Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick: Good evening, giants-killers—giant-killers—boy, it’s easy for me to say—giant-killers, dragon-slayers! I said “giants-killers”; I think that becomes a football thing, then. [Laughter] You are listening to The Lord of Spirits podcast. My co-host, Fr. Stephen De Young, is with me from Lafayette, Louisiana, and I am Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick in Emmaus, Pennsylvania. We are recording live, but we’re actually not going to be taking phone calls tonight. That said, if you leave a question on our Facebook or Ancient Faith YouTube streams and we spot it, there is a chance that we could take it and respond.

Anyway, let’s dive in! So are you ready, Fr. Stephen?

Fr. Stephen De Young: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] All right! Yes, this is going to be an all-Q&A episode, everybody. So we’ve got piles and piles of questions from you. Lots were sent by email, but then lots were sent by voicemail. And since we got plenty of the voicemail variety, we’re favoring that, number one, because we love to hear your wonderful voices, but, number two, it just makes for better radio, actually. So don’t be discouraged, though—we still want to hear from you by email; you’re welcome to send that in—but we, like I said—voicemail is better! So here we are: lots and lots of questions today.

So I’m just going to start us off with the first one. This one comes from, actually, my old seminary classmate, Fr. Christopher.

Fr. Christopher: Leviticus 18 deals with various and sundry forms of sexual immorality that the Lord commands the children of Israel not to do, according to the way of life in the land of Egypt and Canaan, because this way of life vexes the land itself. But one verse in this chapter stands out as very different, and on first reading it doesn’t look like it’s dealing with sexual immorality, and that’s verse 21. “Furthermore, you shall not give your offspring to worship a ruler, nor shall you defile my holy name. I am the Lord.” My question is: Is this verse actually talking about the nephilim ritual? Thank you, Fathers.

Fr. Andrew: There you go. Right out of the gate with a giant question. Yay. [Laughter] I don’t know, I—

Fr. Stephen: I didn’t think the question was that long. Oh wait, you meant the other way! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: That’s right. All right, so a good pun to start off with.

Fr. Stephen: The punishment continues.

Fr. Andrew: As it will. It will continue no matter how morale does! [Laughter] I mean, my read on where it says, “Do not give your offspring to worship a ruler…” I mean, “ruler” there, that’s referring to gods, right? Is that the idea? It’s not talking about… Of course, you know, your local god-king is a god, right?

Fr. Stephen: Well, it’s kind of a mistranslation.

Fr. Andrew: Oh! All right. Take us in.

Fr. Stephen: Well, it’s Molech.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, is that what it says literally, is Molech?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and someone read “Molech” as melech, which means “king.”

Fr. Andrew: Wow. All right. Is that… I mean, I don’t have my Septuagint in front of me. Is that the Septuagint reading? They have “king”?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah.

Fr. Andrew: So don’t give your kids to Molech, who is the notorious—

Fr. Stephen: It was referring to a specific demon, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: So there are probably—

Fr. Stephen: It’s derived from the same root, the same way that Baal—baal means “master” or “lord”—Molech means “ruler.” So it’s kind of a mistranslation, that it’s not translated as a proper noun.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and notoriously Molech is the one associated with child sacrifice in the Old Testament.

Fr. Stephen: Right.

Fr. Andrew: So probably not referencing the nephilim ritual, but really talking about sacrificing children to this demon.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and the connection to the sexual immorality element is that this is related to fertility, the practice. So people would sacrifice a child to Molech, the idea being that would guarantee fertility, and you’d have a bunch more children.

Fr. Andrew: Oh wow.

Fr. Stephen: Counter-intuitive, I know.

Fr. Andrew: There’s a weird parallel there to the whole prosperity gospel “seed faith” thing: “Pay this money, and you’ll get a lot more money later!”

Fr. Stephen: Right, so this is a little darker.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, way!

Fr. Stephen: I can’t see Rod Parsley sacrificing any babies, but… [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Good old Rod.

Fr. Stephen: If you have information I don’t, let the police know, but I’m pretty sure he’s not. But, yeah, that’s the connection. That’s the connection, and a lot of the commandments there in Leviticus 18 are bluntly talking about non-reproductive sex.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, all sterile kinds of things that are against the basic commandment of “be fruitful.”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and so this is related to that, and they’re all directed toward men, because, of course, women at that time did not have the right of consent, so it was men making the decisions about these things. And so it’s restricting male sexuality from these various outlets, because men, for some reason, in the past, wanted to have a lot of sex without having a lot of children they’d have to be responsible for.

Fr. Andrew: Huh! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, go figure!

Fr. Andrew: And then also, the pairing of idolatry and sexual immorality is ubiquitous in the Bible. It’s everywhere.

Fr. Stephen: Right.

Fr. Andrew: All right, well, moving on to our next question for our first half, this one is from Noah.

Noah: Hello, Fathers. I was wondering what is the theological significance of the fact that, in John’s gospel, Jesus doesn’t exorcise any demons, even though he’s seen doing this in the other three? Thanks.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, so, number one, there’s a lot of differences between John’s gospel and the synoptic gospels—Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Why is this? It’s funny; actually I had never noticed this before, but then when we got this question I kind of looked it up and was like: Oh, hey, that’s right. I can’t remember any exorcisms in John’s gospel, and I can’t find any. Is that true? Are there not any? And if not, why do you think that would not be in the picture there?

Fr. Stephen: So I have said that there aren’t any in your presence before, so apparently…

Fr. Andrew: Oh really? I can’t remember…

Fr. Stephen: You tune me out a lot of the time. I believe it, but…

Fr. Andrew: Everything you say— You say a lot of things! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: It’s true. But I also repeat myself a lot.

Fr. Andrew: That’s true, too.

Fr. Stephen: On the flip-side. On the flip-side, I say the same things over and over again a lot of times. But it is true that there are no exorcisms in St. John’s gospel. I mean, on one hand, this is kind of an unanswerable question in that we’d have to get into St. John’s head and say, “Hey, why didn’t you put in any exorcisms?” But I’m not just going to say that. [Laughter]

I personally hold to—and I think there’s good warrant for this. As an Orthodox Christian, the iconography of St. John composing his gospel with a scribe always depicts him as an elderly man, for example. So based on sort of everything the Fathers say, all the traditions of the Church, rather than my own conjecture—I’ll leave that—that St. John’s gospel was written last. And there’s been some good scholarly work published in the last several years in Johannine studies that makes a really good case that not only is St. John’s gospel written after the synoptic gospels, the other three, but that it is aware of the other three.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah! So he’s like: Well, look, you guys got this covered, so I’m going to focus on this over here.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and there are places where he seems to be deliberately filling in gaps. So, for example, talking about the raising of Lazarus and its direct connection to Christ’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, big example, because the raising of Lazarus isn’t even in the other three.

Fr. Stephen: Right, we just see all these people excited to see Jesus. [Laughter] And we’re like…

Fr. Andrew: Yeah! It comes out of the blue. Like: “Oh, here he is! Welcome!” Big crowds and palm-branches, and like—wait, who is this guy again? I mean, it doesn’t quite make sense in those gospels, but if you— If word has gotten out that he’s raised this guy, four days dead, out of the tomb, people are going to turn out for that. They’re going to want to see this guy who can do that, because no one’s ever heard of that before.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so there are a bunch of other examples besides the exorcisms also. For example, St. John’s gospel doesn’t have the institution of the Eucharist in it. It has the foot-washing, and then it sort of skips. It has the foot-washing that the other gospels don’t, and then it has a much more elaborated final discourse of Christ to his disciples after the Mystical Supper, but it doesn’t describe the institution of the Eucharist. Rather, you have John 6, which isn’t—that whole discourse is not in the other gospels; you have that talking about the Eucharist, but you don’t have the actual institution.

The weirdest one of these, though, is that technically Jesus doesn’t get baptized in St. John’s gospel.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, interesting. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Because it describes him coming to St. John the Forerunner, and then it skips to: “When he came up out of the water…” Like, it skips the actual baptism part, the same way it skips the institution of the Eucharist.

Fr. Andrew: So in a lot of ways, John’s gospel functions as a kind of theological supplement to the other three.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so it takes for granted—in those cases, literally takes for granted that you’re aware of the contents of the others. And so he can fill things in, he can talk about things that maybe he was privy to that other gospel-writers weren’t, and sort of expand on some of those things without having to go through the same material again.

Fr. Andrew: And then the other three… Without getting into the weeds of whether one of them uses a source for the others or whatever, the way they—

Fr. Stephen: You’re just picking fights today! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: I’m just letting you know I’m aware of that.

Fr. Stephen: Oh, okay.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] They don’t function this way. There’s not like a: “Well, you know, Mark had this covered, so I don’t really need to…”

Fr. Stephen: Right, they don’t reference each other.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, they seem to function as units on their own on some level. They’re trying to be complete according to that particular author’s vision for what a complete gospel looks like, each in their own way.

Fr. Stephen: St. Luke in the beginning of his gospel makes reference to a bunch of people having written things before. But other than that, he makes that sort of general reference, like: “I’m using source material,” but other than that there’s no specific… Like: “I got this from this person; I got that from that person.” There are some hints of that in St. Luke’s gospel in that he will sometimes name people for no particular reason. He’ll say, “This was So-and-so, the son of So-and-so,” or “So-and-so, the brother of So-and-so,” which kind of implies that may be whom he talked to. And he just sort of assumes that the people—his original readers will know who that is or be able to ask them something or whatever. But, yeah, beyond that, there aren’t— He doesn’t say, like: “As St. Mark wrote…” [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Right, exactly. And, you know, of course when you’re talking about the two of them in particular, they were not present for the vast majority of what they’re writing about, so they’re all getting that from other sources. They’re talking to people, and maybe there’s some other stuff written down that we don’t have, but…

Fr. Stephen: St. Mark’s getting it traditionally from St. Peter, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: Right. Very interesting. All right. Well, so the answer, Noah, is that we don’t quite know exactly why there aren’t exorcisms in St. John’s gospel, but maybe he figured that had been taken care of already by the other ones.

Fr. Stephen: Good catch, but, yeah, it’s so prominent in the other three that he may have felt that was covered.

Fr. Andrew: Sure, right.

Fr. Stephen: As he seems to have with some other things.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly. Okay. All right, we got one from Jessie, who has a question about Holy Spirit possession.

Jessie: Hello, Fathers. This is Jessie Crosby. I have a question about prophecy. As I’ve been listening to Lord of Spirits and my understanding of what prophecy is and the role that it plays in Scripture and in our lives has been expanded, I’m a little confused about certain areas of Scripture where it talks about the Holy Spirit coming upon someone and they begin to prophesy, almost in an uncontrolled way. Probably the most obvious example would be Saul, when the Holy Spirit comes on him when he’s coming to attack David, and he begins prophesying and takes all of his clothes off, and it’s almost as if he’s acting as if he has no control and is a madman, which seems to be something that we would associate with demonic possession, not the Holy Spirit. And we’re never really told what they say. So I’m wondering: What does prophecy in this sense look like? What are they saying? What exactly are they…? Are they just praising God? Are they speaking about something that’s going to happen? I’m trying to understand how to read these portions of Scripture. Thank you so much.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that’s a cool question. I mean, it’s notable—and you’ve pointed this out before—that there are… It’s not just like with Saul suddenly jerking around on the ground, but there are other cases where it seems like the Holy Spirit sort of takes hold of someone and on some level makes them do something. What are the conditions…? Why would he do that? [Laughter] Obviously, we cannot know the mind of God, but you know what I’m saying. There are clearly times when prophesy seems to be a much more kind of synergistic thing, like: “I heard the word of the Lord and I saw him, and now I’m passing this on to you.” Like it doesn’t seem like… There’s no point where the Holy Spirit functions as a kind of—functions through someone in a kind of oracular way that I can recall. Am I forgetting something? But there are moments that he grabs hold of people, and things happen.

Fr. Stephen: Right. Most of the time when you see the phenomenon of Holy Spirit-possession, whoever gets sort of possessed kills a lot of people. I’ll just even problematize it even more! [Laughter] Like in Judges and in Joshua, that literally happens. It says the Holy Spirit came upon somebody like Samson—people love when I talk about Samson!—and he kills hundreds of people.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. And I’ve noticed that the language seems to be different. It’s “The Spirit comes upon” versus someone is “filled with the Holy Spirit.” Is that a real distinction?

Fr. Stephen: Right. “Comes upon” ...and then departs! Whereas when St. Stephen, when he’s about to be martyred, is said to be filled with the Holy Spirit and then he speaks, where that’s sort of a quality of him that he’s been filled with the Spirit, whereas, in the Samson case or with one of the other Judges case, the Holy Spirit just sort of comes upon him, sort of seizes him, and then departs. We don’t get the idea that the Holy Spirit sort of rushed upon St. Stephen and then sort of left; quite the opposite.

Fr. Andrew: Right. He’s filled with the Holy Spirit. I mean, this is who he is, but this is kind of a peaking, so to speak.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and, yes, prophecy is usually, as you said, kind of synergistic, because we see prophets who sort of cooperate, and we see Jonah who kind of doesn’t cooperate, at least for most of the book! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Right, although in his case, still, the Holy Spirit doesn’t grab hold of him; he just is given so many opportunities for repentance! [Laughter] He finally does.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and then he finally sort of cooperates and then is bitter about it. Yeah. [Laughter] So we have to remember that the Holy Spirit, the way the Holy Spirit is talked about—and this is especially clear in the Old Testament; this is part of why we sometimes miss it—is as, like, the presence of God who is filling the tabernacle and the Temple. So it’s the presence of God himself because the Holy Spirit is God, and it’s sort of filling—and that presence very much has this ambivalent nature in the sense that this is a blessing for Israel that God has come to dwell with them; it’s also dangerous. You have the whole “death by holiness” thing that is a potential there. [Laughter]

And so the way that that goes, whether it goes one way or the other in terms of the presence of God, is based on the holiness or the corruption, the purity or impurity, of the person encountering the presence of God in the Spirit. And so a person who has repented, who’s been made clean… That’s why Isaiah—look at the calling of Isaiah. Isaiah comes into the presence of God; immediately: “Woe is me,” we’ll say. [Laughter] And the King James is: “Woe is me; I am undone.” It’s the equivalent of “I’m done,” because of his own sinfulness. And there’s this symbolic purification with the coal. And then after the purification, he’s then able to receive and go on this mission. So the negative reaction—when you see a negative reaction like Saul, Saul at this point has an unclean spirit dwelling within him and is out for murder out of his own jealousy and anger. So when he comes into the presence of God, that’s not a good experience.

Fr. Andrew: Right, it’s not death exactly by holiness, but it’s getting there.

Fr. Stephen: It’s sort of torture by holiness, madness as the result of it. And so we don’t, obviously, know the exact words that were coming out of his mouth, but we should think about, for example, when we’re told that ultimately every knee will bow in heaven and on earth and under the earth—so including the devil—and confess that Christ is Lord. That’s not going to be a pleasurable experience for the devil to speak that truth! [Laughter] So even prophecy is not necessarily a pleasurable experience, and usually when you see somebody getting seized by the Holy Spirit and then the Holy Spirit departing like that, it’s because that person themselves has not been sort of pure. God is doing his will through them, but this Holy Spirit can’t abide there because he hasn’t been purified. So as we come up—as we record this, we’re coming up on Pentecost, so this chain that St. Luke makes between the purification of the world and of humanity by Christ’s blood on the cross then allows the Holy Spirit to come and dwell within people continually; that connection is there. Otherwise the Holy Spirit couldn’t because it would kill us.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right. You know, the other takeaway I have from this is that just because God makes use of someone doesn’t mean that they are a saint, that they have to be obeyed, or whatever. There’s that whole—within certain sectors of Christianity, that whole “touch not the Lord’s anointed” kind of thing, which is basically a way for allowing abusive church leaders to not face any consequences, like: “Look at his success! How can you possibly criticize him?” Well, actually…

Fr. Stephen: So you can apply that literally. I mean, you shouldn’t go around killing people. That’s what it meant. That was David refusing to actually murder Saul to usurp the monarchy. You should not do that! You get to worse faster. You should not murder them and take over the church. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Right, yes, exactly. Usurping a kingdom… Killing a pastor is not the same thing as criticizing him for bad things he’s done or holding him accountable.

Fr. Stephen: Bad behavior, yes.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, well, we’ve got another one. This one is from Travis who has a question about sin.

Travis: Greetings, podfathers! I have a question about sin. What is it and how did it come into existence? In the past you’ve mentioned that sin is a spiritual being that seeks to dominate and master people like it did Cain. How did that spiritual being come into existence?

Also, in a sense, is sin a form of mis-timed goodness? My understanding of creation is that God made everything good. I’ve also heard Fr. Seraphim Rose quote multiple saints, saying that in the garden of Eden, God eventually intended Adam and Eve to partake of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The problem was not eating of the fruit of the tree, but eating of the tree at the wrong time, when God told them not to.

As I have thought about this more, I’ve come to the conclusion that all sin, on some level, could be thought of as doing the right action at the wrong time. To commit adultery is to have sex—a good thing—at the wrong time: not with our spouse. To commit idolatry is to worship—a good thing; we were made to worship—but it is done at the wrong time; it’s not directed towards God.

Does this view of sin as a sort of mis-timing, a sort of lack of kairos timing, make sense and fit into the spiritual understanding of sin outlined in The Lord of Spirits? Thank you, Fathers!

Fr. Andrew: Two parts, right? The first is: Where does sin as a spiritual force come from? But then also how does that connect with this idea of…? I mean, this second part, we see this kind of language in some of the monastic fathers, especially talking about passions being… When they become sinful, it’s because they’re misdirected, not so much like a change in time maybe, but a misdirection in time is a misdirection, too. I could stand outside in my backyard and turn in circles and swing my arms around, but if one of my children comes within arm’s reach, I should stop that. [Laughter] Because I’m going to hit them in the face, and I do not wish to hit them in the face.

It’s a good question. I feel like I have some sense of both, that sinfulness as a malevolent spiritual presence comes because of demonic rebellion, that it’s a force of an actual, personal force in the world that is fallen angelic nature.

Fr. Stephen: Right, yeah, and so the imagery that’s used with sin, starting with Genesis 4, is of this demonic being, but we shouldn’t think that there is this one demonic being, Sin, and this other one, the Devil, and this other one… [Laughter] But the idea is very much… And this is not only Genesis 4, but this is how the New Testament, but especially the Johannine literature treats it, is that… And this goes into the monastic literature. Even before the monastic literature: I was recently doing some work in the Shepherd of Hermas, and it’s spelled out there, too. That this is a question of a demonic entity, sort of working through you. And this is what, in 1 John is referred to as the works of the devil. This goes all the way back.

So demonic entities aren’t able to produce things in the world independently. So sin is when one of these spirits sort of seizes control of a person, and that person brings those works into existence in the world.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s not necessarily… You used the phrase “seizes control,” but it’s not necessarily like true possession in the sense of you can’t help it or whatever, although that does exist, but is… Voluntarily I’m participating in the works of a demon, and so therefore the demon works through me. I become his agent.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. Well, let me freak everybody out a little more.

Fr. Andrew: All right!

Fr. Stephen: In that there’s more of a continuum between sinning and demonic possession than them being two different things, because if you think about sin and you think about sin in the way the Fathers talk about it as the passions—they’re called passions because they make you passive.

Fr. Andrew: Right, they control you.

Fr. Stephen: So rage takes control of you and leaves you passive. Or, if you think about it in terms of addiction, as an analogy, there’s a point in, say, alcoholism, where you’re not consciously choosing to take the next drink any more.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, no, it just becomes automatic.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And so there’s not so much a line between one of the demon-possessed people we see in the gospels and me “committing a sin” as there is sort of this range of continuum, but that’s sort of where the road leads if you continue on it without repentance.

Fr. Andrew: So a difference of magnitude more than of type.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And so any time we yield to the passions, we’re yielding control of ourselves and our lives to essentially a demonic being; a spirit of evil is what we’re manifesting and what we’re… And so that produces these works, which are themselves dangerous and destructive in the world, and which Christ came to destroy, according to 1 John.

And the reverse is also true; this is how the fruits of the Spirit work. When we’re following Christ and keeping his commandments and doing good, we’re manifesting the Holy Spirit, God himself; we’re participating with God himself.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and you become gradually more… It doesn’t become automatic, exactly, but it becomes a kind of second nature to do—

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, because our nature is changed; our nature is transformed.

Fr. Andrew: You know, the thing I would say about this question of “Is sin just sort of goodness mis-timed?” I see where Travis is going with that, and I think that there is some truth to that, but I think that the problem with that image is that it sounds… When someone conceives of how they perform an action, they think about their motives, they think about the process of beginning it, and so on and so forth. But if it’s just: I’m just doing this at the wrong time, then that suggests that all that led up to that action is the same; it’s just that: “Oh, whoops, it’s at the wrong moment.”

But the truth is that the kind of movement of sin is a different movement than the movement of holiness, even if the action itself, taken as a separate, isolated sort of datum, may not be evil. It’s not an evil thing to eat a steak, but the whole motivation that goes into putting that meat in front of an idol and praying to that god and having the desire and intention to share a meal with that god, that whole action is idolatry; it’s not just the eating. So it’s not just kind of mis-timed; it’s an inappropriateness in a lot of ways. Like I said, I think it’s an okay image, but I think it could be a lot fuller. That’s my take on that. What do you think about that?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and you have to take into account the distinction that the Fathers make between… There are blameworthy passions and there are blameless passions. So as humans, we get tired. We don’t voluntarily get tired. [Laughter] We get tired, we get hungry, we even have the drive to reproduce, none of which are blameworthy in and of themselves. It’s when they’re indulged to excess and in the wrong way. So there is something there in that distinction, but there are also just blameworthy passions. Like pride is never a good thing. Greed is never a good thing. Sorry, Gordon Gekko. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, those ones, the idea of mis-timing them, like: “Okay, I’ll be proud at this moment, and that’s okay, but not…” or “I’ll be greedy at this moment, and that’s okay, but not…” So, yeah, it doesn’t quite work.

Fr. Stephen: It’s okay for me to be a little slothful in moderation, right? [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: No matter how much any of us might feel that way, it’s still not true.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, or it may reflect our actual lives… Yeah, and so there’s a whole nest of issues here we could— Maybe we’ll do a show on that some time, on morality and ethics and that, like: Does someone’s intentions even matter? When we talk about voluntary and involuntary sins and that kind of thing. But that’s for another time.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, indeed. So we’ve got one from—he didn’t say his name, but it’s Socrates, or Sokratis, I guess, if you’re going to…

Fr. Stephen: So-crates, I believe it’s pronounced. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: That’s a call back to a lovely film from the 1980s! [Laughter] All right, this is one from Socrates, and he has a question about nakedness.

Fr. Stephen: He’s always asking questions and never giving any answers, that guy!

Fr. Andrew: Right, exactly! So here it is!

Socrates: Hi, Fr. Andrew and Fr. Stephen! Thank you for the show. My understanding is that Adam and Eve had bodies, and then when they sinned, they now have flesh, which is what we all have. So my question is: At the end of Genesis 2, it says that they were naked and were not ashamed. So how are we to understand their nakedness in regards to the body they had before the Fall? And also sometimes in iconography we see them getting kicked out of paradise, and they have these fur garments of skins or clothes, look like made from animals rather than the human flesh we have now. So I was wondering how to reconcile the information there. Thank you.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so this turns on this question of the garments of skin. What does it mean to be naked before you have the garments of skin? And what’s the deal with iconography that shows them literally wearing animal skins? I think the second part is the easiest one to me. Just because you— You shouldn’t take everything you see in an icon literally. [Laughter] I think would be the way I would put that.

Fr. Stephen: And how would you depict that? I mean, how would you depict them before the expulsion from paradise, if you were going to depict them as normal humans after?

Fr. Andrew: Right. Or another example is Christ in his post-resurrectional appearances, we all recognize him. When we look at an icon, we see him and say, “Oh, there’s Jesus Christ!” And yet, I think no one who saw him after his resurrection immediately recognized him.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, well, we talked about that in that one episode, but there’s a lot of weird… No one dared ask him who he was, because they knew it was Christ. Like, that’s kind of a weird circumlocution. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: That suggests that was a question that arose in their minds. Like: “Who is this? Wait, no, this has to be him.”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah! [Laughter] So that’s kind of an odd thing.

Fr. Andrew: So like I said, you can’t take it—I don’t think you can just simply take it literally. And again, this is a patristic image, the idea that the garments of skin represent a change in human nature and aren’t just: “Here’s some leather, guys.”

Fr. Stephen: But that’s an iconographic way of conveying that, and I have difficulty thinking of another one, let alone a better one, to convey that.

Fr. Andrew: And clearly, actual iconographers have had difficulty in depicting that as well.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, people far more talented and blessed than I have ever been.

Fr. Andrew: So what does it mean for them to be naked and unashamed?

Fr. Stephen: The garments of skin aren’t an answer for the problem of them being naked. They had already, remember, gotten leaves to try to solve that problem, once they realized they were naked. There’s a whole exchange: “Who told you that you were naked?” So the issue of being naked and unashamed is that they’re naked and don’t realize that they’re naked. And then after the knowledge of good and evil, they realize that they’re naked. So what is the nakedness doing in this? This is basically trying to convey to us the idea that they’re innocent. Remember, the knowledge of good and evil, throughout the Old Testament, every time it’s referred to later, it refers to maturity, toward being an adult. And so this is them trying to circumvent growing in the grace of God and the knowledge of God and trying to seize maturity for themselves post-haste.

Fr. Andrew: And it’s notable that when the Lord encounters them after their transgression, they said, “We hid because we were naked.” He said, “Who told you you were naked?” And then immediately: “Wait. Did you eat of the tree that I told you not to eat from?” [Laughter] So it’s connected; it’s directly connected, that their knowledge of their nakedness comes as a result of this transgression.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so think about—and this was true in the ancient world, too—little kids run around naked all the time.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, yes! [Laughter] Often prefer it. “Put your clothes back on, please!”

Fr. Stephen: Little girls run around topless, and nobody thinks anything of it, and they don’t think anything of it. It’s only later on, as they mature and come to know themselves more, that they develop a sense of shame and want to cover up, and that becomes appropriate. So that’s what the story is trying to tell us, that they’re innocent. They’re sort of child-like beforehand.

Fr. Andrew: Okay. Well, we’ve got one more before we take our first break. This is from Nathan.

Nathan: Hi, my name is Nathan. I’m from Dallas, Texas, and my question is about the most recent blessing episode, and how blessing relates to justice and wisdom, because it seems to me that blessing and justice are practically synonymous. Since God founded creation on his wisdom, and his wisdom undergirds all of reality, if you’re a wise man then you live by that wisdom that God used, by which God wishes us to live; whereas justice is being set in proper order relative to creation, both in your interior man and the external relations. So that’s, again, proper ordering in relation to creation and God, like wisdom is. And then blessing is that state of being properly ordered in relation to creation. So I don’t really understand. Is the wise man equivalent to the just man and equivalent to the blessed man? I just— I’m not really understanding any sort of distinction between those three terms, as far as any sort of practical life is laid out. So if you wouldn’t… If you could clarify that, I would greatly appreciate it. Thanks very much and God bless.

Fr. Andrew: All right. I mean, I think it’s a good question. My initial take on that is to say, yes, these are all pointing ultimately at the same thing, but kind of pointing from different angles. Like wisdom is about the knowledge of doing the right thing, often gained through experience; and justice is how things are supposed to be; and then blessing is a way of talking about establishing justice, especially with regards to oneself, that it’s about putting yourself in that just state. But I don’t know; I mean, is he…? I don’t think they’re exactly synonymous in the sense that they all mean exactly the same thing, but I think he’s right that they all kind of point in the same direction, but at least from different at least conceptual angles. What do you think of that?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, sort of. Yeah, they’re all related. So justice, properly speaking, is the order in creation, the actual order where everything is in its place and everything is… And so that’s directly related to blessedness, because at the end of the creation days God blesses the things he created. It’s there in the text. So blessedness is the state of part of the creation when it is in accord with the whole. So the just man and the blessed man is the same person.

Fr. Andrew: I just wanted to clarify. You said that God blesses everything after he made it. This is when he says—this is when it says, “And God called it good.” Is that what you’re talking about?

Fr. Stephen: Well, also he… Yeah. But he also, on humans, pronounces a blessing. So the blessed man is the man who is— and that also makes him a just man. But again, it’s two different perspectives. The just is: everything is set in order; the person is set in order. Blessed is the sort of, I guess, phenomenological side, the experience of that, that state of blessedness that it’s reflected by. And then wisdom has to do with the perception and understanding of that order that’s in creation.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: And it’s in human life. And this is why in the wisdom literature in the Old Testament, like you read Proverbs and there’s all this stuff about ants! [Laughter] And different elements of creation, and then drawing connections from that order to the ordering of human life. So wisdom is the ability to perceive that order, what is just and what is right. And that’s why when we get, for example: Oh, we’re going to show how wise Solomon is, we have him judging a court case, because he’s able to perceive the truth of how things are rightly ordered, and because of that he’s able to resolve these injustices and correct them, because he’s aware of that order. And the fool is the person who doesn’t, then, understand how these things work.

Fr. Andrew: Right, exactly. I mean, to be a fool is the opposite of the wise man.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so this is what’s going on with: “The fool says in his heart there is no God.” There weren’t any atheists. That’s not what this was about. “There is no God” meant: There is no consequence for what I do; I can live how I want and there will be no consequences. Well, guess what? [Laughter] That’s not how things work!

Fr. Andrew: Especially when you understand this basic notion of God as ruler, as God, the one who establishes justice. When he says, “There is no God,” it’s more like saying, “No one is watching me. There’s no one in charge here.” It’s not just “I don’t believe that a God exists.” It’s like you said: he’s saying, “I can do whatever I want! Nothing’s going to happen.”

Fr. Stephen: Right, and those consequences will find him out anyway, but he’s a fool because he doesn’t understand and he doesn’t see them coming and he doesn’t act accordingly.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly. All right! Well, that is the first half of this pre-recorded episode of The Lord of Spirits. We’re going to take a little break and be right back.

Fr. Andrew: Welcome back, everybody! Like I said, we’re not actually taking calls tonight, despite what you just heard the Voice of Steve say. But we are taking your questions! We’ve received a lot of pre-recorded questions, and so we’re just kind of running through them, shotgun-style, and giving responses to them. So, Father, are you ready for the second half?

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: All right! So for our next question, we have Fr. Vijay.

Fr. Stephen: Hi, Fr. Andrew and Fr. Stephen! This is Fr. Vijay. I’m a priest in the Indian Orthodox Church serving in New Jersey. Thank you so much for your podcast; I very much love it. Prior to listening to your podcast, I would look at paganism and Hinduism as nothing to be concerned with, that there was nothing behind it. And yet, after listening to your podcast, then I realized that we should be concerned, we should be worried, and we should be careful. Then going to your “Blessings and Curses” episode, it felt as if you were very dismissive of the curses and that there shouldn’t be any concern.

So I wanted to clarify and get actually a good soundbyte to give to the Orthodox Christian that is concerned with these curses. We don’t, in our jurisdiction—we don’t have the evil eye; we have the black tongue. And we have something called Rāhukāla, which is like the hours of the day that, if you start something new, it would be cursed. I think all of our communities, all of our jurisdictions have this concept. Our faithful are going towards this. But if you can just speak to it directly and say how is the Orthodox Christian to handle these curses, and in what way they should be careful or not.

Fr. Andrew: That’s really interesting to me. I mean, number one, I’m surprised that they apparently do not have the evil eye tradition there in India, whereas it’s like… I mean, it’s all over the—

Fr. Stephen: Everywhere?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s everywhere. So I’m going to have to look into that. But they’ve got the black tongue—which, I’ve never heard of that.

Fr. Stephen: It sounds like a tribe of orcs.

Fr. Andrew: Right!? Right!? [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: The Black Tongue.

Fr. Andrew: That’s great. The black… Yeah, I kind of love it. Yeah, so he’s referencing the “Blessings and Curses” episode where we talked about those things, and I think that the thing that was said about cursing was if you are a baptized Christian living a faithful life, then you kind of don’t have to really worry about that. It’s not something that can take over. Yet nonetheless, for instance, some of the Euchologia—the Book of Needs, the priest’s prayerbook, whatever that gets translated as—they have a prayer against the evil eye. I mean, is it a thing or not a thing, or is it something…? Is it a thing that we don’t need to be worried about but even though it really is a thing, or…? I was interested that at the beginning he said, “You know, I used to think that we didn’t have to worry about paganism or whatever, but after listening to your show I realized there actually is something there! I realized there are spirits…”

Fr. Stephen: “Now I am deeply concerned.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right, exactly. So he’s from the Indian tradition, where their community has the presence of Hinduism, especially if you’re in India, but I’m sure that here in the US, Indian Christians probably know a bunch of Hindus as well. So I mean that’s a live thing for their lives. I don’t know, is it nothing? Is it nothing, but nothing to be worried about? What’s going on with this?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. So I’ve been—like I said, I’ve been fiddling around in the Shepherd of Hermas, so you’re going to get some more Shepherd of Hermas. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: All right!

Fr. Stephen: That there’s a saying that one of the things that the angel tells Hermas is that you shouldn’t be afraid of the devil, because he’s powerless—because he’s powerless; he’s been made powerless by Christ—but you should be afraid of the works of the devil. And the works of the devil here is not, as we kind of mentioned in the first half, not stuff the devil might cause somebody else to do to you; it’s stuff that you would do. Because when we yield to sin, we thereby give the devil influence in our lives. And so this is why I think the Church has always pushed back against… So the temptation with the evil eye, or, I would presume, the black tongue, or any of these things, is that there is also some kind of folk means by which to ward them off.

Fr. Andrew: Right, the little blue bead or the little eye amulet or that stuff.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and when we talked about that Ugaritic death curse, putting the evil eye on someone is immediately followed by doing another incantation to protect yourself from the evil eye in case it rebounds and the other guy throws it back at you. And so if we enter into sort of that world and that way of doing things, then we’re giving those things purchase in our lives. So my presumption would be, the purpose for composing a prayer— Remember, prayers aren’t to, like, change God, and they’re not magic incantations; prayers are to change us. So writing a prayer against the evil eye would, I think, be a pastoral thing, to give the concerned person something better to do than entering into folk magic or whatever themselves; but say, “Here, pray this prayer. This prayer will remind you that Christ protects you from the demonic powers; Christ protects you from these things. Take solace in Christ through prayer rather than whatever techne is suggested by the world.”

Fr. Andrew: And there’s a kind of whole matrix of exorcism bound up with the priesthood as well, especially some of the prayers against the evil eye that I’ve seen are largely to be said by priests, but I think maybe there’s lay ones as well. And of course there’s lots of prayers that talk about protecting us from the attacks of the devil and of demons. I guess the idea that people have with this is that someone could, with their own malevolence or whatever, do a thing that can then make bad things happen to somebody else through sorcerous means, whether it’s the evil eye or the black tongue—I have to imagine that black tongue folk magic has got to be like amulets shaped like a black tongue, right? I mean, I don’t know… Fr. Vijay, I have to know more about this! I’m really interested in this now. You’ll have to write in and tell us!

But yeah, the truth is we’re always under assault in one way or another from demonic forces. They’re always trying to drag us into their garbage. But I don’t… I think this idea that one person can sort of shoot a sort of demonic magic missile at somebody else… I don’t know, I mean, is that a thing? What do you think?

Fr. Stephen: Well, it’s not that different from the physical. Like, someone could come and punch me in the face, or stab me or burn my house down. So I could become so terrified of that that I become sort of violent and militant and paranoid myself, or I can trust God and I can follow Christ. The same thing is true spiritually. Like, yeah, hypothetically… And if you’re both people who are essentially worshiping demons, yeah, the idea that one person could sic a demon on another person—okay. But in the same way, do you respond to that reality by becoming paranoid and suspicious and superstitious and thereby destroying yourself, or do you follow Christ, trusting God to protect you from that, just like all the other kinds of harm which we face every day?

Fr. Andrew: Right, which, I mean, as you were saying that, especially I thought: Wow, that’s so applicable to so many things in our lives right now, with the massive spread about theories about bad people wanting to do bad things! When someone presents me with one of those theories, whether it’s true or not—I mean, there are actual conspiracies in the world…

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, people get together and plan to do bad things together. Yeah, that happens. A lot! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that is a thing. So maybe a given conspiracy is true or not true, but even if they’re all— This is what I always say to people: Even if they’re all true, even if the things being described in these are actually all true, our task as Christians in the world is still the same as it was before! It’s still: Be faithful in the midst of this. It’s still: Trust God for his protection. That’s still what’s going on.

Sometimes I think there’s an attraction to the idea of having achieved some kind of knowledge of what’s going on in the world, and that becomes a kind of an addiction to itself, when you see evil everywhere constantly. I mean, it’s not that evil isn’t everywhere, but when that’s what you’re focusing on, when that’s what your whole life is about, then, like you said, it’s this sort of addictive anxiety and failure to trust in God really. People become very nasty often in response to feeling like they’re surrounded by hostile powers, if that’s their whole deal: the emphasis and the turning of the attention towards what is evil rather than the focusing on what is good and being faithful in the midst of a difficult world. Yeah. Fun stuff.

Okay, all right. Well, this next one comes from Kenzie.

Kenzie: Fathers, bless! My name is Mackenzie Jean Romero, but my friends call me Kenzie. I’m recording from Colorado Springs, Colorado, and I am a Bible college student with kind of a difficult question, but I sense not only strength and intelligence in you two, but also great kindness. So even though this is a tender and tricky issue, I have confidence in you guys.

I grew up Wesleyan-Arminian, and for a long time my family also attended various Baptist denominations, and both of those traditions have radically different teaching on women and their role in the church. Now I personally have a huge heart for the ministry. My great-grandpa, whom I’m named after, was a preacher; my dad is a pastor. I remember I had a passion for the ministry from a young age, and I was sitting across from, at the time, my beloved Baptist head pastor, and over a meal he looked at me and said if I were to pursue those goals I would be a Jezebel—the Jezebel spirit, you know, is so huge in the Baptist Church.

And what I want to know is: What is the Orthodox perspective? Is there room for someone like me, who is a passionate poet, thinker, writer, artist, and minister at the Orthodox table? Is there room for me there? Yeah, I guess that’s it. Thank you guys so much for this show and everything you do.

Fr. Andrew: All right. It’s a good question. You know, my initial response— The first person I actually started thinking about when she— especially at the end when she was kind of describing herself, I started thinking about St. Kassiane, who—a number of those adjectives could be used to describe her!

The thing that she’s most remembered for, of course, in the history of the Orthodox Church is as a hymnographer, and in fact probably the greatest piece of Byzantine music—in the whole tradition of Byzantine chant—was written by her, and it’s the famous Hymn of Kassiane that’s sung on Holy Tuesday evening during Holy Week. It’s so beloved that actually in many cases, if you look at the Holy Week schedules for a lot of churches, it’ll say: Sunday night, Bridegroom Orthros; Monday night, Bridegroom Orthros, Tuesday night, Hymn of Kassiane—even though it’s Bridegroom Orthros, but including that hymn. But that’s such a feature, that becomes the thing that people are sort of going there for.

But that’s not the only thing she ever wrote; she wrote lots of hymns, actually, and they are—even in translation, they are stunning pieces of work. Like, this is real theological poetry! It’s really delightful and profound and moving. I mean, there’s a reason why the hymn of Kassiane is so popular, and it’s not just because of the kind of musical settings that are attached to it; it’s because of the great, great depth of what’s being expressed in that. And certainly there are other examples of that within the life of the Church, both historically and, of course, in our own time. And especially considering this old saying of “the one who prays truly is the true theologian,” we tend to think of theologians as people who write books—people like you, Fr. Stephen, or like me, God help me! but I wouldn’t describe myself as a theologian—that that’s what a theologian is, or a professor, or something like that. But there’s a great truth to this saying, that theology is really about prayer.

And if that’s really true, that the person who is really advanced in prayer is sort of the real theologian on some level, then the number-one example of that is the Lord’s Mother. The highest of all the saints is a woman, that the ministry that she gave, not just to us, although that’s really important, but to the Lord is above all other possible ministries. You can’t achieve something greater as a human being than what she did. And that’s not a cop-out response. I recall… I can’t remember which episode it was, but we were having a conversation about… I think it was in response to a caller and had a similar question about this. If you remember, Father, that… And you gave a good answer about mothering, and how motherhood is not—is of course one way people think about it and should think about it, as about bearing children and taking care of them, but there’s mothering that all women engage in, whether they have children in the flesh or not, that that’s the… What women are in their telos is motherhood, and this is built into the creation from the beginning.

I think our modern world tends to denigrate that so much that it’s like: Well, that’s second prize or whatever, but it’s really not, and I think that the Christian tradition, especially in the person of the Mother of God, emphasizes how much it’s really not, because again, this is the highest possible place that a human being can have is the one that she has. “More honorable than the cherubim” and so forth.

But I would simply say, Kenzie, that it’s true—you didn’t ask about this, but it’s true that the Orthodox Church does not ordain women as priests, as clergy. And for I think a good take on that, Fr. Stephen wrote a great blog article, The Whole Counsel of God blog, called “Priesthood and Masculinity,” and it’s a really good piece, and it talks about how priesthood is integral to masculinity, not just for ordained men but just for men in general. So it’s true, yes, we don’t ordain women as clergy, but I think that a huge part of the problem that we have is that we’ve identified clergy with power, and we’ve identified power as the highest thing that people should have, and therefore if you don’t give it to some people then it’s because you’re trying to keep them down.

Now, you didn’t say that, Kenzie, and I appreciate that, but I thought I would just kind of put that out there. But I would say that, based on the things that you say that you love and the talents and skills that you have, I mean, all of that can be put into service of Christ! There absolutely is a place for you at the table of the Lord in the Orthodox Church. I mean, every person is integral to the body of Christ. It doesn’t matter whether they’re a hand or a foot or a spleen or whatever; we’re all needed and we’re all required, really.

So that’s some of the thoughts that I would have about that. I guess the other thing that I would add is that I could not live as an Orthodox Christian without the ministry that women within the Church do, not just sort of in support of the parish or whatever, but in my own personal life as well. I mean, absolutely critical, absolutely irreplaceable. Fr. Stephen, did you have anything you wanted to add to that or whatever?

Fr. Stephen: Well, I’d just add, I mean, there is a lively tradition of female monasticism that often gets left out of these conversations. There are spiritual mothers; there are abbesses. And a lot of the activities they do— So our understanding of ordination is less about activity— So this is a comparison based on the background that the caller said she was from. They tend to define “ministry” in terms of certain activities. So like standing in front of the church and giving a homily, they would say that’s ministry; that’s reserved to these people. But abbesses of convents, for example, frequently give homilies to the female monastics there. There are female monastics who are blessed to hear confessions. They don’t give the absolution, again, but they hear the confession and they give advice, and the person goes back to their usually parish priest, and then receives the absolution.

And that’s a good example, because the activity there, most of the activity, other than reading the prayers at the end—most of the activity there is being done by the female monastic, but the role—the role of delivering absolution is reserved to that priest, not to men; to presbyters and bishops, because bishops are still presbyters. But deacons can’t do it; laymen can’t do it. So that is a role that is reserved to specific people who are chosen from among the men of the church.

Fr. Andrew: And not even all presbyters. Not even all presbyters are given the blessing to give absolution and hear confessions.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and lay male monastics can’t. So it’s based on this particular role, but the overarching thing—and this is a thing that’s not directed to the caller in particular; this is directed at everyone, first and foremost me—is that all of us, when we approach serving the Church, have to wrestle a little bit with our ego, because the reality is, if we’re serving, if that word means anything, that I’m here to serve the Church, then that means that I’m going to do whatever the Church needs me to do. It doesn’t mean I’m going to do what I want to do.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, servants don’t show up to the Master and say, “So this is what I’m going to be doing.” The servant goes to the Master—and the Master is Christ. The servant goes to the Master and says, “What do you want me to do?”

Fr. Stephen: Right. So if the Church tells me that what it needs me to do is scrub toilets, then I need to go and scrub toilets, even if I’m an archpriest with a PhD. If what my parish needs me to do is go and clean the toilets, then that’s what I need to go do. And so we can’t ever approach the Church with “This is… I am confident… These are my gifts. This is what I want to do, and will this church let me do it? Well, if not, then I’ll find some place that will.” That’s very dangerous.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and I don’t get the sense that Kenzie was saying that, but there are people who do that.

Fr. Stephen: No, and that’s what I’ve said. It’s not directed at her in particular.

Fr. Andrew: Men and women. I’ve known men— I’ve had men approach me and say—especially this is fairly common—“I’m ordained in this, and I want to join the Orthodox Church, but I want to make sure that I can be clergy.” I’m like: “I… You need to give up on that. If you want to be Orthodox, be Orthodox, but you can’t just say: Look, I’m coming here because I’m going to be clergy.” Ah! Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: And there have certainly been people in the Orthodox Church—men—who wanted to be ordained to some office and couldn’t get it, and have left and gone somewhere else where they could. So this is not directed at her or even just women in general; this is all of us have this tendency we have to fight with our ego. So we have to always keep in mind that all of this is service, and that means we do whatever Christ and his Church need us to do at any given point in time, whether it’s something we really love doing or something that… like cleaning toilets, or walking around after Liturgy on Sunday, throwing away used coffee cups that people left lying everywhere—but now I’m going on a personal rant. [Laughter] But that’s it. That’s part of the reality of being in ordained ministry, is you do a whole lot of stuff other than liturgize.

Fr. Andrew: Indeed.

Fr. Stephen: That’s not always fun and enjoyable, like paperwork.

Fr. Andrew: Not me, man. I got out of that! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, you never have to do paperwork at all, I’m sure.

Fr. Andrew: Ever! Yeah, ever! Okay. All right, thank you very much for that question, Kenzie. It was… Thank you.

All right, this next one comes from Lane who has a question about atonement.

Lane: Hi! This is Lane in Ocala, Florida, and I had a question about the word “atone.” So in the atonement episode, you guys said that to atone just meant to cover, and so that got me wondering not only how did something so simple get so theologically complicated, but more so there are lots of places in the Bible where things are covered, like Noah’s covered up in his nakedness; stuff is covered up all over the place. But are those also atonement? Are they a different kind of covering? What makes this kind of covering get its own special word and those not, or maybe they do? Thanks! Love the show.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Right, so that was actually one of my favorite episodes was the atonement episode. It’s been a while since we did that now. I feel like it was over a year maybe, yeah. We talked about the Day of Atonement and how that is fulfilled in Christ ultimately. I think that the short answer to what Lane is asking is that this word, covering, is just a general word, just like it is in English. But if you talk about covering in a particular context, then it takes on a greater meaning. But of course the word, the English word “atonement,” was actually coined to be a translation for this word, and so it becomes a translation that has a specific theological purpose within the English language, but if you’re just simply reading it in ancient Greek or in Hebrew, then it’s just a general term, but you see it’s used in this one particular context.

I think the reason that it gets so complex in the way that Christians of various stripes talk about it is that it’s such a key moment in salvation history that of course there’s just going to be a huge amount of reflection about that, and when you have big sea changes like the Reformation’s ideas about what salvation means, then you are going to… There’s going to become debate about that, and that complicates the whole matter. But it doesn’t mean that the more general uses of the term no longer apply or that every time you see the word, that k-f-r—is it that k-f-r root? Is that what it is?

Fr. Stephen: Well, roughly, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: Roughly, yeah. Wherever you see that root, you should think, “Oh, this has to do with the atonement of Christ”—it may not; it may just be the cover on your Tupperware.

Fr. Stephen: Or the ark of the covenant.

Fr. Andrew: Or the ark of the covenant! Exactly. It could be just that kind of cover. But also I think a lot of the significance, of course, comes because of the Day of Atonement. It’s the day of covering, the day of cleansing and cleaning up and doing all that. So that’s kind of my hot take on that. Father?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, well, slight “Um, actually” in that it’s not actually a normal Greek word. The Greek word seems to be kind of a coinage also.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, that’s right. That’s right.

Fr. Stephen: To separate this type of covering from other general types that it’s particularly related to, sacrificial usage. In terms of the complications, I think we can all blame Avril Lavigne.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] That ageless Canadian!

Fr. Stephen: Right. So really, honestly, the reason why you get… And you don’t have a similar history of theorization about the atonement in the East—you just don’t; you don’t have people proposing atonement theories; you don’t have people arguing against each other: it just doesn’t happen in the East. Now some—particularly Protestant apologists—like to argue it’s just because we never figured atonement out; we’re just like a bunch of primitives: we didn’t figure out atonement, we didn’t figure out soteriology… But that’s because they’ve basically bought into our 19th-century German friends that all these things have evolved in the Church, and so we’re just stuck at this earlier phase, whereas, you know, German Protestantism in the 19th century: the pinnacle of all human religion, right? [Laughter]

But in the West, it really gets so complicated because you have a series of— As theology is being worked out, you have a series of questions that get asked. Each one is sort of engendered by the ways, the expressions of previous tiers of theology. So for example—I mean, this is a very rough and very general genealogy, but, for example, St. Augustine ends up kind of smooshing together the coming of death upon humanity and sin and guilt. He kind of webs those together. And so as the West, being unable to read Greek post-St. Augustine, are reading mainly St. Augustine, that gets carried on.

Well, that starts raising questions, because in the East, for example, where we have a separation between death and sin, as these two different things, we could say that Christ’s resurrection redeems everyone from death, but it does not redeem everyone from sin. Those are dealt with separately. Whereas in the West, if those start to get smudged together, you get: Wait a minute; so then why doesn’t Christ’s sacrifice redeem everyone from sin?

And so you get Peter Lombard [who] comes along and makes this sufficiency-efficiency distinction, where he says: Well, Christ’s sacrifice is sufficient to save everyone, but it is only efficient—it only actually saves—the people who do X, Y, Z. And that basic distinction ends up being the basis for basically the Protestant Reformation, is the argument over: What is the XYZ? How and when does it get applied? And then things move on from there.

So if you say: Well, it’s sufficient, but it’s only efficient for these people, what’s the sort of mode or means of transfer? So you get the idea of merit, you get the idea… and then that gets broken down further. So it all gets more and more elaborate because people are asking questions, but the questions they’re asking were really engendered by the solutions to the previous problem. And so in the East where we didn’t face those same problems, we didn’t come up with answers, because we didn’t face the questions, and so those then didn’t raise the further questions. And so you have this whole thing in the West.

Fr. Andrew: It’s built up, frankly, on a foundation that we don’t share. It’s like saying, “Why don’t you have the answer to this English-language riddle that was written 50 years ago?” Well, because we’re not speaking English—as a sort of analogy to that.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so if a person comes to an Orthodox person who understands Orthodox theology and says, “Are the merits of Christ’s sufferings imputed or infused into a human being?” we don’t have an answer to that question, because we don’t have all the pre-existing superstructure that leads to that question.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, exactly. Okay, well, this next one is from the same Travis that we heard from earlier.

Travis: Greetings, podfathers! So my questions have to do with theosis and demonosis. My understanding is that everything we say and do either draws us closer to God or draws us closer to the demons. What I’m left wondering is: Can what other people say and do lead to theosis and demonosis of others? For example, if a priest blesses me, is he an instrument of theosis in me? By the same token, can acts performed to someone lead them to demonosis apart from them consciously sinning?

Also, on the far ends of theosis and demonosis, are there certain things that need to happen for one to become a saint or a demoniac? Clearly, becoming a saint requires outpourings of grace from God in a unique way. Has someone who’s become a demoniac undergone a similar process in the opposite direction? Are there particular sins we should avoid if we do not want to become a demoniac? And what are some of the things we can do if we really want to become a saint? Warm regards, Travis.

Fr. Andrew: So my response to the second part is that my understanding of both sanctity and demonization is that the difference between what a saint is and what the very good man in my parish or even the pretty good man or woman who’s in my parish, whichever, is really not so much a difference of kind as of degree, that there’s not… I wouldn’t necessarily say that there’s a unique outpouring of grace that turns someone into a saint whereas they weren’t before. Does that…?

Now, certainly, there are some people who are canonized, which is to say that there is a process that the Church went through to recognize someone as a saint and to publicly venerate them in an organized way, but that’s not what makes someone a saint. There are people who truly are holy people, actually saints, that don’t have any Church services written for them, and maybe we don’t even know their names or that they ever existed for whatever reason. So I don’t think that there’s a line that you can cross and go: “Oh, now I’ve made it; now I’m a saint.” I mean, my response to this question, is there a thing you can do to truly become a saint or some sin you should really avoid to become a demoniac, it’s really just a matter of that faithfulness to Christ. It’s not like: if I can get into this one kind of faithfulness, then that’s kind of the shortcut to sanctity. [Laughter] I don’t think there’s any shortcuts to that.

There are some… I wouldn’t say it’s like magic to become deeply sinful, but certainly there are some extreme sins you can engage in that do radically disfigure the human person. Not all sins… All sins are bad, but some sins are worse. Like having suddenly an envious thought and accepting and entertaining it for a few minutes is definitely not as bad as going and murdering someone: these are not the same degree of evil. Both are demonizing, both can push someone further in the direction of evil, but they’re not the same thing. So, yeah, there might be shortcuts to hell on some level, but it’s not like: If you do this one thing versus this, then that’ll take you… I mean, someone could become a very dark person but have never done anything illegal or some extreme act. I don’t know; that’s my take on that part of it. Yeah, I don’t know.

And the first part, I don’t know whether you can… Yes, I do believe that the things that we do can affect other people, but I wouldn’t say that they do it apart from their—especially if it’s someone who’s a baptized Christian—apart from their participation in it. Especially when you’re talking about the world of—outside of Christ, then that’s probably a different ballgame. Father, what do you have to say to all of that?

Fr. Stephen: Well, a lot of the way people think about canonization now is this weird nominalism, where somehow to be something you have to be recognized as that, or being recognized as something, being validated by someone else as something, is what makes you that thing. So if someone sees me and recognizes me as a priest, that doesn’t make me a priest; I was already a priest. [Laughter] But in our modern world, we have this nominalist thing where, no, if no one else recognizes it, then I’m not really that thing; that’s the cause of some kind of suffering, and I need to be validated. So, yeah, we recognize saints; they’re already saints before we recognize them. Even if the Church never recognizes them, they’re still saints. So, yeah, it’s a question of a spectrum of…

In terms of other people affecting things, obviously in both cases we’re talking about cooperation. So if I’m cooperating with demons in rebellion, and you come and cooperate with me and join me in my sin as I’m joining them in their rebellion, I guess then I would be the mediator of demonization to you. And this is why being an arch-heretic or cult-leader would be a very bad thing to be. And this is talked about in Scripture: “Temptations are bound to come, but woe to him through whom they come.” That it is more serious to lead others into our sin than just to sin ourselves.

And then, vice-versa, if someone is cooperating with the grace of God, and you cooperate with that… [Laughter] So if your priest is cooperating with God working in your life, by speaking to you, preaching to you, teaching you something, advising you in confession, and you cooperate with that— Confession might be a good example. He says to you, “Here are some things you can do to help you in this struggle.” You can now cooperate with that; you can now follow through and do those things, and continue to struggle, which case then, yeah, that priest will have sort of, and that act and confession will become a means of grace for you. Or you can reject it or ignore it or rebel against it, but the key factor there is still your own cooperation.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, he gave the example of a priest giving a blessing. To receive the blessing, you have to receive the blessing. [Laughter] “Father, bless.” I mean, it’s something I think about sometimes. For instance, if I drive by the house of somebody I know, then I may, as a priest, give a blessing in the direction of their home. It’s not a magical act; it’s a prayer for them, and God may well send them good thoughts or something helpful to them that day in response to that prayer, but it’s not that I just put a magical ward on their house or on them or whatever. They still have to cooperate with it. It doesn’t make them holier just because I give them a drive-by blessing.

Fr. Stephen: Do you do that a lot? Just drive by and spray blessings in neighborhoods?

Fr. Andrew: Oh yeah. Actually, where I live there are a number of other people who belong to the parish who all live in the same little town, so, yes, I do give drive-by blessings. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Okay. But you don’t bless the people who don’t go to the parish. [Laughter] You leave them under the curse.

Fr. Andrew: Apparently. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Okay.

Fr. Andrew: I also throw blessings at ambulances with their lights on. And police officers.

Fr. Stephen: Regardless.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly. I mean, how am I supposed to know who’s in there? [Laughter] Thanks for calling me out there!

Fr. Stephen: No problem. It’s part of my job.

Fr. Andrew: It is. Okay, so this next one comes from Nikolai.

Nikolai: Fr. Andrew and Fr. Stephen, this is Nikolai from Austin, Texas. I can’t adequately describe my gratitude to you both for the great work you’re doing on this podcast and your other publications; thank you very much. My question is: I’m very interested— You mentioned a few times how spiritual and material reality are not necessarily separate. I’m very interested to understand more about how the union between spiritual reality and the physical reality… It’s a concept that I can’t quite grasp; I’m not sure it’s graspable in this life entirely, but I know you two will have more to say about it if you’d care to add some color to it. Thank you very much.

Fr. Andrew: All right.

Fr. Stephen: Those were very kind words, and it sounded like they were uttered from the bottom of a mine shaft!

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Right!? I know! I don’t know where he was…

Fr. Stephen: I hope everything turned out okay for him.

Fr. Andrew: It’s definitely pretty… In the audio world, it’s what we would call a very live room, a live room. I don’t know. I don’t know how to respond to this. What connects the spiritual… ? I guess my initial response would be that we tend to think in categories of material and spiritual, but my sense is that at least in the pre-modern way of thinking tends to think more in terms of seen and unseen, that there’s not a physical stuff and a spiritual stuff; there’s just creation, and some of it’s seen and some of it’s unseen. I don’t know.

Fr. Stephen: It’s just a lot of stuff.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, just so much stuff! All the stuff! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Piles and piles.

Fr. Andrew: What’s ancient Hebrew for “stuff”? I don’t know. Is there one?

Fr. Stephen: Um… Well, debar could mean a thing. Debarim I guess would be “things”? “Stuff”?

Fr. Andrew: The fun “thing,” as it were, about the English word “thing” is that it actually meant a meeting. Like, we’re having a thing.

Fr. Stephen: So that’s the correct usage. Oh, okay.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, that’s the ancient usage. That’s the Old English usage. So there you go. And it existed in Norse, too: ting. It meant the same… thing. Later it becomes about “a thing” as we put it now, an object or whatever. But, yeah, it originally meant a meeting.

Fr. Stephen: So Ben Grimm is the ever-loving blue-eyed Meeting.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, he’s a sort of walking committee.

Fr. Stephen: Okay—of rocks. That kind of works.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Exactly.

Fr. Stephen: That kind of works, kind of a committee.

Fr. Andrew: A rock group, as it were.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yes.

Fr. Andrew: Ahh!

Fr. Stephen: Ahh.

Fr. Andrew: We haven’t had enough culture banter in this episode for people, so we had to throw this in.

Fr. Stephen: “Thing Ring, do your thing!” Anyway. That’s digging in the crates.

So, yeah. So the thing is—pun probably intended [Laughter]—that we have kind of a sensory processing disorder. And what I mean by that is… So the original meaning of the word “common sense” was a way to refer to the way in which our senses, our five senses, are naturally integrated to each other, when as a human we’re functioning normally. We don’t have vision and hearing and taste and touch as, like, disassociated stimuli, but from them we have a “common sense” that sort of constructs a world out of all all that data taken in by all those various senses. So we associate a smell with something that we see or taste or feel, then a sound with something we see.

But when it comes to the nous, which is as we said is a sensory organ that’s aimed at the spiritual world, probably because it was blind for a good chunk of our lives and we’re as Christians just beginning to use it again—at least I am; the saints, much better—but we don’t really have it integrated with the other five. So we have the five that we’re used to using to engage with material reality, and then maybe we’re starting to get the beginnings of some kind of very shadowy and dim spiritual perception. But not only is it shadowy and dim because we haven’t exercised it as much, but we haven’t integrated it with the rest.

So when you read stories from the lives of the saints, and even stories—I mean, we referred to Elijah and Gehazi a bunch, because it’s an obvious idea—you have saints for whom these things are integrated, and they will just see angels and demons and spiritual realities and principalities and stuff, and that’s integrated with the material world. It’s not that sort of they block out the material world and they go into some spiritual realm where they see these things and then they return to the material world where the rest of us live; it’s that they’re seeing the whole of reality, and they’re seeing elements of that that we can’t see. So it’s like if we lacked one of the five senses—so if we were like the man born blind, whose gospel we read not that long ago, as we record this—we would have no concept of what color is; we would have no concept of what vision is or how it works. We’d have our other four senses and we’d understand how those work, and they’d be integrated and everything, but we wouldn’t have that one.

And so in the same way, it’s sort of—and I obviously am not a saint; this is obvious to anyone who’s met me or heard me talk or knows who I am—but I can’t… It’s not like I have this and I’m now trying to explain it to you who lack it; it’s—I don’t have it either! [Laughter] I’m reading accounts from people who do, ancient people and saints in the Church, and reading their attempts to describe it to people who don’t have it, and then I’m trying to pass that on second-hand to other people who, like me, don’t really have it.

The key thing in terms of how they’re related is simply that they’re related in the same way that, to further this analogy, the same way that smell and taste are related, the same way that hearing and sight are related. These are just elements of the created order that we can or can’t experience. All those colors a mantis shrimp can see: the way those are related to the colors I can see. So it’s part of creation in the same sense. This is the really hard part to get over, is that we can say, “Yes, they’re part of creation, too,” but we still have: well, kind of in a different sense, because it’s higher or different or… But, no, it’s in the same sense. An angel is a creature in the same sense that I am a creature; we’re just different types of creature. In the same sense that a badger is a creature. It’s just different types.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. This kind of distinction occurred to me a little bit this morning when I was reading— So today when we’re recording this, this is a secondary feast of St. Theodore the General, and so I was reading the brief account of his life this morning, and when he was headed towards his martyrdom, he was tortured—I mean, all kinds of horrible things were done to him, disfiguring stuff. And then it just simply says, “The next morning, he was found whole, and because of this many people believed in Christ,” and so then eventually the authorities behead him.

And it struck me once again: What was that like when that wholeness happened? What was it like when people saw that that’s what had occurred? I’m pretty sure there weren’t some explosions and sparkles. There was nothing woo-woo about it; it was just simply: Whoa! He’s… Hey, what do you know? He’s healthy in every way. That there was not— Like we expect “spiritual things” to have some kind of special effect attached to them, and yet you never… Like when miracles, for instance, happen in the Scriptures, like the healing of the blind man, it doesn’t say that suddenly everything went hazy and he opened his eyes and—Wooo! It was just simply he could see. “I was blind, but now I can see.”

Fr. Stephen: Well, there is that one instance where he could see men walking around like trees first, but other than that…

Fr. Andrew: Right, exactly.

Fr. Stephen: Which is a great phrase. “I see men walking around like—” Trees walk around!?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, or, like, “Wait, how do you know what a tree looks like?” [Laughter] That’s the other question I have! That’s what he thinks they look like, or that’s what they feel like? But so obviously for him, he went through a transitional experience before he truly had sight again, but there’s no indication that anyone else saw magical sparkles in the air or something when this happened. There was no signs of sorcery or anything like that.

Fr. Stephen: Light shining from the sky.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah! Right, exactly. It’s not that those kinds of experiences never happen, like Moses’s face shining or this kind of stuff, but it does not always happen or even often happen such that we should think that that’s sort of the signal that there’s a spiritual thing happening. It’s just part of the warp and weft—or warp and woof? I can never remember; I think they’re both right—of the way that life is. And people simply receive that.

I think about, for instance—I’ve probably mentioned this before on this show—St. Nikolai Velimirovic has a homily where he says, miracles—God gives many gifts, and miracles are just simply some of God’s gifts at which men marvel. That’s what he says. He doesn’t say that there’s a separate, unique thing to them.

Fr. Stephen: That’s why they’re wonder-workers.

Fr. Andrew: Right.

Fr. Stephen: Those who are called wonder-workers. But, yeah, it’s… The most—now, I know this is going to be disappointing to a lot of people, but the most common way God heals people, it’s like rest and their immune system.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Right? That’s the action of God.

Fr. Stephen: That’s what he uses most of the time. And then next is probably medicine.

Fr. Andrew: A big problem is just the problem of interpretation, that we tend to interpret things in the wrong way.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and we’ve got this barrier. There’s this barrier between God’s action and angels and demons, and the material. No, God heals people using their immune system.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which is a gift.

Fr. Stephen: Which is a material thing, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: Okay. One last question before we wrap up for our second break. So this is from Fr. Aaron.

Fr. Aaron: Why did Christ give himself to us in the form of flesh and blood? Such a provoking act! Was it necessary to say, “Eat my flesh and drink my blood?” This would especially have been a set-up for the chosen people, the Jews, his own flesh and blood, because he had established strict laws against consuming blood and against consuming unclean flesh. Psalm 105: “They sacrifice their sons and daughters into demons; they poured out innocent blood.” Certainly drinking blood would have been associated with pagan sacrifices and gross things and demonic things. So was all this demonic sacrifice in the collective memory of the Jews, and was the Eucharist meant to heal that?

The Jews were forbidden to drink blood, whether sacrificial victims’ or any other. So why does Jesus introduce this practice, which is so likely to scandalize, and much more akin to pagan practices than to Jewish ones?

Fr. Andrew: That’s a cool question. So it’s kind of the cannibalism/pagan sacrifice/Eucharist thing. Like, how do they relate to each other? Why does Jesus give us his blood to drink and his flesh to [eat], even after all those commands against doing exactly that kind of thing? What’s that all about, Father?

Fr. Stephen: Well, first of all, the flesh part is relatively easier than the blood part. Well, not easier, but these are two separate things as was brought out in the question.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, they’ve been eating flesh as part of sacrifices already, but not—

Fr. Stephen: Not human flesh!

Fr. Andrew: Not human flesh, right.

Fr. Stephen: And this is, right—eating is the way you participate in a sacrifice. That’s the way you take part in it. And then sort of the “human” part I’ll deal with under the “blood” part, so that’s the first immediate thing. So the idea is that Christ’s sacrifice is the sacrifice to end all sacrifices, and therefore we participate in it, and we do that through the Eucharist.

So in terms of the blood… So the commandments against blood, if you go back to where they’re first stated and where blood is first is talked about, blood as representing the life of a creature, we have to remember that before the flood, man was not permitted to eat meat in general, at all: the killing of animals. And so what you have with the consumption of blood… Because they weren’t just prohibited from drinking sacrificial blood; they weren’t allowed to eat meat with the blood in it, completely outside of sacrifices. So the blood had to be drained, or drinking blood in any context. So the blood being the life of the thing, then, directly consuming the life—life feeding on life—was sort of symbolic of man as predator. We talked about this when we talked about werewolves, and this is what cannibalism is associated with, too: man becoming predatory.

And Adam and Eve, obviously, in the garden, are not predatory. The language that’s used there is they’re eating the fruit from trees, which means they’re not even killing plants! It’s only after the expulsion from paradise that Adam has to bring forth food from the ground with sweat. The fruit was the trees’ offering it themselves to him, sort of cooperatively. But so predatory natures is sort of the opposite of that.

And so what we see with Christ then giving his flesh and blood to is an inversion; it’s the exact opposite of predatory. Christ does not say to murder him and eat him, to murder him and cannibalize him, but he offers himself. This is why St. John’s gospel is so clear, over and over and over again, that no one takes his life from him, but he lays it down, and he can take it up again. So Christ offers himself to us as food, and a lot of our prayers say that. St. John of Damascus, in what we sing in place of the cherubic hymn on Holy Saturday, says that Christ is offering himself to us, and that includes his blood, which is his life, which is the life of God, which is immortal, which he offers to us to share in it. So it is the inversion of that kind of predatory sacrifice that culminates in sort of human sacrifice and cannibalism and werewolfish. Christ’s self-offering is the exact inverse of that.

Fr. Andrew: All right. Well, with that, we’re going to go ahead and go to our second and final break, and we will be right back.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah! There’s that crunchy metal theme. Thanks a lot once again for that, Rob; we appreciate it. And it’s the third half of The Lord of Spirits on this pre-recorded episode. So once again, don’t call in; we’re not here to talk to you today, but we are talking to you, because you sent in your questions!

Fr. Stephen: You could… You could call in and just see what happens.

Fr. Andrew: You could call. I mean, that is always an option, but…

Fr. Stephen: And who knows? Somebody might be there.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. But anyway, all right, we’ve got six more questions, and then we’ll wrap it up for this pre-recorded episode of Lord of Spirits. So this first one comes to us from our friend Emilian.

Emilian: Greetings, Fathers! Later this year, God willing, I am going to marry my fiancee. So in light of the topics covered before on this podcast, could you talk a bit about the holy sacrament of marriage, and specifically about what it does accomplish? I hope this question isn’t too broad. I’m sure a series of episodes on the holy mysteries is on the way, but I’d like to know more about this particular one at this time. Thank you for your excellent work.

Fr. Andrew: I love how he says he’s sure that a series is on the way.

Fr. Stephen: He thinks that, like, I plan things in advance! That’s hysterical! [Laughter] Anyway.

Fr. Andrew: At least a week or so.

Fr. Stephen: Maybe. If we’re lucky.

Fr. Andrew: So number one, Emilian, la mulți ani! Congratulations on getting married later this year! If I remember, Emilian is from Romania. So, yeah, great! Good for you, man; good for you. I mean, I think the main way to answer this question is to sit down and read the wedding service. It tells you… I mean, I’m not telling you this to be glib—

Fr. Stephen: It’s a cop-out.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Good night, everybody! But, you know, it does say it. It’s about yoking people together for the sake of their salvation, for the glory of God, to bring forth children into the world to be raised in faithfulness to Christ. And there’s even some cool theosis language having to do with the saints, that the couple will shine like the stars of heaven—I love that line. And of course, as a lot of people will point out, there’s this theme of martyrdom there as well. But as with all the sacraments that kind of take you from one mode of life to another—so baptism does that, ordination certainly does that, and I know a lot of people wouldn’t consider tonsure to monasticism as a sacrament, although I think some of the Fathers do call it that, a holy mystery; I mean, we’re not bound to the number seven, I think…

Fr. Stephen: Yes! Stop numbering sacraments!

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yes, please.

Fr. Stephen: Latins, come on!

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] It’s okay. I mean, if you need a number, it’s fine. You know, all of these things that take you from one mode—and of course, marriage, that takes you from one mode of life to another mode of life, is to equip you to be faithful in this new way, because being married is a different kind of faithfulness than the life without a husband or a wife beforehand. Certainly the overall mode of faithfulness is the same, or the overall trajectory, I should say, is the same, but the mode has shifted a bit. Now it’s about serving Christ by serving your husband or your wife, and then eventually, God willing, serving those children. That becomes the first place where you’re supposed to love Christ is with those people that are in your house.

So that’s would I would say that marriage, that the sacrament of marriage does, that the actual wedding service does, although it’s an interesting question… I had someone ask—I don’t remember the context was, but I had someone ask me this recently: Is the sacrament of marriage the service, or is it the whole life together? And I love to kind of respond with: Yes!

Fr. Stephen: ¿Porque no los dos?

Fr. Andrew: There’s definitely something going on in that service that is that transition, just like baptism is a transition and ordination is a transition, but then it has to be lived out in the rest of life ever after. I don’t know. What would you want to add or “Um, actually” or enrich or whatever about that? [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Well, just in terms of the relationship between the two, between the life and the wedding service, the thing that happens on that day, what ultimately gives it meaning is the life that’s lived after it. So if you’re baptized and then never darken the doorstep of a church again and go out and live a life of sin and wickedness, it’s not that the baptism didn’t do anything—I mean, the baptism will maybe stand up against you at the judgment, but it’s not doing you any good. Same thing with ordination. If you’re ordained and the proceed to be a wicked or foul priest or deacon or bishop—Nestorius’s ordination as a bishop didn’t count except maybe against him. And so the same thing really is true of the wedding itself. What makes that meaningful, what happens there, in a positive sense, is the life of faithfulness that’s lived thereafter. And if that doesn’t follow from it, then, again, that wedding service may stand against us when we’ve been unfaithful to it, but if we want it to be meaningful in the positive way, if we want it to be promises that find fulfillment, come to fill up our lives, then it has to be joined with faithfulness thereafter.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, exactly. All right, well, this next question comes to us from Carline.

Carline: Hello, Fathers! This is Carline calling from California. I’m a recently illumined new member of the Orthodox Church; I came in with my family in March, so I’m pretty green, so bear with me and give me lots of grace as I ask my question. I wanted to know something about the traditions of the Church. One of the things I love about Orthodoxy is that it is the bastion of the ancient faith and the Church is rife with tradition, and change, if it comes, comes very slowly. This gives me a great sense of security, and I love the wisdom and weighted care with which the Church approaches any shifts. So can you talk to me a little bit about how do changes in the Church occur? How does something like St. John Chrysostom’s homily for Pascha become part of what the Church always does? How does St. Kassiane’s hymns move into something the Church uses? How do shifts like this occur? And maybe you can give me a kind of a zoom-out view. I realize the Church does make tiny changes and shifts, so how does that happen and still respect tradition and make sure that these are wise and careful changes? Thank you so much.

Fr. Andrew: Well, I love that question, and it’s a good one, because you have this idea that some people have that the Orthodox Church never changes, but of course that’s just historically untenable, if they mean by that we do things exactly the same way that we have always done them in every possible respect. That’s just not a thing. But what’s interesting is that there is also—and she didn’t mention this, but there is also this problem where people might acknowledge historical change but have the sense that that’s over now, that there was kind of some point in the past at which, for instance, especially liturgical change, was completed, and now there’s no possibility for it after that.

I think part of what’s bound up in that is there’s often this kind of reactivity, a reactiveness, reactionariness, that a lot of folks have, especially in light of the fact that the world is often chaotic and is addicted to innovation, and so they see the Orthodox Church and say, “Ah. Here is the place where I am going to be free of all of that.” And I certainly agree with that in the sense that the Orthodox tradition is not addicted to innovation, but there is change and there is creativity, and there continues to be creativity. She mentioned the hymn of Kassiane; there is a point at which that was not written, and then there was a point at which St. Kassiane wrote it, and there was a point in which it was probably just used in her monastery, and then… I mean, I don’t know the history of the spread of that particular hymn, but it must have started local and then it eventually spread. There are hymns that the Church uses and particular liturgical practices that in many cases are maybe not even a century old! Some of them are newer. There’s certainly feast days that are new, because there’s a new saint or other kinds of feast days sometimes are brought up.

But I mean she asked about the particular kind of mechanism by which it happens. Largely, it’s bishop making pastoral decisions that they feel that are appropriate. Most of them are relatively minor, but sometimes there actually is liturgical reform on a moderately large level, like we can think, for instance, of the Nikonian church reforms in Russia, which were of course hugely controversial but basically did stick. I mean, that’s essentially the form of Russian Orthodox liturgical life now with those reforms of several centuries ago. But even before that, St. Philotheos Kokkinos, who was the patriarch of Constantinople, who canonized St. Gregory Palamas: he was a liturgical reformer. Now, the kinds of reforms that they did were not some massive replacement of the liturgical tradition, but they were still changes.

And of course we can think of canonical shifts that happen. Early on canonical uses of Scriptures, there was more variation probably than there is now. And I think sometimes seeing those kinds of consensuses emerge is what gives people the temptation to think that change stops in some cases. I doubt there’s going to be any changes in Church canons, but what happens if the Church of Greece and the Church of Russia get together and say, “Hey, let’s go ahead and have the same Old Testament canon,” even though they don’t currently? If they made that decision, if the Greek Church said, “Okay, we’ll take 4 Esdras,” I don’t think that would be a problem, but largely it’s pastoral stuff like that. And it’s ultimately in the hands of the episcopacy; this is their job. They can be creative; they can bless creativity. Sometimes you see changes happen because one parish has a practice and another parish doesn’t, and they think it’s cool and they go ahead and adopt it. They find it meaningful and good, and then it spreads. It becomes a thing.

I don’t know. I mean, there’s a lot of ways that it happens. I wouldn’t say that it’s always tiny and incremental because, like I said, there’s sometimes programs of liturgical reform. They’re not usually, like, on the level, frankly, that we saw in the post-Vatican II era in the Roman Catholic Church, almost never. I mean, I’m not a liturgical historian, but from the liturgical history that I know, you don’t see that level of change in the Orthodox Church. But there are sometimes fairly systemic changes that do occur, and the question then often is, well, how does that get received? Is it just rejected? Does it become incorporated into the life of the Church? And sometimes it does. I don’t know. Father, what would you want to add to all that?

Fr. Stephen: I think the key thing is that what we’re talking about when we’re talking about the truth is we’re talking about Christ himself, who is a Person, who is the same yesterday, today, and forever. And we’re talking about faithfulness to him. So the question that’s not just once a generation but continually asked and is the task, again, really of the bishops is: What does it look like to follow Christ for these people at this time in this place? And in the broad contours, that’s not going to change. So it’s not like: “Well, now I think murder should be okay.” [Laughter] Like, that’s not going to… “Forget that whole ‘one husband, one wife’ marriage thing.” That kind of stuff is not going to change.

Fr. Andrew: Right and wrong is not going to change. We’re not going to start putting steak on the altar.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so in the broad context none of this is going to change, but people living in agrarian world in the 13th century and people living in an urban environment in the 21st century have very different ways of life to start with. So there are going to be differences in their family structures. There are going to be differences in their relationship to their work and those kind of thing. So the same faithfulness to Christ is going to take subtly different shapes when your work is spending 14 hours a day working your family farm to feed your family or if it’s going and punching a clock and working in a cubicle farm and then coming home to be faced with various entertainment options. It’s not going to be radically different—there’s not going to be things that are horribly sinful for one and the road to theosis for the other—but they’re also not going to be identical.

So that’s what’s sort of continually being asked, and continually there are adjustments being made, and continually there are things being tried, because every bishop is not infallible. No bishop is infallible. And so sometimes they’re going to say, “Hey, this seems like a way we could go,” and that’s going to have unintended consequences in the life of the Church, and they’re going to draw back from that. Or sometimes something one bishop does and tries and the other bishops will say, “I don’t know if that’s a good idea,” and it won’t spread. Or other times other will bishops will look at it and say, “That seems to be working well for the people of that local church; we should give that a try as well, or we should try a slightly different version of that.”

And so that’s how these sort of things happen, because you can’t just… to every culture, to every time, to every place, just come up with a list of rules—“just do these things and you will find salvation.” And that’s because Christ is incarnate.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and history is real. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly. Well, okay, and this next one comes from Moses, and I think this is a tough one.

Moses: Hello, Fathers. My name is Moses-Rhys, and I’m from Portland, Oregon. I have a question about the body and gender. In your episode, “God’s Body,” you defined “body” as a nexus of potentialities; in the recent episode, “Prophet Motive,” there’s some references made to individuals accessing spiritual forces from the liminal between-gender state, or sometimes being thrust out of a gender state as a result of exposure to spiritual forces.

In my work as a professional counselor, I’ve sometimes talked with trans and non-binary individuals who describe the experience of their internal sense of gender being incongruent with their body to some degree; they describe an energy craving a different sort of body, and this incongruence can be mild or extreme, but it centers on how they experience their bodies. So, then, what is the potentiality of a male body versus a female body? And is it strictly or primarily reproduction, or is there more? What is the essential nature of man or woman? Is the essential nature of man or woman that they have particular genitalia? Or is the essence of manhood or womanhood something deeper and intangible?

And if the essence of gender is in fact connected to particular genitals, then what does that say about the overall nature of a person? Is our essential nature bound up in organs of elimination and reproduction, and is this possibly reductionistic? Moreso, if the essence of manhood/womanhood is bound up in the genitalia, then what does this say about the nature of God?

On the other hand, if the essence of gender is not specifically tied to physical genitalia, but rather something internal, inherent, and transcending physical flesh, then what is actually problematic about a trans or non-binary person’s experience, journey in physical alterations to their body? That’s my question. Thanks so much for the show; it makes being a Christian a whole lot more fun. Peace!

Fr. Andrew: Okay. Well, yeah, I think this is a tough one, because there’s so many potential minefields and pitfalls that can go along with it. And I think often— And I appreciate the spirit with which, Moses, you asked this question, because you’re concerned about the care of people, whereas a lot of times when people ask questions related to now this very, very hot question of gender, it’s about justifying, frankly, sexual immorality or all kinds of other very problematic behaviors. I mean, we’ve talked many times on this show about this question of identity becoming… Like, one’s personal identity, like “I’m different from everybody else for the following list of reasons that together make me unique” as being a very problematic way to live.

And that is at least some of the way that I think about this stuff, but I’ll be honest: I don’t… I don’t have a lot of really big, formed thoughts about how to understand this. I have very clear thoughts about the right kinds of behavior, but I don’t yet have fully worked-out ideas about necessarily how we get there. So, Father, I’m just going to kick it over to you, and I want to hear what you have to say about this.

Fr. Stephen: So this is not a question of Fr. Andrew being chicken to really delve into this; it is that he does not share my reckless abandon. [Laughter] Because I’m about to get everybody mad at me… But we’ll see. If you… If this actually makes it out onto Ancient Faith’s airwaves and you listen to it, and I have not made you mad in any way, send an email, because I’ll be curious to see if there’s anyone out there.

So part of— Again, we have to start by interrogating the question a little, because sort of the way you start an inquiry is going to shape the results you get. So there is something that happened—there were important distinctions that were made in the late mid-20th century that have kind of been lost now and are part of what’s causing this confusion. And one of the big ones—and here’s where I’m going to tick off a lot of people right off the bat—is that there’s a difference between biological sex and gender, that those aren’t the same thing. So biological sex is—all organisms, if you’re into the evolution thing and humans are higher primates, they come in two biological sexes, male and female.

There are also intersex people, for various reasons—genetic issues, other things. There are people who physiologically don’t conform to one of those two. Those are people who have their own set of issues they face and struggles they face, and I frankly find it kind of offensive when they’re used as like a political football in these arguments. So the existence of intersex people literally has nothing to do with transgenderism, because this is a question of biological sex, and transgenderism is about gender, which is a different thing. So, respectfully, out of respect for them, we need to leave them out of the rest of this discussion. And when those people are in our churches and that kind of thing, we need to treat them with respect and help them with their struggles the same way we would anyone else. So that’s a separate kind of issue.

So gender, then—and part of this gets confused, too, because we’re speaking English. In pretty much every other language I’ve ever studied, language has gender. So different words are masculine and feminine; it has nothing to do with biology whatsoever. The French people don’t think tables are women.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there’s even neutral gender, and I think some languages have more than three, actually. Grammatical gender, you know. Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and English doesn’t have it, and so that makes pronouns radioactive now, because that’s the one—that’s the only part of the English language that’s really gendered is pronouns, and we’ve all forgotten that we used to call ships “she.” So, again, language-gender is not related to this.

So what’s commonly called “gender” in these discussions is basically—and I’m going to use another word that’s going to make another group of people mad at me—it’s a social construct, meaning it’s something that is constructed by a society in terms of: This is the way males should dress, present themselves, speak, appear in public; and this is the way females should dress, present themselves in public. And obviously, that’s different in different cultures and different times. Like most of the earth’s history, men did not wear slacks or pants or jeans; that’s now we consider masculine attire. Men didn’t wear that for most of human history. If you saw someone dressed as Louis XV, you would not say, “There is a hypermasculine person.” [Laughter] So that has changed. The founding fathers of the United States used to wear wigs and stockings and high-heeled shoes; men don’t do that any more in our current cultural conception of gender.

So there are people who are men or women biologically who, at any given point, don’t feel comfortable with the way their society tells them they should dress and act and present themselves. We didn’t used to make a big deal out of this. Lots of women were tomboys in some period of their growing up, and they liked things that our culture associated with boys: they liked sports or they liked playing with what we considered to be boys’ toys—not a big deal. That didn’t make them a boy; it didn’t make them a man. Why? Well, because that’s just social construct; that has nothing to do with biology. We are very clear this person is biologically this; they happen to like some things that in our society are more commonly liked by the other sex.

The other, in terms of ground-clearing, the other issue here—and this even came out in the question a little bit—is that… And the questioner at least sounded like—we’re not allowed to assume any more—sounded like a man, and so he talked about genitalia. For men, it’s very easy to talk about reproduction in terms of genitalia, because that’s how men are involved in reproduction, but for a woman most of what’s involved in reproduction is carrying a new human being in [her] womb for nine months. And so the reproductive structures of the body, especially if we—as best I can, since I’m not one—look at it from a woman’s perspective, is much more involved than just their organs of reproduction and elimination, that there is more involved here. And that’s not sort of the end of physiological differences between men and women.

When we say that a body is a collection of potentialities and powers… So obviously, there are some of those that are different. A big, glaringly obvious one is that men don’t have wombs. They can’t conceive and carry a child for nine months. That’s a potentiality, that’s a power that they do not possess and that women do possess. Again, that doesn’t mean that every woman possesses it, because we’re in a fallen world where there are disorders of the body just as there are disorders of the soul, there’s disease, there’s problems where things don’t work—but the structures, the physiological structures, are aimed at that possessed by women and not by men.

We’ve also said and tried to make clear that your soul is not a thing separate from your body. Your soul is the life that is in your body. You are your body; the resurrection is physical. After the resurrection, Christ is still a man. His body is still a male body, a male human body. So that is—those structures… Our physical structures are not sort of ancillary. We have to get past—this is a Plato-brain thing—that our real self is this spiritual thing inhabiting our body, and our body is coincidental. We are our body just as much as we are our soul.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I feel like there’s a lot of Cartesian backing to a lot of this question.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And so in order for the transgender narrative to function, you have to take gender and make it not a social construct and make it real. You have to say, “If this person is biologically male, but they like She-Ra better than He-Man, so they’re actually a girl or a woman,” meaning there is something essential about this cartoon as opposed to that cartoon… [Laughter] And so you have to essentialize these things in a way that just does not work. That would be to say: George Washington was secretly a feminine, because dressing… wearing high heels and stockings and a wig is feminine no matter what and makes him a female. So that doesn’t work.

When we’re talking to someone who identifies as trans, this isn’t a person we should hate; this is a person who’s confused. And part of the reason, frankly, that they’ve gotten confused is our modern sense of identity. And we have a whole generation of people now—really two generations of people now—whose first sexual experiences, whose only experiences of community, have taken place on the internet, meaning they’re disembodied, and we haven’t taken into account what having all of a person’s sexual experiences be disembodied does to a person, when they’re first developing their concept of sexuality and identity. But we’re seeing it play out, because if you don’t form your sense of identity in community, then your identity, if you’re just talking about yourself as a black hole, you end up in nihilism, because by ourselves we aren’t human; we aren’t anything. Aristotle knew that! If you’re going to live by yourself, you have to be a beast or a god. And Nietzsche said ¿Porque no los dos? [Laughter] But you can’t be human by yourself.

So the solution to this is not to degrade people and insult people, insist on calling them things they don’t want to be called in public to make some kind of point. That’s not the solution. The solution is we have to work to rebuild communities so that people who have grown up without any concept of what it even is start to understand what community life is. And once you’re in a community, your identity gets formed, because you have a role within that community. You have gifts and abilities that you share with that community, and then in return the community places certain responsibilities upon you. And you—contributing what you can and fulfilling those responsibilities gives you a sense of self and a sense of self-worth and a sense of being appreciated, and that makes for a healthy person.

But we can’t argue at people out of this while they’re sitting alone in their room in front of a computer. No matter what you post on Twitter, you’re not going to convince anybody of anything, and you’re not going to help them. I know most of the people doing these things don’t care about helping them, because they’ve identified these people as the enemy in some kind of culture war. But our goal as Christians should be to help these people find salvation, and they’re only going to find salvation in a community, specifically the community of the Church, and that’s why that’s where we start building these communities.

So there. Now everyone’s mad at me—and I’m happy.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Actually, I’m good with all of that.

Fr. Stephen: Oh? Well, okay.

Fr. Andrew: I know, I know!

Fr. Stephen: You can answer the hate mail, then.

Fr. Andrew: I will! [Laughter] You know, I—I have to be careful how I say this, but I’ve had experience with a young person, so, a teenager, who… it’s like you said, this person was raised basically in front of a screen, and came to say, “I’m not the actual sex that I was born; I’m the other one.” And I thought about… I looked at that person’s life and I thought about, well, okay… So in this case it was a girl who said that she was a boy, and I thought about… I looked at her life, and I thought, well, she’s never had a dad—dad was out of the picture from a very, very early age—and has been at home for… in public schools where a lot of those things are, let’s be honest, a lot of public schools these days are totally happy when someone says that kind of thing, they say, “Okay! We will help you and support you to be that way and help you go down that path as far as you want to go. That’s just reality,” and not getting anything different at home, and just sort of realizing: This person doesn’t even know what a man is, and she thinks she is one, but there’s nothing manly about her. Literally, there’s nothing manly— Not even this kind of gender-stereotyping stuff; it was just kind of an identification, like a switch was flipped. It’s not like she started dressing differently or anything like that.

But I think you’re right. From my experience, this is the result of the fragmentation and the breakdown of human communities, and the place of sanity has to be the Church. Like you said, it can’t be… that sanity is not simply giving people lectures about how they’re wrong about stuff, but actually creating a community that they can plug into and enter into that web of relationships where who they are as God created them to be is meaningful and is something they can actually connect to, because in many cases they haven’t been able. And I’m sure there’s a lot of different kinds of experiences. The one I happened to have interacted with with this young lady is not universal, I know, but the cure for this kind of stuff is a sane community where someone can plug into that and be part of it. It’s always in isolation that we—often in isolation, I should say, that we really go off the deep end and get in dangerous waters.

All right. Well, I hope that’s helpful to you, Moses, in your work. Okay, so this next one comes from our friend Kyle in Ireland. He has called into the show on multiple occasions.

Kyle: Hi, Fathers. My question is about the second coming. Is the second coming of Christ an event which will happen in material time at some point in the future? Or is it something which happens on an individual level in one’s personal experience during one’s life, meaning that the second coming of Christ has already happened for some people throughout history? Or is it a way of describing what happens to everyone when they die, so they enter into judgment or the second coming of Christ? Or is it all of these? Or is it none of these? Anyway, thank you very much.

Fr. Andrew: All right. It’s a good question. So, how about it, Father? What exactly is, as he put it, the second coming? I know you don’t like that phrase, actually.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. [Laughter] Well, yeah, because as I’ve said before it’s kind of deceptive. As we record, at least, we’re not that far past the Ascension, and, yeah, fighting back against the idea that Jesus “went away” somewhere and therefore is “coming back.” And therefore “second coming” and “return” kind of give that… It’s not that they’re a horrible translation; it’s just that they give a connotation. And there’s other language from the Bible, like: “Christ gloriously appeared,” “glorious appearing,” or just “when he appears” that I think conveys the idea that he is still very much with us and is still in our midst, even though we don’t sort of see him directly.

Fr. Andrew: He’ll be manifest in a way that he isn’t right now.

Fr. Stephen: Right, to us, yeah. So, yes, there is going to be an end of material time, or there’s going to be an end to this age, and what time will be like in the age to come we don’t know. And by “what it will be like” I mean how we will experience it after the resurrection—we don’t know! Likewise, how time is experienced when someone is separated from their body, we don’t know. So I can’t answer, at least at this point, what that’s like, whether they experience it as waiting for a long time or… You know what I mean? Whether the intermediate state is experienced as an extension of time or not, that’s the only way we can talk, is in terms of time and space. But I would suggest at the very least would apply differently to someone who is not in a body, or not embodied, with a material body. But what that means I can’t say.

So if you ask the question, “Has someone experienced it already?” I can already answer that—no—because the “already” means from our perspective, not from their perspective. [Laughter] So I can say from our perspective, the last judgment hasn’t happened, and that’s why we continue to pray for the departed, among other reasons. But I can’t answer from their perspective.

Fr. Andrew: We can’t project ourselves— I mean, this is the bat thing again. We can’t project ourselves out there and say, “Ah, yes, I know what it’s like to be departed from this life, and I know—I can tell you, I’m here at the second coming and we’re looking forward to you joining us.” We don’t know that!

Fr. Stephen: Right, and even to phrase the question, “What is this person who is departed doing right now?”—well, the “now” is now time from my perspective. So “now” for me and “now” for them might mean two completely different things. So that’s probably unsatisfactory, but that’s what we’ve got!

Fr. Andrew: That’s okay. Kyle from Ireland always asks good questions, so it was a good one, though. Okay. All right. We’ve got a couple more, and this one is from Phil.

Phil: Hello, Fathers! My name is Phil. I’m up in Canada. First, thank you for such a great show; I absolutely love it. God continue to strengthen you in your great work. I’m also really thankful that I get to speakpipe in and send a question. So my question is as follows: In [Colossians] 2:14-15, we read that Christ’s work on the cross

...canceled the bond which stood against us with its legal demands; this he set aside, nailing it to the cross. He disarmed the principalities and powers and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in him.

In this passage we not only see what we talk about often on the show, that is, that Christ put the beat-down on the devils, but also that salvation is not just healing; it is a debt. It might even be called a legal vision of salvation. I bring this passage to your attention because often in Orthodox circles we see salvation as healing. Talk of salvation as debt or other legal terms is often derogatorily referred to as Catholic or Protestant. As the above passage illustrates, though, there is clearly something more going on. I know that on the show we’ve talked about justice as being setting things in their right order, and I can see how this is related to healing, the example of placing bones back in their joints, but I’m not sure how to make more sense of the passage than that.

So my question is: Is there a more authentically Orthodox vision of salvation as a legal concept? Can you please just riff on this idea? Thank you.

Fr. Andrew: Okay! It’s a good question.

Fr. Stephen: I’m going to guess he’s from Manitoba.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, based on his accent?

Fr. Stephen: Maybe Winnipeg. Yeah, he has the same accent as Chris Jericho.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Wow!

Fr. Stephen: That’s what I’m going by.

Fr. Andrew: Wow, that’s… that’s fun.

Fr. Stephen: Someone tell me if I’m right at some later point.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] We just learned a little bit about your interest in Canadian-American wrestling.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, well, and here’s the thing— Here’s the thing. I may be looking at going all Henry Higgins about Canada, which would be a whole weird thing, right?

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Okay. So, yeah, I’m not sure that he…

Fr. Stephen: Now that I’ve thrown you off completely off the train you had going…

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, yeah. So he said 2 Corinthians 2:14-15, but I think he might be quoting something else. I’m not sure, though.

Fr. Stephen: That’s the handwriting of our sins passage.

Fr. Andrew: Right. Because that’s not what’s there in that passage. That’s in Colossians, isn’t it? Yeah, Colossians 2. I think that’s what he’s looking at.

Fr. Stephen: I knew what passage he was talking about.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, I knew it; I was just like… Ehh, I don’t think that that’s right. But, yes, there’s reference to indebtedness and this sort of handwriting and— I’m looking at the NET Bible right now; it refers to a “certificate of indebtedness expressed in decrees opposed to us.” [Colossians] 2:14. Yeah, which is very legal kind of language, financial

Fr. Stephen: Well, those are two different things, though.

Fr. Andrew: That’s true.

Fr. Stephen: That’s part of the problem with the question, is that “debt” and “legal” are two different things.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, we tend to, in our modern experience… “Debt” is a very legal experience.

Fr. Stephen: Well, we don’t have debtors’ prisons any more! I mean. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: That’s true, I suppose. But the law can be involved, and there are contracts that you sign…

Fr. Stephen: You can get a judgment against you in a civil court, maybe, I guess.

Fr. Andrew: Right, but also if you sign a contract, that has legal force.

Fr. Stephen: That’s enforceable, right.

Fr. Andrew: It has force of law. And indebtedness is a contract that you sign. So that kind of stuff is there, but I think… The way that I read this that makes the most sense to me is that debt is so much bound— I mean, you made mention of debtors’ prisons, but debt is so much bound up, especially in the Roman Empire, with the institution of slavery that… which is another very, very common image used in the New Testament for our relationship to sin, that it’s slavery, and it’s slavery to demonic powers, which is then, of course, referenced in verse 15: “Disarming the public authorities, he has made a disgrace of them, triumphing over them by the cross.” And so then this indebtedness that we have for Christ to pay that debt or to tear up the debt, as it is in this particular passage, or nailing it to the cross, is to release us from that slavery, that that’s gone that way.

My take is that legal language and financial, indebtedness language, whether they’re bound up together or not, that stuff is in Scripture. He made mention of how a lot of Orthodox people will say, “No, salvation is healing; it has nothing to do with this other kind of language,” but I think that that’s a problem, that when Orthodox people talk that way, it’s a problem, because it’s throwing out some biblical language in favor of other biblical language, which is a problem with the other side of the question that says, “No, it’s primarily a legal issue,” that’s throwing out other biblical language in favor of that biblical language, and so you get this truncated view either way.

Fr. Stephen: I think you’re trying to be overly charitable.

Fr. Andrew: Oh! Okay, well…

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Which is not a bad thing to be accused of.

Fr. Andrew: Since this is an episode where you’ve decided you’re going to go ahead and make everybody angry—go ahead! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yes. Again, reckless abandon—no.

Fr. Andrew: It’s true! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: And I can tell from your answer that you read the session related to this passage in Religion of the Apostles. Anyway.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Everyone, buy it! At store.ancientfaith.com!

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] There are a couple things with interrogating the question. First of all, at least on this show we never said that salvation is primarily healing.

Fr. Andrew: No! No, we haven’t.

Fr. Stephen: Let alone only healing. I even said “primarily.” That’s way down the chain. Being set free from bodiless powers, being raised from the dead, and being purified from sin and its effects—that’s what we talk about salvation being on this show. Now the purification of sin and its effects, healing covers part of that, but when we talk about atonement, the purification from sin and its effects is so that we can be filled with the Holy Spirit with the presence of God. It’s the beginning of theosis and transformation in a positive sense, not just healing. So, yeah, all of that is way watered down. In answer to the final form of the question: Well, yeah! It’s a lot more than healing, and that’s what we’ve always said.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yes.

Fr. Stephen: But, yeah, and then the other thing with this wiggle between “debt” and “legal”… I’m going to assume that this is positively motivated. I know that there’s a certain mindset that says, “Hey, we need to throw our Western brothers a bone (brothers and sisters),” and we’ve got Western Rite Orthodox people; some of whom are friends of mine, and some of them feel the need, because they’re using Western liturgical usages, to also try to defend bits and bobs of Western theology unnecessarily, and so we want to try to throw people a bone. And so using that “legal” as sort of this broad category that covers twelve things, then we could say, “Well, yeah, we think there’s some legal imagery there.” Now by “legal” we mean something totally different than what, say, penal substitutionary atonement or satisfaction theory means, but it’s still legal, so we can be friendly. To me, that’s just papering over actual differences.

As you mentioned, the word there in Greek actually refers to a promissory note. And this is connected to St. Paul’s common imagery: “Wages of sin is death.” So we have brought this upon ourselves. Again, it’s not a death penalty, and that’s proved by the way St. Paul, elsewhere in Romans, uses the term “wages.” He said if salvation was wages, it would not be grace, it would not be the grace of God; it would be something you earned. So when he said, “The wages of sin is death,” it means death is something we earned, not the action of God apart from our own actions, meaning it’s not a death penalty. St. Paul straight says that.

And if you read Hebrews—which is at least Pauline, even if you don’t want to call it St. Paul’s epistle to the Hebrews, which I’m comfortable doing, but even if you’re not, it’s at least Pauline—it talks about how we, through the fear of death, have been enslaved our whole lives by the devil who holds the power of death whom Christ came and defeated. So as you said, this is about freedom from slavery to sin and death, which Christ accomplishes on our behalf, and that’s not, again, a legal matter. It’s not that there’s a court case between the devil and Christ, and Christ wins the civil case and therefore becomes the holder of our debt and tears it up. [Laughter] That’s not the imagery that’s being used. The imagery is Christ saving us from the consequences of our actions, which we’ve richly earned, but that are part of the natural consequence of what happens when we give ourselves over to sin and rebellion and follow the demons.

So I don’t—I just don’t feel the need to find a way to agree with Anselm. I don’t feel a need to find a way to partially agree with John Calvin about penal substitutionary atonement. I just don’t. I just don’t! I don’t need to. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Be free, Fr. Stephen. Fly! Be free!

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] And I’m sorry if that upsets people who do agree with them, but just—I don’t see any positive to it.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. I mean, we don’t need to! We don’t need to. I mean, just to put it bluntly, they’re not Orthodox saints, so we don’t need to figure out how to incorporate them into what we’re doing.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, it’s not serving a purpose for us, it’s not answering a question that we don’t have an answer to otherwise… I mean, to me it’s like the lamest kind of ecumenism.

Fr. Andrew: God bless.

Fr. Stephen: Just like, hey, let’s pretend we agree more than we do—and why?

Fr. Andrew: All right. So on that note, we have one more question. This comes from Jonathan.

Jonathan: Hey, podfathers. My name is Jonathan Harris, and I just recently joined the podcast and the Facebook group, and I ended up asking a question the other day about Ancient Near Eastern cosmology and what you guys believe about that. Do you agree with scholarship of the day that sees a three-tiered cosmology with a hard sky and all of that stuff, or do you disagree? And if you do agree, what do you think that means for inspiration of biblical inspiration and how we read the Bible and understand it and all of that stuff? That’s been really on my mind lately, so it’d be great if you guys could speak to that a little more in depth. But thank you so much for the podcast; I really enjoy it.

Fr. Andrew: All right. Thank you! I feel like I heard seagulls in the background of his recording there! So he’s coming to us from the beach, I don’t know!

Fr. Stephen: Or he’s going Tippi Hedren, and they’re about to attack!

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] So, yeah, I actually want us eventually to do a whole episode about this question, about cosmology.

Fr. Stephen: Oh, I thought you were going to say The Birds. Oh, okay, that’s a much better…

Fr. Andrew: No, not The Birds. No, I can’t handle even minor horror films like that; I can’t do it. I’m just a total pansy in that regard.

Yeah, so I guess the way that I would sort of restate his question would be: Okay, it seems in the Bible the cosmology that’s presented has got three levels. You’ve got the heavens above us, you’ve got the earth that we live on, and you’ve got the underworld underneath us. I should point out, by the way, that the middle part is referred to as Middle-earth in pre-modern Germanic literature; just putting that out there: Middangeard. And then now we’ve got… We live long after Copernicus and all that kind of stuff, and we know that that’s not the way that things are shaped. Do we actually believe that that’s what’s presented in the Bible? If that really is the case, then what do we do with that we know now that that’s not how the world is actually arranged?

So here’s my understanding of that. My understanding is that you actually do— In some cases in the ancient world, you get some people who seem to hold to more than one cosmology at a time. One the one hand, they’ll say, “The earth is round,” which a lot of them had figured out with the use of geometry. They could tell that the earth was round. And then at the same time also describe the earth in three-tiered cosmological terms, which suggests that they didn’t see them as contradictory models, that they’re essentially describing two different sets of experiences that are related to the same reality but are two different ways of kind of talking about it.

But it’s also my understanding that you do get, at various points in time, certain people who very much push a kind of a total, even materialization of the three-tiered version of cosmology and say, “This the way that the world simply is laid out.” For my part, I have no problem in believing in both at the same time, that the three-tier cosmology describes something like what we would describe as a spiritual experience, and it’s not about an empirical, material measurement. And then you can take an empirical, material measurement and see planets that are basically spheres going around the sun, which is itself part of a galaxy, and all that kind of thing; and that both are meaningful models and both apply. Both apply to actual phenomenological experiences that people have.

I don’t know. That’s my understanding of it, and I would say that even if it is the case that the Bible teaches only a three-tier cosmology—and I have to say, I’ll have to defer to you on this whether that’s all that’s said there, Father, but even if it does teach that, I don’t see that that’s a problem for believing that the Bible is inspired, because the Bible isn’t trying to answer material, empirical questions about planets and astronomy and so forth; that’s not what its purpose is. Instead, it’s talking about the actual experiences that people have and their experiences with God with that and the world and so forth. That’s my set of thoughts that I have about this.

Fr. Stephen: So there’s a bunch of things that make this complicated. One of them is the concept of spiritual geography that we’ve talked about before.

Fr. Andrew: Right, overlaying.

Fr. Stephen: So Leviathan swallows Jonah, swims down beneath the pillars of the earth. Like, no one was actually claiming there are pillars that are actually supported by nothing, supporting the earth. That’s sacred geography. How those things overlap, though, with real geography, or with material geography, I should say… So there’s that, and it complicates it.

There’s also, as we talked about in the “How (and How Not) to Read the Bible” episode, the fact that the Bible does not make scientific claims, ever, at all. So trying to read it from the perspective of modern science is fundamentally cattywampus. That’s not saying science is bad; don’t do science. But if what you’re really interested in studying is ancient textiles, great: Go get your PhD in history, study ancient textiles. But if you try to read the Bible from the perspective of textiles, you might have some interesting insights here and there that I’d be willing to hear, but on the whole you’re not really going to get the thrust of what the Bible wants to teach you. And so the same thing: if you try to read the Bible from the perspective of astrophysics, you might have some interesting insights here and there, but you’re not going to get the thrust, because it’s not making claims from that perspective. That’s not the discourse that’s taking place in Scripture.

And then of course there’s what would you expect God to say to Bronze Age people? So we all have a little bit of 19th-century German in us, where we have this assumption that we stand at the pinnacle of history, and that includes science; so we’ve got this all, or pretty much all, locked down in terms of science. And so if God were really going to speak, he’d communicate in our scientific terms because we’re at the pinnacle of human history. [Laughter] And so the fact that he talks to these Bronze Age people about the world as if it’s the way the Bronze Age people thought it was, that’s a problem.

The reality is if God actually explained the world to Bronze Age people the way it actually is, we still wouldn’t understand it! Because if there’s a humanity in this age, 2,000 years from now, we will probably look at today’s science like we were a bunch of idiots, the way modern people look at medieval science and alchemy. There will be all kinds of things that we think are horrific and stupid about our current science.

So that whole chain of argument is based on this sort of modernist hubris and doesn’t hold up and make a lot of sense. So the reality is that God had things that he wanted to communicate to Bronze Age people, and so he spoke to them in a language that existed at the time and in ways, using metaphors and descriptions, that they could understand, so that he could convey to them what he wanted to convey.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and it’s still meaningful for us, even though—like, those models are still meaningful for us, even for they’re not what our scientific textbooks are talking about.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and our current models will seem equally quaint in a thousand years to the people of that time.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. All right. Well, that wraps up this big Q&A episode. Thank you very much for listening, everyone. If you didn’t get to catch us live on one of our previous episodes, in the future we’d still like to hear from you. You can email us at lordofspirits@ancientfaith.com; you can message us at our Facebook page; or you can leave us a voicemail at speakpipe.com/lordofspirits.

Fr. Stephen: And join us for our live broadcasts on the second and fourth Thursdays of the month at 7:00 p.m. Eastern, 4:00 p.m. Pacific, except, like, not today, but the next actual live one will be in the second week of July, second Thursday.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] And if you are on Facebook, you can like our page, join our discussion group; you can leave reviews and ratings everywhere, but, most importantly, share this show with a friend whom you know is going to love it, or even someone who’s kind of “eh” about it.

Fr. Stephen: And finally, be sure to go to ancientfaith.com/support and help make sure we and lots of other AFR podcasters—I’m going to go ahead and say all of them—stay on the air.

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