity named from chilios which means a thousand, that believed in— basically believed that that messianic age was in the future.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and if you’ve never heard this word said out loud before, the word looks like “chili-asm,” because it’s usually spelled with a “ch.”

Fr. Stephen: Yes, but it’s pronounced “kill-i-asm.”

Fr. Andrew: It’s pronounced “kill-i-asm,” because that “ch-” represents the Greek letter chi, so it’s chiliasmos, “chiliasm.”

Fr. Stephen: Yes, although somebody out there needs to start a Milliennial Chili brand.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] There we go! That would be— Oh, man, that would be good.

Fr. Stephen: Based on this.

And where does that view come from? This view, it ultimately pretty much gets condemned by the Church. There are continuities and discontinuities between it and modern pre-millennialism. It ultimately gets condemned by the Church, but it’s… You know, I hesitate to call it a heresy because it’s not a heresy in the same sense as, like, Arianism.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s not a Christological heresy…

Fr. Stephen: It’s not a Christological heresy; it’s not a Trinitarian heresy. So it’s not in that category. It’s more in the category of theological error.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s an eschatological error.

Fr. Stephen: And so it is… It is condemned, but it is— Yeah, it’s in that category of “this is wrong,” not in the category of someone trying to set up a sect outside the Church. Now, that said, as we’re going to see, there are a number of heretical groups that are heretical for other reasons that are also chiliasts, where this is part of their views, which doesn’t help it. [Laughter]

But so where does it come from? Most of the kind of Trinitarian heresies and Christological heresies find their origin in some rejection of the Orthodox view, either because someone finds the Orthodox view to be nonsensical or doesn’t understand it or misunderstands it or has some reason why they want to reject the traditional Orthodox view; whereas this view grows up a little differently. It has a little bit different genealogy as chiliasm forms.

It’s really grounded originally in the kind of thinking that led the Pharisees within Second Temple Judaism to hold to the bodily resurrection. So we’re sort of coming back to the bodily resurrection. As you know, even if you’ve just read the book of Acts, there’s sort of the famous scene in the book of Acts, the Acts of the Apostles, where St. Paul is confronted by a mixed group of Pharisees and Sadducees, and so he kind of throws up a distraction by saying, “Oh, I’m here because of the resurrection,” because the Pharisees believe in the resurrection and the Sadducees don’t.” [Laughter] He gets them sort of all fighting amongst themselves about it, the fact that this is specifically a Pharisaic belief within the various sects. This is one of the identifying beliefs of the Pharisees.

And they come to hold to the importance of the bodily resurrection, the importance of affirming the bodily resurrection, which is present there as far back as Job, at least in the Hebrew. By the way, Greek Bible folks, I like Greek Old Testament tradition as much as anybody, but the Hebrew of Job contains a much firmer specific declaration of the bodily resurrection than the Greek does. So this is an element, but the Pharisees are going to insist on the importance of this, that this is not just some kind of speculative hope or something, but that this is doctrinally important. It’s dogma, basically. And that’s because of their understanding of justice.

You can see the kind of tension that they’re wanting to resolve, for example, when you compare Psalm 1 and Psalm 2. Psalm 1 and 2 have the same numbers in Hebrew and Greek. It’s not Psalm 0 and 1; it’s 1 and 2.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] What!?

Fr. Stephen: Psalm 1 is very much in the vein of “the righteous man is like a tree, planted by a river, and the wicked man is blown away.” It’s: the righteous prosper; the wicked perish. Boom, yes, we all agree, that’s the way things should be. That’s the order in the world. And then you get to Psalm 2, and it’s like: “How long will the wicked prosper?” Because we look around in the world and we see that, a lot of times, that’s not the case, that the righteous are oppressed and the righteous suffer, and the wicked seem in this life to prosper. A lot of them die without getting their comeuppance, without there being any kind of justice for their wickedness.

From that perspective, from a Jewish perspective that’s immersed deep in the Hebrew Scriptures, this is a problem that has to be resolved, and it can’t just be resolved by saying, “Well, they go to heaven somewhere, or they have a pleasant afterlife and these other people have a bad afterlife.” That kind of nebulous spiritual answer is unreal to them. This is a place where this kind of thinking really is directly antithetical to Platonism. So for Plato— Another place we talked about the bodily resurrection tonight was in terms of St. Augustine’s view of history, but for Plato the spiritual, the immaterial, the invisible, the eternal is the most real, and the physical and the material is the least real. It’s like a shadow of an image. And this is the reverse. So just some kind of happy, ephemeral afterlife does not solve the problem of a righteous person having received curses rather than blessings, and a wicked person receiving blessings rather than curses.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that ultimately the bodily resurrection is grounded in the material creation.

Fr. Stephen: Right, that the ordering of creation, the order in the world, has to be restored, and not only has to be restored objectively but has to function properly after being restored. And so this bodily resurrection, this transformation, this transfiguration of the cosmos has to happen in order for that to happen, in order for that to be real. So the bodily resurrection becomes chiefly important because it becomes an affirmation of the justice of God and of the goodness of God and that God speaks the truth in the Torah when he promises blessings for obedience and righteousness, and curses for disobedience and wickedness.

And this understanding of resurrection is at play in the early homilies, the early sermons we have in the book of Acts, especially St. Peter’s when he talks about Christ’s resurrection, that Christ’s claim to be the Messiah: he was vindicated when he was raised from the dead. He was condemned as a liar, he was condemned as a wicked man, along with other wicked men, thieves, but by the resurrection he was vindicated. He was shown to be the Messiah by being raised from the dead. That’s working off of this idea, this Pharisaic Jewish idea of what the bodily resurrection represents and how it works.

So the chiliasts are taking this kind of idea— They’re taking this kind of idea and saying, well, therefore, the saints, the martyrs, these folks, they have to have this sort of justice, these sort of blessings in this world, in this earth, this material way. And especially as Christianity is butting up against Gnosticism, and Gnosticism’s all-too-full embrace of Platonism and rejection of the value of the material, even going further than Plato and saying the material is actually evil—not just a shadow of an image, but actually evil, actually bad—and denial of the physicality of salvation, they see affirming chiliasm, affirming this future material messianic age in this world as being the key to rejecting Gnosticism, the key to establishing the justice of God and the truth of God’s promises in the same kind of way that the Pharisees did. It’s built off the same logic.

But the problem is—and this is something we’ve seen a lot; this is something we’ve seen a lot, is that, all too often, when a false view—whether it’s a heresy or just a wrong view or bad theology—rises up, there is a tendency for some of those opposing it to not question the basis of that theology but to accept the basis and take the other side. So an example of that that we’ve talked about before— Since I’ve been trying to be nice so far to the Young Earth creationists, I’ll be a little less nice now; I should have a little bit of cred with them that I can now squander. [Laughter] We’ve talked about how you have sort of the rise of modernism and the subjection of the text of Scripture and things to “modern science” as it’s understood in any particular era, and therefore the discounting of the veracity of the Scriptures, the reading of the Scriptures in a very materialistic way, by what has at various times been called Protestant liberalism or the theology that comes out of 19th-century Germany.

This is [arguably] bad, but when the modernist fundamentalist crisis happens in the United States, the fundamentalists— This is not me calling them that; this is what they called themselves at the time. The fundamentalists do not say— do not try to go to a pre-modern reading of Scripture, do not reject the basic way of reading the Bible in this sort of materialist, literalist way, do not reject any of that; they try to use the same methodology and come to the opposite conclusions, and that’s where you get Young Earth creationism. So both of those views are fundamentally modernist, as we’ve said on this show before.

Well, you get this same kind of thing here with chiliasm. So you have kind of Gnostic and Gnostic-tinged versions of Christian eschatology which strip away the material element of salvation—the transformation of this world, the bodily resurrection—either deny it or de-emphasize it, maybe even ignore it—and spiritualize it all, or Platonize it all. And over against that the chiliasts, rather than questioning the separation of the spiritual and material kingdoms, because focusing on the spiritual is based on separating those two ideas and then either rejecting one or saying one is more important or however that works out, but there’s a separation implied. Rather than questioning that separation and trying to bring them back together—which is what the Orthodox party did, was continue to hold them together—they accept that these are two separate things and just affirm the material and physical part and deny or de-emphasize the spiritual part. They say, “No, it’s just the literal and the material. Christ being enthroned at the right hand of God doesn’t ‘count’ as his ruling the world. He’s got to come back and rule it here physically.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Everything doesn’t seem to be hunky-dory yet, so therefore it must not have happened.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so it’s a misguided taking the other option based on faulty presuppositions rather than questioning the presuppositions. And I do have to say—I do have to say—this is one of the first things I have posted on my blog that got people all worked up, because I said the idea of people going to heaven or hell when they die is a sub-Christian eschatology—that’s the phrase I used—oh, people went ballistic. [Laughter] But the common view, your average person on the street who may or may not fully identify as a Christian, if you ask them, “What happens when you die?” you get: “You go to heaven or you go to hell.” “For how long?” “Oh, for eternity!” Bodily resurrection, anybody?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, this is what’s represented in pop culture that ever deals with this. It’s ubiquitous!

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yeah. So Harold Bloom was basically right: the average Christian in the United States is a Gnostic, at least a little bit.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I’d love it if we could say— if someone says, “Well, he’s in a better place now,” we could say, “For now…” [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, he’s going to be in an even better place in the future, namely here, because here is going to get a lot better!

Fr. Andrew: That’s right!

Fr. Stephen: And read Robin Phillips’ recent book if you want more help extracting yourself from Gnosticism.

Fr. Andrew: There you go.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And so within chiliasm, sort of this material rule of Christ gets postponed. So in certain ways this represents a point of continuity with modern premillennialism, because… Well, they also have in common that they have a literal— They take it as a literal thousand years rather than just an age, a thousand years as representing an age. But also that there is this physical, earthly element of it and that it is postponed into the future. That said, there is a major point—there a few points of discontinuity. The biggest point of discontinuity is that the chiliasts, when they talked about an earthly paradise, meant an earthly paradise. It’s like heaven in the Quran. It’s you having lots of kids and eating sumptuously every day, extra desserts, and drinking tons and tons of wine, which no premillennialist Baptist would be on board with.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Never get fat…

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yeah, and you living for hundreds of years. It’s very much earthly paradise in ancient chiliasm. And modern pre-millennialism is a little more theologically and spiritually sophisticated than that in terms of how they see it. There’s also a different focus in that a lot of the focus in modern pre-millennialism is on— is not on— Modern pre-millennialism does not focus on this idea of reward for having lived righteously and done good, and that’s because it’s operating in Protestant circles. [Laughter] So there aren’t people who have done all this good and been unrewarded.

Fr. Andrew: Right, it’s faith versus works.

Fr. Stephen: And it tends to be especially in the dispensationalists’ side, as opposed to what’s sometimes called historic pre-millennialism or other adjectives. It’s more oriented toward particular promises to national Israel.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah…

Fr. Stephen: And the modern nation-state of Israel is often considered to be the same entity as the Israel of the Bible—which is kind of silly. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, we don’t need to go into all that, but suffice to say a lot of people living in the modern nation-state of Israel do not regard what they’re doing as being identical to the Israel of the Bible.

Fr. Stephen: A lot of Jewish people don’t think it’s identical, that that’s silly.

Fr. Andrew: Right!

Fr. Stephen: So that’s a discontinuity. Ancient chiliasm was not really concerned with that. There was none of this stuff about Rabbinic Judaism or there being a nation-state of Israel in the future or any of that in ancient chiliasm. So there are clear separations there.

What really ends up getting— I mean, chiliasm probably—and this is conjectural; this is alternate history, so unless the large Hadron Collider helps me, I won’t know for sure— [Laughter] But chiliasm might have just sort of faded away as an incorrect view if it hadn’t gotten associated, as we mentioned, with certain other ancient heretical groups who became chiliasts, primarily in this case Montanus and his followers: Montanism, sometimes referred to as the Pontic heresy.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Look them up, everybody. They are a wacky, fun, interesting, wacky…

Fr. Stephen: Well, I do have to say— So, one of the fascinating things about the age of the internet and the availability of information is that some sectarian groups in the modern world have decided to embrace ancient heresies as their historical ancestors.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, I know! Well, I mean, even— But even prior to the wide wacky world of the interwebs, you get Landmarkism.

Fr. Stephen: Trail of Blood, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: Trail of Blood stuff, which is like: everybody who wasn’t Catholic in the ancient world is some kind of Baptist.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. But this is more— I’m thinking more of how some of the Jehovah’s Witnesses now are trying to say, “Oh, yeah, we’re in continuity with the Arians.”

Fr. Andrew: Right…

Fr. Stephen: And trying to sort of embrace that, to give themselves a sense of history. “We’re not a group that spawned in the 20th century off the side of Evangelical Protestantism in the United States. No, we have this ancient heritage of the Arians.” So lately—I have seen this a bunch—people from charismatic and Pentecostal groups going to the Montanists.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, don’t go there, Pentecostal friends! It’s only sadness! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: And presenting the Montanists as being some kind of early charismatic groups because there are accounts that talk about them having glossolalia—which is what is the modern day called speaking in tongues—and some other manifestations like that. But here’s what we have to be clear about. The Montanists, which is what Tertullian became, which is why he’s not St. Tertullian, believed that the person they’re named after, Montanus, was the Paraclete promised by Christ who would come after him.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and he hung around with these two prophetesses…

Fr. Stephen: Yes, he traveled with two female prophetesses… whom he roomed with.

Fr. Andrew: Right. It’s a bad scene! You don’t want to go there, Pentecostal friends.

Fr. Stephen: As a general rule, all cults become sex cults. I’m just saying!

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] That’s true.

Fr. Stephen: So this is not a guy you want to pin your lineage on. You’re better off being a 20th-century phenomenon than being connected to the Montanists. But the problem with the Montanists was not primarily that they were chiliasts; they just also were chiliasts. [Laughter] But that being a part of their whole milieu, when the Church Fathers wrote against one of these heretical groups, they kind of went full-bore. They kind of went after everything wrong. They didn’t say, “Well, they’re also wrong about this, that, and the other, but those aren’t as important.” They just went to the wall: “Here’s everything they’re wrong about, and they’re wrong about everything.” And so this is how chiliasm ends up kind of getting broadly condemned, and they’re not the only group they’re just the most prominent group that were chiliasts. A lot of the Apollinarians were also chiliasts. So it gets kind of a bad rap in that way.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Not that we’re saying it’s good, but… [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. It’s just— Like I said, it would have just been an error and not like a major heresy thing if it hadn’t ended up getting associated with these heretical groups. Sort of as evidence of that, both St. Jerome and St. Andrew of Caesarea took commentaries on the book of Revelation that had been written by chiliasts, edited them to take out the chiliasm, and then put them out under their own names.

Fr. Andrew: As one does. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Right? But so, that’s fifth century, sixth century: fifth century in the West, sixth century in the East. These are Fathers who are saying, “Hey, if it weren’t for the chiliasm, there’s a lot of good stuff here.” [Laughter] I submit to you, they would not have done the same with an Arian text.

Fr. Andrew: No.

Fr. Stephen: Or a Nestorian text, or: fill in the blank.

Fr. Andrew: I think it’s that sense of: “Oh, well, there’s some problems with this. We can fix them!”

Fr. Stephen: Right, we’ll just cross out all the errors and keep the rest, and I’ll add a little bit here and there to fill out where I took out the errors, with the correct view. So that’s evidence that it was sort of treated differently by the Church Fathers—even though, again, we’re not allowed to talk about patristics on this show—than heresy heresies, or Christological heresies or Trinitarian heresies.

Fr. Andrew: All that said… [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Having said all that, it is a commonplace of the world, both on popular and academic levels, to say that St. Irenaeus, amongst other Church Fathers, but we’re just going to talk about St. Irenaeus for now— that St. Irenaeus was a chiliast.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, and that he made this unfortunate error and then later on, we’ll excuse him for this because the Church only realized later on that this was really an error, or took the time to condemn it or whatever.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and other weird arguments regarding St. Irenaeus.

Fr. Andrew: I tried to figure out when people started saying this about him, and I couldn’t find anything really— I don’t know. Listeners, if you know who started—

Fr. Stephen: Of a pre-modern person who says this about St. Irenaeus.

Fr. Andrew: We’re not saying there isn’t one, but—

Fr. Stephen: We haven’t found that person yet.

Fr. Andrew: We haven’t found that one.

Fr. Stephen: As far as we can tell, this is a modern thing, to say that he was a chiliast.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and so what Fr. Stephen did as he was researching for this is he went and found all the passages from St. Irenaeus that people who are either using it to accuse him or are using it to enlist him on their chiliastic side—

Fr. Stephen: All the quotes they give to make their case, because I have long contended that he is not a chiliast.

Fr. Andrew: Yes! Right.

Fr. Stephen: And when I say that, people give me the hairy eyeball, like: “Everyone knows he is!” I’m like: okay.

Fr. Andrew: So Fr. Stephen put these in front of me and basically said, “Okay, these are the passages that—” So I just looked at them cold when we were briefing for this. So we’re going to go through them. We’re not going to spend a lot of time on them because that would be a whole episode, probably.

Fr. Stephen: We’re not going to dismantle it, word by word, or anything.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, just to kind of get this on the record.

Fr. Stephen: And I said—before you start— What I said to Fr. Andrew was: If this was a court case and they presented these quotes as their evidence, I would not present a case. I would move that that judge dismiss the case because they haven’t met their burden of proof. I don’t think there’s anything in any of these quotes that they’re using to say he’s a chiliast that even suggests he’s a chiliast.

Fr. Andrew: Right! I looked at these, and my response was kind of like: “Wait, what?” For most— Some of them you can kind of, maybe, sort of...

Fr. Stephen: If you read it sideways, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so: spoilers, everybody! Here’s the first one. These are all from Against Heresies. So this is from Book 5.32.1.

Fr. Stephen: These are all from Book 5, all in the 30s in the sections.

Fr. Andrew: So 32.1.

Inasmuch, therefore, as the opinions of certain people are derived from heretical discourses, they are both ignorant of God’s dispensations and of the mystery of the resurrection of the just and of the kingdom, which is the commencement of incorruption, by means of which kingdom those who shall be worthy are accustomed gradually to partake of the divine nature.

I just can’t even see it in that. He talks about theosis here.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and notice he says, “...by means of which kingdom those who shall be worthy are accustomed gradually to partake of the divine nature,” meaning this is happening now, suggesting that the kingdom is going on now.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so it’s kind of like: “Uh, actually, this is an argument for the other side.”

Fr. Stephen: Yes. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Okay, next. This is from 35.1.

If any, however, shall endeavor to allegorize prophecies of this kind, they will not be found consistent with themselves in all points and will be confuted by the teaching of the very expressions in question.

This was another one that just left me stumped. And it turns out that because he says something against the idea of “allegorizing prophecies,” that must mean that he is a biblical literalist in the modern Protestant sense.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, he is taking everything perfectly literally, yes. Yeah.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, which therefore means he should be chiliast.

Fr. Stephen: Right. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: All right. Again, doesn’t hold up. Okay, 36.23.

The present world would not be annihilated, though the present corruptible state would give way to an incorruptible state where nothing grows old or loses its freshness. Those that produce a hundredfold would go up to heaven, those that produce sixtyfold to paradise, those that produce thirtyfold to the city.

Fr. Stephen: The city being the New Jerusalem.

Fr. Andrew: The New Jerusalem, right. So the only way that this could work is if you decide that there is, in the future, again this earthly paradise that we were talking about, like if you presume that’s what’s true, and then you read this, and you say, “Oh, this might sort of fit into that.” But he says the present world is not going to be annihilated, that it’s just in a corruptible state and there’s going to be an incorruptible state.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and that’s what they’re saying makes him a chiliast.

Fr. Andrew: Right, which— That’s not distinctive to chiliasm.

Fr. Stephen: People— All Christians should believe in the bodily resurrection and the transfiguration of this world.

Fr. Andrew: Right, this is just normal, standard—

Fr. Stephen: This is Christianity. And then he as that bit about going to heaven, paradise, the New Jerusalem: he’s talking about levels of reward in heaven.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so in other words, this is something we believe, that some saints kind of shine more brightly than others.

Fr. Stephen: And heaven there meaning the age to come: level of the reward in the age to come.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, so here’s another one. Again, these are all from Book 5. This is 36.2.

The presbyters, the disciples of the apostles, affirm that this is the gradation and arrangement of those who are saved, and that they advance through steps of this nature; also that the ascend through the Spirit to the Son and through the Son to the Father, and that in due time the Son will yield up his work to the Father.

I’m still stumped at this one. Like, how is—? I don’t— I just don’t see this.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] So I think the idea is he’s a chiliast because, see, in due time, the Son will yield up his work to the Father, and that due time is I guess the millennium, is I guess the thousand years?

Fr. Andrew: Okay. Sure. [Laughter] Cool story, bro?

Fr. Stephen: Like we said, you have to really stretch this to even fit chiliasm, let alone: “Oh, see, look: he’s a chiliast.” [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Again, these are the quotes that are used to prove this point.

Fr. Stephen: That they use. These aren’t quotes I picked to refute it; these are the quotes they use to try to say he’s a chiliast.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Okay, so here’s one from 32.1.

For it is just that in that very creation in which they toiled or were afflicted, being proved in every way by suffering, they should receive the reward of their suffering, and then in the creation in which they were slain, be revived again, and that in the creation in which they endured servitude, in that they should reign.

Which, again— This is just an affirmation of the bodily resurrection!

Fr. Stephen: Yes. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: That’s what’s going on here. Um, okay. Just a couple more, everybody, a few more. So this is from part 38.

For in as many days as this world was made, in so many thousand years shall it be concluded—

Okay, here we go! This is really it, right?

—and for this reason the Scripture says: Thus the heaven and the earth were finished and all their adornment, and God brought to a conclusion upon the sixth day the works that he had made, and God rested upon the seventh day from all his works. This is an account of the things formerly created as also it is a prophecy of what is to come, for the day of the Lord is as a thousand years, and in six days created things were completed. It is evident therefore that they will come to an end at the 6,000 years.

I mean, this just preserves this “thousand years equals an age” tradition.

Fr. Stephen: —tradition, that was everywhere in Second Temple Judaism, yeah. Nothing to do with chiliasm.

Fr. Andrew: Right.

Fr. Stephen: Unless you think the Pharisees were all pre-millennialists. Good luck arguing that one!

Fr. Andrew: Okay, another one, again from Book 5, chapter or part 33.

Christ, after he had given thanks while holding the cup, and had drunk of it and had given it to the disciples, said to them, “But I say unto you, I will not drink henceforth of the fruit of this vine until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father’s kingdom.” Thus, then, he will himself renew the inheritance of the earth and will reorganize the mystery of the glory of his sons, as David says, “he who hath renewed the face of the earth.” He promised to drink of the fruit of the vine with his disciples, thus indicating both on these points the inheritance of the earth on which the new fruit of the vine is drunk and the resurrection of his disciples in the flesh. For the new flesh which rises again is the same which also received the new cup, and he cannot by any means be understood as drinking of the fruit of the vine when settled down with his disciples above in a super-celestial place, nor again are they who drink it devoid of flesh, for to drink of that which flows from the vine pertains to flesh and not spirit.

So you could read this in a chiliast way, I guess, as saying that this eschatological Eucharist will only happen— I don’t know. I’m falling apart trying to make it work chiliastically.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: It’s an affirmation of the bodily resurrection. This is going to happen in the body.

Fr. Stephen: Right. It’s the bodily resurrection. That’s all he’s talking about. It’s the bodily resurrection. And why? This is Against Heresies: he’s arguing against the Gnostics who didn’t believe in the bodily resurrection. He’s not arguing with the amillennialists, the modern amillennialists; he’s arguing with Gnostics. He’s affirming, over against them, the bodily resurrection. This has nothing to do with chiliasm.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Okay, so this is the final one. This is probably the funnest one in terms of the language that he uses. It’s really extra, as the kids say these days. [Laughter] So this is Book 5, part 33.

The elders who saw John, the disciple of the Lord, related that they had heard from him how the Lord used to teach in regard to those times and say, “The days will come in which vines shall grow, each having 10,000 branches, and in each branch 10,000 twigs, and in each true twig 10,000 shoots, and in each one of the shoots 10,000 clusters, and on every one of the clusters 10,000 grapes, and every grape, when pressed, will give five-and-twenty metretes of wine. And when any one of the saints so lay hold of a cluster, another shall cry out, “I am a better cluster. Take me! Bless the Lord through me!” In like manner, the Lord declared that a grain of wheat would produce 10,000 ears and that every ear should have 10,000 grains, and every grain would yield ten pounds of clear, pure, fine flour, and that all other fruit-bearing trees and seeds and grass would produce in similar proportions.

Someone out there is doing the math right now. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: And clearly, clearly, this is quoting Christ; Christ meant it literally.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Right, that’s why you have to do the math, to figure out how much wine is this, how much flour is it!

Fr. Stephen: But more pointedly, the way in which this is seen by some people who are chiliasts is the whole element of the chiliasm believing in this earthly paradise. So: “See, look, he’s talking about how there’s going to be this plenty of wine and plenty of flour and grain and food.”

Fr. Andrew: By the way, in case anyone is wondering, a metretes is an ancient Greek unit of liquid measurement equivalent to 39.3 liters. So that is a lot.

Fr. Stephen: Okay, so factor that into your math when you tell me how much wine you can get.

Fr. Andrew: It’s 25 times that for every grape!

Fr. Stephen: Yes, and there’s 10,000 of those, and then there’s— yeah. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: That is a lot of wine.

Fr. Stephen: There is someone who will do that math and send it to us, I’m sure.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, of course! Write in. We want to hear from you!

Fr. Stephen: But more importantly, this is a reference to another text. This is a reference to 1 Enoch 10:19.

Fr. Andrew: [Gasp] Oh my stars!

Fr. Stephen: Right? And anybody who’s read St. Irenaeus knows St. Irenaeus had read the book of Enoch.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, a lot.

Fr. Stephen: He’d had the whole Watchers story in the apostolic preaching. He’s familiar with this text. What he’s changed here is that the speaker is the Lord, like God, in 1 Enoch, and here the speaker is the Lord, Jesus. So St. Irenaeus is saying that Jesus was the speaker in 1 Enoch, is what he’s doing here. And in 1 Enoch this is talking about the messianic age.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. He expands a little bit on it, too. There’s a lot more math in his version. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. More sort of esoteric math. So that’s it!

Fr. Andrew: That’s the case.

Fr. Stephen: Those are the quotes based on which it is “common knowledge” that St. Irenaeus was a chiliast.

Fr. Andrew: No dogs are hunting. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: That means to me there is no evidence that St. Irenaeus was a chiliast—unless you think anyone who believes in the bodily resurrection is de facto a chiliast, which I present is not the case: that makes you a Christian. So stop saying that. [Laughter] If you hear someone saying that, say, “Citations needed.” If they bring up any of these passages, you can point out to them they don’t prove what they think they prove.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s just… Yeah. It doesn’t.

Fr. Stephen: So now, as we come to the end of the third half, let’s talk about Revelation 20 and the millennium, the actual topic of this episode.

Fr. Andrew: Yes! [Laughter] Welcome! Yeah, okay, so this is the passage that talks about this, Revelation 20:1-8.

Fr. Stephen: He who endures to the end shall hear about the topic.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter]

Then I saw an angel coming down from heaven, holding in his hand the key to the bottomless pit, and a great chain. And he seized the dragon who is the devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years, and threw him into the pit, and shut it and sealed it over him, so that he might not deceive the nations any longer until the thousand years were ended. After that, he must be released for a little while.

Then I saw thrones, and seated on them were those to whom the authority to judge was committed. Also I saw the souls of those who had been beheaded for the testimony for Jesus and for the word of God and those who had not worshiped the beast or its image and had not received its mark on their foreheads or their hands. They came to life and reigned with Christ for a thousand years. The rest of the dead did not come to life until the thousand years were ended.

This is the first resurrection. Blessed and holy is the one who shares in the first resurrection. Over such the second death has no power, but they will be priests of God and of Christ, and they will reign with him for a thousand years. And when the thousand years are ended, Satan will be released from his prison and will come out to deceive the nations that are at the four corners of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them for battle. Their number is like the sand of the sea.

Fr. Stephen: So the reason we’re doing this last is not just Lord of Spirits tradition. [Laughter] It’s that with everything we’ve gone over in the preceding three hours, to me at least, hopefully, if we haven’t put you to sleep, if you’ve endured, when we read that now, with that background, it’s pretty clear what it’s talking about. If we had started out by reading it, then we would have gotten into all the ambiguity of “well, this group reads it this way, and that group reads it that way, and how do we mitigate between the two, and they use these other prooftexts,” but having laid out all the background, when you read it, and you read it in light of Daniel 7 and you read it in light of Jeremiah 31 and Ezekiel and Isaiah and these other things we’ve read and Psalm 110 and everything else—it’s pretty obvious what St. John is talking about here.

So there is this binding of the devil, this binding of Satan, where he’s thrown in the pit and sealed for this age, this era. Of course, this is language that Christ used about binding the strong man and pillaging his wares. This is the icon of the resurrection and the harrowing of Hades that you’ll find in pretty much every Orthodox church: the devil being bound, the devil being restricted. But this is just another way of talking about what happens in Daniel when the dominion is stripped away from the beast and given to the Son of Man who is enthroned. And remember that whole Daniel passage about the enthronement of the Son of Man begins with “thrones were set.” Well, look at verse four of chapter 20: “Then I saw thrones…”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, this just echoes—what is it, Daniel 7?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. So the binding of the devil, and then you have this talk of the first resurrection. The souls of those who had been beheaded for the testimony of Jesus: the martyrs, the saints, those who would not worship the beast. They came to life and they reigned with Christ for this thousand years; the rest of the dead afterwards: this is the first resurrection.

So a pre-millennial or a chiliast point of view wants to make the first resurrection a first bodily resurrection and then there’s another bodily resurrection, but is that really the first resurrection? Remember what Christ says to the Sadducees who come and ask him, famously, about seven brides— or one bride for seven brothers.

Fr. Andrew: Seven brothers!

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yeah, one bride for seven brothers. He says to them, “As to the resurrection, God says, ‘I am the God of Abraham and of Isaac and of Jacob. I am not the God of the dead but of the living.’ ”

Fr. Andrew: Which means that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are—resurrected!

Fr. Stephen: Resurrected, and he doesn’t mean bodily.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because Abraham is still in his tomb; his body is still in his tomb.

Fr. Stephen: Right. Christ had not been bodily resurrected yet when he said that—but he’s still resurrected. So this is the first resurrection: the soul being made alive in its connection to God. See our soul episode. This is the first resurrection. And they rule and reign with Christ for this messianic era, during which Christ is ruling—what?—in the midst of his enemies—according to Daniel, according to Psalm 110, and all the places it’s cited in the New Testament.

And they reign and they serve as priests. Their priestly service, as we’ve talked about before on the show, this is a service of intercession. If Christ isn’t ruling in the midst of his enemies, then what’s going on with intercessions.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, why is it?

Fr. Stephen: Why would you have to make intercessions for those on earth? And then it’s after this; it’s after this that not only the rest of the dead are raised, but there’s this final rebellion, where those who were bound are finally judged, à la Daniel 7. But another reason why we know what the first resurrection is talking about is the fact that, in verse six, St. John feels the need to point out that those who share in the first resurrection are blessed and holy.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because someone might think that they’re not, because they’re dead. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: He is correcting a contrary view, and why would that be? Well, I mean, we see this in 1 Thessalonians, frankly. St. Paul talks about this, this idea that these people have been martyred. These people have suffered for Christ. These people are dead.

Fr. Andrew: A failure, to earthly eyes.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and they’re a failure, and they must be of some lesser caliber than those who will still be alive at the time that Christ has his glorious appearing. These must be accursed, because they died. Sometimes they died very young. They were killed violently. But no! Blessed and holy.

Fr. Andrew: Not only does St. John say it here, but if you go to vespers in the Orthodox Church for feasts, usually of martyrs and various other saints, you’ll sometimes hear this passage from the Wisdom of Solomon, chapter three:

But the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God, and no torment will ever touch them. In the eyes of the foolish, they seem to have died and their departure was thought to be an affliction and their going from us to be their destruction, but they are at peace, for though in the sight of men they were punished, their hope is full of immortality.

So it’s making the same point that St. John is making there in Revelation 20.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and the prokeimenon before the epistle reading in our Orthodox funeral service—and I know that just went over the heads of some people who’ve never been to an Orthodox service, but—is: “Blessed is he whom thou hast taken and chosen, O Lord.” This person who has died, who is here, whom we’re having the funeral for, whom we’re mourning: this person is blessed, because of the destiny they have in Christ, which is the same thing: “Blessed and holy are those who participate in the first resurrection” that St. John is saying here.

And so saying that Christ’s kingdom is now, that Christ is right now ruling and reigning in the midst of his enemies, is not saying, “Oh, Christ just has some kind of spiritual kingdom or some kind of allegorical kingdom or some kind of woo-woo theoretical kingdom or, you know, he’s on the throne in my heart,” or whatever else. That’s not what it is saying. That’s not what it is saying, because there are actual effects in the material world of the fact that we’re living in the messianic age, and they’re not just any effects; they’re the ones talked about in the Old Testament prophetic passages we read.

So a big one—to me at least, being not a Jewish person—is what we saw repeated in several of those quotes, about the knowledge of God covering the earth as the waters cover the sea, no man having to teach his neighbor, “know the Lord; know Yahweh,” because all will know him, from the greatest to the least. Let’s talk about the reality. When those words were said, who was there who knew the name “Yahweh” and worshiped him?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, not many.

Fr. Stephen: This tiny group. At the time Jeremiah talked about it, they were on their way into exile in Babylon; they’d just been conquered and had their Temple burned down.

Fr. Andrew: So it’s looking even worse at that point!

Fr. Stephen: This tiny group in a backwater are the only people who’ve heard of him, and the rest of the world, the rest of humanity, is worshiping demons, is engaged in idolatry, concomitant sexual immorality. As I’ve said before, my ancestors were painting themselves blue, dancing around fires, sacrificing members of neighboring tribes to demons, and probably eating them. That’s what my ancestors were doing at that time that Jeremiah said that.

Fr. Andrew: Herodotus said that mine were werewolves. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Well, there you go!

Fr. Andrew: I’m not even kidding!

Fr. Stephen: That’s even worse.

Fr. Andrew: Well, what he said was, he said that people who went up there said that they were, that he didn’t believe it, but he said, “But they all say it!” [Laughter] Which is kind of funny.

Fr. Stephen: So this is the reality. And now you look at today. You can go almost anywhere in the world and say the word “God,” capital-G. If it’s an atheist, they’re going to think of some kind of caricature of the God of the Bible, of the Christian Bible: that’s the God they don’t believe in. I mean, they’ll also say they don’t believe in Zeus, but they’re not really thinking about Zeus when they say they don’t believe in God. Billions of people. And we— I as an Orthodox Christian think a lot of them are worshiping God the wrong way, or misunderstand who he is, or are completely wrong about who he is, but Muslims out there are at least trying to worship the God of Abraham—they’re doing it wrong, they don’t understand who he is because they don’t understand who Christ is, but that’s what they’re trying to do. They’re not trying to worship idols any more. And if you believe St. John of Damascus, they’re basically a Christian heresy. And heretics are kind of better than pagans.

There has been a transformation. There has been a radical transformation. We haven’t experienced it in our own life, maybe, but in world history there has been. And it’s not just on that religious level of how people think about God and the ceasing of idolatry. Idolatry is now in tiny corners of the world as opposed to everywhere. That this has been a transformation of the very way we view ourselves and each other and society.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, it’s notable that even some of the most vocal anti-Christian people in our society are often being anti-Christian on the basis of Christian ethics. It’s just that Christians don’t live up to their own ethical code is what it comes down to be.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, they challenge Christianity by their firm belief in the concept of human rights.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that everybody is fundamentally equal before God is not a pre-Christian idea.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, and the things that— I mean, go read Tom Holland’s Dominion. There’s been this huge, radical transformation of the way women are viewed, of the way we view other human beings, of the way we view sexuality, of the way we view morality, the way we view the value of human life—has been utterly transformed by the spread of Christianity, even amongst those who are not only non-Christian but anti-Christian.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, even in whole countries in the world that are not Christian and never were Christian. There’s— Christian ethics has affected them.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And this isn’t just something that we can now, 2,000 years later, look back and say. St. Paul was already saying this. St. Paul said, “Christ is the Savior of all men, especially of those who believe, especially those who are faithful.” Christ having the authority of all in heaven and on earth, rather than demonic powers? That benefits everyone. That benefits the virulent atheists as much as it benefits the person who holds to a non-Christian religion. It benefits Christians a bit more, obviously, as St. Paul says—more than a bit. But this transformation of the world.

The world now, in the messianic age, since Christ’s ascension and enthronement, is ordered fundamentally differently than it was before. And if you study the ancient world and ancient history, like Tom Holland, who’s not a Christian, did, it smacks you in the face. It smacks you in the face. So by saying that Christ is right now ruling from the right hand of the Father in heaven, again, this is not an ephemeral or spiritualized or allegorical kind of kingdom; it’s very literal, and it’s over the invisible and visible creation, and it has concrete effects in the material world as well as the spiritual world.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. So I thought for a while about what I would say at the end, because there’s so many different directions that one could take with a lot of what we said. Last time I kind of spent a little time saying dispensationalism is not good for you. [Laughter]

One of the things that I like to talk about a lot because I think it’s really neat these days is this question of hope. A lot of times Christians look around us and we see that there’s a lot of bad stuff going on in the world, and we might feel hopeless; we might quote some of those lines from the Psalms: “How long, Lord? How long?” And some, if they feel particularly hopeless, might be tempted by some of the arguments that essentially say, “This is all just pretend. This is all just pretend. You guys, you’ve been calling out to your God for thousands of years and he still has not showed up.” I mean, this is a basic kind of apologetic against Christianity. It’s tempting. It’s tempting to accept that idea.

But the only way that that’s really acceptable is with a very, very fundamental myopia about the history of humanity. What do I mean by that? Well, especially here in 21st-century America, our sense of history is— [Laughter] I’m not going to say it’s zero, but it’s approaching zero. I’ve had the opportunity, thank God, to go to some places where you can’t hardly kick a rock and not find an archaeological site of some kind. A lot of other places in the world have a much deeper sense of their own history. But the modern world in general is kind of arranged to make that harder, but I think even more in American than probably most other places in the world. So myopia is the default; historical myopia is the default way in which we function. And even within our the scope of our own lives: the way that I feel today is how I think about my life.

But if we take a step back and we see that we are living in this millennium of the messianic age of Christ—“messianic age of Christ”: that’s a little bit redundant, but you know what I mean—this is the period when Christ is ruling. And we see, like Fr. Stephen was just saying, we look at the historical reality of how things were 2,000-plus years ago versus how they are now, there is this radical change in the world. I’m not saying that things are great. Again, it says in Scripture that it’s in the midst of his enemies, so the enemies are still here—they’re not all here; lots are gone; lots are defeated; lots have been kicked out and sent to the abyss—so we can still expect that there’s going to be bad stuff, but nonetheless, the world is a very, very different place than it used to be.

And when we zoom back in to our own lives and assess “Where would I be without Christ? How would I even understand life without Christ?” then we begin to see that his ruling in the midst of his enemies is not a reality that’s kind of on a grand scale in the scope of human history or grand scope of geography across the whole planet, but it is within my life as well, that if he’s ruling in the midst of his enemies, then I should expect also, if I’m going to be with Christ, to be in the midst of his enemies. So I should expect my life to include demonic attack, meaning the Lord said in this world you’ll have trouble, but he also said, “Be of good cheer, for I have overcome the world.”

So that fundamental victory has been won, and so what’s happening now is the enemy is in retreat: they’re sacking, they’re burning as they go, but they’re being— They’ve been routed, and they’re being chased down by the saints on behalf of Christ; Christ is doing this in them. And so our task is to participate in that, not to just feel bad and to complain often or maybe even to give ourselves to despair that we are experiencing trouble; that our hope is fundamentally not in just thinking, “Well, things are bad, but maybe it’ll get better someday” or whatever, but our hope is actually in our participation in the work of Christ, to cleanse this world from demonic influence, to bring about his order and beauty and justice and love and kindness and all of these things, his ministry, that we are to be participants in his ministry and that the more that we are faithful, then the more that our hope grows. That’s just the way that it works.

So when we talk about the millennium, when we talk about the messianic age, it’s not just so that we can make big charts to put on the wall and say, “Ah, this is how it’s all laid out.” I mean, I love maps and charts and stuff, but that’s not what it’s about. It’s fundamentally about having the perspective that we need in order to be faithful, to do his work in the places where we are, and to participate in his putting all of his enemies under his feet and going into all the world, preaching the Gospel, baptizing, teaching everyone to do all that he has commanded. Father?

Fr. Stephen: So part of the reason—honestly the main reason—I wanted to go through that St. Irenaeus stuff was not so I could do the neat trick of “Everything you think you know about St. Irenaeus is wrong: ta-da! He’s not a chiliast!” [Laughter] I mean, that was a little bit, but that’s not the main reason. The main reason is that I think by working through that hopefully it’s kind of made plain that chiliasm and its sort of distant cousin, modern pre-millennialism, is not really a satisfactory answer to Gnosticism because, as we’ve talked about, it’s kind of based on the same principles. It’s based on this principle of setting the material world and the good things in it and the enjoyment of it over against the spiritual world and spiritual things, and saying one is more real or more important than the other.

It also has an additional problem over against the Gnostic issue, and that problem is that the good things of this world and the enjoyment thereof are pushed off into the future: not now, but someday. And this is part of what lies behind the comparison I made between the millennium in an ancient chiliast scheme and sort of Muslim heaven, because one of the features of heaven in Islam is that suddenly you’re allowed to indulge in all kinds of things that are sinful when you’re alive on earth. Can’t drink alcohol when you’re alive on earth, but all of a sudden all the wine you want in paradise, etc., etc. There are shades of that in chiliasm.

And that again points to a shared sort of Gnostic view of asceticism, that asceticism is denying yourself the world because— not because of trading something good for something better but because it’s not really good, but maybe it will become good in some later phase, in some later world, in some later age, or at least you’ll be given permission in that other context to do what otherwise you would not be permitted to do.

I think one of the importances, if we really embrace the truth of the fact that we are living in the messianic age—we are living in that age in which the Holy Spirit has been poured out upon all flesh; we are members of the new covenant, have been grafted in, as St. Paul talks about, as Christian—is that that means that all of that imagery and all of those promises of richness and abundance and peace and enjoyment—all of those are ours for the claiming. The Church—the Orthodox Church—is not just about fasting; it’s also about feasting. It’s not just about denial, but it’s also about acceptance of one another. It’s not just about going off by yourself into the wilderness to pray, but it’s also about the monastic who does go off by himself into the wilderness to pray and draw close to God and come to know Christ deeply, throwing open the doors of his monastic cell to receive visitors and to pass on the wisdom and the sanctification that he’s received, the holiness he’s received, to those who come to visit him and who need it.

And I think it’s very easy, because I’ve seen it on the faces of a lot of folks, especially newly Orthodox folks, to think that Orthodoxy is about being very serious and very even dour and about fasting even more than is required and about holding yourself apart from other people and about not laughing and about not enjoying yourself. And joy, of course, is a fruit of the Spirit. God has given us the good things and the blessings of this world for us to enjoy and to receive with prayer and thanksgiving and to share with each other. He’s given us each other not just— Sometimes we talk about this: we talk about how, well, we live in community and so that means we rub up against each other and we bounce off each other and we knock off each other’s sharp edges. This is true, but also to enjoy each other, to form friendships and bonds and familial relationships with each other, that are deep and are important and that are lasting—that will last for eternity, not just for this life.

St. Paul, when he’s talking about the resurrection in 1 Corinthians, says that if we have the hope of Christ only in this life—meaning if there is no resurrection and we only have the hope of Christ in this life—we of all men should be very much pitied. But what’s interesting is sometimes I think that we, while we firmly believe in the resurrection and life in the world to come and we’re looking forward to that and our hopes are put in that, sometimes I think we don’t really have the hope of Christ in this life any more. We’ve kind of given up on it. We’ve just accepted this life in this world is going to be a vale of tears and I need to endure to the end—and then there is joy and then there is happiness and everything in Christ afterward. I’m not saying there isn’t all of those things afterwards, but all of those things are available to us here and now.

St. Paul was in prison in Philippi, shackled to the ground in a pile of mud and feces, and he was singing hymns and praising God. He was not bitterly enduring. [Laughter] He was not biting his lip and emoting. He was not being stoic. He was rejoicing. How often does St. Paul—? Read Philippians. You can read it in one sitting, very easily. I know someone who memorized the whole thing. How many times does St. Paul call on us to rejoice? To rejoice in the Lord, to rejoice in each other, to rejoice in the salvation we receive. I think we need to take seriously that this is the messianic age. We need to take feasting with each other—with each other, not gluttony, not overdrinking, but with each other, feasting with each other, enjoying each other—as seriously as we take fasting, at least as seriously as we take our fasts and as we take Lent. We need to take Pascha and the whole Pascha season as seriously as we take Lent and the lenten season.

I think when we do that, we’ll see just how bad an error it is to project all of that joy and that fellowship and that communion with each other out into the future as though it’s not available to us now. And we’ll truly start to understand what it means to rejoice in the Lord and to participate and to experience our membership in the kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ and his reign over us and over our world.

Fr. Andrew: Amen. Amen. Well, that is our show for tonight. Thank you for listening, everyone. If you didn’t get through to us live, we’d still like to hear from you. You can email us at lordofspirits@ancientfaith.com—send me that hate mail that Fr. Stephen’s always talking about—you can also message us at our Facebook page; or you can leave us a voicemail at speakpipe.com/lordofspirits.

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Fr. Andrew: Thank you, good night, God bless you. And I feel fine.