Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick: Good evening, all you gigantomachs out there. You are listening to The Lord of Spirits podcast. My co-host, Fr. Stephen De Young, is with me from Lafayette, Louisiana, and I’m Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick, in Emmaus, Pennsylvania. This is not a live episode, despite the entreaties from the Voice of Steve that you will hear to call in. And this episode is pre-recorded for two reasons. The first is that we’re both going to be in church services tonight for the great feast of the Annunciation, and the second is that our mothership studio in Chesterton, Indiana, recently was flooded because of a water main break. So Matushka Trudi and the rest of the local crew are in the process of getting the studio put back together after a thorough cleaning and getting some new, upgraded equipment installed as well. That means that Ancient Faith Radio live shows can’t take live calls right now, and it’s also why there was not an episode of Lord of Spirits two weeks ago.

Fr. Stephen De Young: You really got carried away with that house blessing.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Too much, too much. Water mains, that’s the wave of the future for house blessings. Just got to turn those things on. [Laughter] Anyway—I was not anywhere near that!

Fr. Stephen: That’s what you’d like us to think.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that’s right! That’s my official story. But this episode is going to be a Q&A even though we can’t take live calls actually. Because this time we’re using pre-recorded calls from you, our listeners. Tonight we’ve got questions from all over the world, with topics ranging from catechism to giants to the Zs. So, are you ready, Fr. Stephen?

Fr. Stephen: I am, although I want to suggest that next time we have to do this, we actually post-record it.

Fr. Andrew: I don’t know what that means, but okay.

Fr. Stephen: That would mean like the show airs on Thursday night, and we record it on Saturday morning. Just to prove once and for all that time—

Fr. Andrew: That time and space don’t exist, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah.

Fr. Andrew: Okay. [Laughter] Sounds good.

Fr. Stephen: We could at least give it a shot.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] We will see what we can do. There’s new equipment coming to the mothership, so maybe it’s got that capability.

All right. So here is our first question. We’re just going to dive right in. This one is from Christopher.

Christopher: Glory be to Jesus Christ, Fathers. My name is Christopher Mihaly, from Danbury, Connecticut, and I know you’ve, on multiple occasions, said that “liturgy” does not mean the “work of the people.” Would a better way of understanding it be “work for the people,” as in God is doing the work for us? Thanks again. Have a good night.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, so that’s question number one, and that is something we’ve talked about before. So, number one, shout-out to Fr. Lucas Christensen, who mentions this all the time, and Richard Barrett. Hello, guys. I don’t know if you’re listening, but… Yeah, the reason that people think “liturgy” from Greek leitourgia means “work of the people” is because they see the words for “people” and “work” in there, and so that’s then used to make this okay point about you should be participating in the Divine Liturgy and not seeing yourself as merely some kind of spectator. So there is an actual basis for this comment, but it doesn’t work in terms of actual historical usage. Is that right, Father?

Fr. Stephen: Right, yeah, that’s sort of like “butterfly.” You don’t take the two words and read them separately and come to a conclusion or you’ll be wrong.

Fr. Andrew: So how is the word used in the context in which it actually arises?

Fr. Stephen: Right, so originally—and by “originally,” I mean pre-Christian, pre-Greek translation of the Old Testament—[in] Greek it basically means public works. And it means public works in the sense of… in the polis you have….

Fr. Andrew: “The city,” everyone. He doesn’t mean the po-lice. [Laughter] Sorry. Although they are related! The words are related.

Fr. Stephen: Like Minnea-polis, up in Minnesota. [Laughter] Or Indiana-polis.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly. You’re going to have work on your modern Greek accent a little bit there, Father.

Fr. Stephen: I know, it’s not good. I just offended a lot of people, but it’s okay. At least I didn’t do the old Saturday Night Live, “Do you like-a da juice? Da juice, she is good?”

Within the city, there would be at certain times public festivals, choruses for theatrical performances, other kinds of public works that were of interest to city life and the people, the citizens, the people who in Athens had the vote, but the people who were at the citizen level, which wasn’t everybody. But they were expected to pay for those things. And that was part of your responsibility to the community. The community in the ancient world, remember, including in ancient Greece, included the gods. So the first person to use a phrase something like “the divine liturgy” was actually Aristotle, and when he uses that phrase, he’s talking about the fact that a certain amount of land should be given over by land owners to build temples. You can see how that’s both a religious activity but also just sort of a public works project.

So this, then, gets used to translate certain Hebrew verbs related specifically to this service of the Levites. And the reason it seems to get chosen—because there are other words just for service or religious devotion and this kind of thing—the reason this particular word gets used in… first when the Torah gets translated into Greek, is that it’s within the context of the covenant. So the covenant, remember, is—Yahweh the God of Israel is the king; he cuts the covenant with the people, identifies himself, lays out their responsibilities, describes the consequences. So leitourgia is a good word to use if that’s your understanding of the services outlined in the Torah, the sacrificial system and this kind of thing, that this is your responsibility within the covenant toward God. It’s sort of this public work of the community aimed toward God.

So then it gets picked up that way in early Christianity, because early Christianity saw themselves as a people, not as a religion, remember, not as something separate. This was their identity as a people, and so their public work was Christian worship, “public” referring to “a people,” not just people in general, but a united community. And then this transitions then very easily once you get to St. Constantine, because they already had this idea of public works related to the pagan gods. The Christian liturgy, then, replaces that, beginning with the military under St. Constantine himself.

And this gets translated in a couple of different ways into Latin. One of them is ministerium, which is where we get the word “ministry.” This is why, for example, in Great Britain, the departments of government are called ministries. It’s not because there’s anything particularly religious about them; it’s this older concept of public service, public works.

Fr. Andrew: The United Kingdom is not a theocracy? [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Not for a long time!

And then the other one of those is officium, which is why you’ll see—in a lot of English sources you’ll see various services referred to as an office or as offices.

Fr. Andrew: The divine office.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and that’s… The word officium means officially something sort of similar to our concept of duty, although our modern concept of duty has a whole bunch of layers that can’t really be easily seen through by us. [Laughter] So it’s “duty” in the sense of responsibility, and so that’s why “office” also gets used, for example, what we would call holy orders or the clergy, they have an office that’s a set of duties, responsibilities.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, things you’re supposed to do.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, but that’s where leitourgia literally… That’s where it comes from; that’s what it means.

Fr. Andrew: So here’s my follow-up question, because at the beginning of the Divine Liturgy, if there is a deacon serving, which, ideally, there should be—

Fr. Stephen: Oh, are we going to argue about this now?

Fr. Andrew: No, no! I’m just asking about it!

Fr. Stephen: Okay. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Because there’s that line which is translated variously as— Because this is sometimes brought up when people say “liturgy” means “work for the people” or “public work” or “work by God.” There’s that line that the deacon says to the priest, which is translated either as “It is time to begin the service to the Lord” or sometimes “It is time for the Lord to act.” And that’s a translation from something in the Greek Old Testament, isn’t it? I’m trying to remember; I can’t think of it.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so “Now is the time for the Lord to act” sounds much cooler, but is wrong.

Fr. Andrew: Okay! [Laughter] So “The time to begin the service to the Lord” is better?

Fr. Stephen: That’s accurate. I mean, technically, the Greek can go either way. To translate the Greek as “It is time for the Lord to act,” you have to do a little bit of special pleading in terms of really uncommon Greek usages. But if you look at the way that’s translated into all of the other languages in which Orthodox liturgy is done, it’s always something like “It is time to begin the service of the Lord.”

Fr. Andrew: This raises the question of: Who is doing the Divine Liturgy? I think one of the problems is that there’s—on the one hand, you can shove it all the way to the one side and say, “This is simply God doing it, and we’re simply here to show up and receive it,” and shove it all the way to the other side and say, “This is something we’re doing for or toward God.” And my understanding, based on the prayers that are actually within it, is that it is clearly both; that we are serving the Lord, but he is also doing something to and for us in the midst of it, that it’s really—really is both. Do you think that’s a good way to read it?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, I mean, we can get super technical with Greek and Latin here, which no one wants—

Fr. Andrew: Aw, come on. Someone wants it, but let’s not.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] If you really dig into the usage of those, both Greek and Latin words, essentially the way a word like “office” or “ministry” works is it’s essentially used instrumentally. I’m not going to into all the Cicero and stuff we’d have to go into to demonstrate all this, but basically an analogy I’m pulling from ancient usage is that the person who conducts the office, who conducts this duty or this responsibility, this role, is sort of like an axe. So you can say, “This axe chopped down the tree.” That’s technically correct. But the axe was instrumental; it was not the actual agent of chopping down the tree. It is that through which the tree was chopped down, technically, but it had to fulfill its role in order for the chopping down of the tree to happen.

So the idea then, if we apply those words sort of in their original literal usage to the Divine Liturgy is that God is doing something, and he’s doing it instrumentally through the clergy and the people.

Fr. Andrew: Got you. Well, that makes sense. This is the first of several questions we have now from people named Ben or Benjamin. I don’t know why—there’s like five or six of them in the collection for this episode! But here we are, so this is Ben number one.

Fr. Stephen: Are any of them a rodent?

Fr. Andrew: I’m not certain. None of them identified whether they were a rodent or a hominid, so I don’t know. That’s up in the air. So here’s Ben.

Ben I: Hi, Fathers. This is Ben, calling from Grand Rapids, Michigan. So I am currently an Orthodox Christian enrolled in a master’s program within the mental health field. And I had a professor in a recent lecture make what I kind of thought was a bold statement. He said that, really, until about 200 years ago, there weren’t any cultures that viewed issues of mental health—like depression, schizophrenia, those types of disorders—as anything separate from maybe demonic possession or some sort of supernatural influence. I mean, I really agree with a lot of the things that you’ve talked about on the podcast in terms of there really being no separation between these material phenomena and the spiritual reality.

But I guess my question would be: Has there been any time during the history of Christian thought or any examples where a distinction is drawn between those two? In essence, we see diseases, mental disorders that can be cured with medication—is there a way to draw a line there between what might be more material, what might be more spiritual? Or am I maybe just looking at this totally wrong?

Fr. Andrew: Okay, so what do you think? I mean, there’s a couple of claims there. There’s the idea that no one in the pre-modern world thought that mental illness was anything but what we would think of now as purely spiritual, and then also the question of: Do we, can we make that distinction, or in what way should we make that distinction? What do you think, Father?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, well, I mean, a lot of that depends on there being an either/or. And this is programmatic for a lot of modern people: “Either this is just the product of a material system of causes or it’s a miracle. It’s only a miracle if there’s no material causes, and it’s only totally material if there’s nothing miraculous about it.” And so part of the reason why you’re not going to see that distinction among pre-modern people is that they’re always trying to do the opposite; they’re always trying to show the connections between these things. Like we’re constantly seeing in the gospels, when Christ heals someone, there’s this connection between the healing of soul and body. There’s casting out demons, there’s healing physical ailments, and there’s the forgiveness of sins—all sort of mixed together all the time, that these things are always sort of intimately connected. But they’re not sort of connected in sort of a crass way like Job’s friends, where it’s like, “You sinned, therefore bad thing happened to you.”

Fr. Andrew: It occurs to me—I’m reminded suddenly of something that St. Nikolai Velimirovic said in I think one of his homilies, where he talks about miracles, and he says that a miracle is simply one of God’s gifts at which men marvel; that it’s all God’s gifts—the good things that we receive are all God’s gifts, but there are some of those gifts that we marvel at, because that’s just kind of the way that we are. I mean, even within stuff that you might think of as purely “spiritual,” Orthodox Christians who go to church every Sunday don’t tend to go: “Whoa! Wow! What’s happening!?” when they know that the Eucharist has become the body and blood of Christ, but if they see a myrrh-streaming icon, they’re much more likely to go: “Whoa!” Even within those things that we think of as spiritual, there’s kind of levels of marveling. The Eucharist, people tend to marvel if they contemplate it; it’s not something that sort of smacks them in the face the way that a visual, a strongly visual “miracle” might.

Fr. Stephen: Right, but even then, there are commonplace things, like a sunrise or a sunset—

Fr. Andrew: Right, that people marvel at.

Fr. Stephen: —that we would hold are totally material causes, but that people will still pog out about—

Fr. Andrew: “Pog out.”

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] —and will have that experience of awe and wonder. Part of this is also related to this idea we have as modern people that we’re—at best, if we’re Christians, we’re a ghost in a machine, that we are a soul, which is a thing, and it’s living inside our body. And, again, that’s not how it’s seen in Scripture; that a human person is a human person. It’s not just in terms of criticizing Apollinarianism—sorry, William Lane Craig—that we are argue that Christ is one Person, and that human nature is one and is whole. That’s true for all humans: human nature is one and is whole.

And so you can’t separate out these capacities. We know this in experience. There’s not somebody who has spent years dealing with a debilitating physical ailment who hasn’t struggled with mental health and depression along the way and who hasn’t been subject to spiritual attack along the way. In our actual human experience, those things are never separate; they’re always mixed together and intermingled. So I think the instructor whom Ben’s hearing is sort of trying to de-mingle these things. He’s trying to say that “oh, no, no, no, they were saying it was only demons—this person was fine, but then these demons came out; that’s what they thought back then. Now we know it’s this other thing.” But the reality is—this is the modern “everybody in the past was a primitive screw-head.” [Laughter]

The fact is they had a much more nuanced view. They didn’t deny the material elements and the mental elements. You’ll find people talking about distraction and these different problems, and despondency and these things, but they always saw those as having physical and spiritual causes and effects. They weren’t—it wasn’t purely one thing, the way we modern folks want it to be.

Fr. Andrew: Right. Okay, so now we’ve got a question from Cynthia.

Cynthia: Hi, Fr. Stephen. We have a question for you, kind of two parts. We were wondering if you could help us understand whom does Cain have children with, and we were wondering if that might be related to your discussion about giants. And in Genesis 6, there is… It says,

Now there were giants on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men, and they bore children to them. Those were the mighty men of old, men of renown.

And there’s also reference that giants are also known as nephilim and hybrid sons of fallen angels. So if you could please clarify for us, that would be very helpful, and thank you for clarifying so much for us as we are listening to your podcasts and starting to read your book. Thank you!

Fr. Andrew: All right, so there’s several things there. Number one, who was Cain’s wife? Does this have something to do with giants? And how does that relate to the nephilim? What do you think, Father?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And apparently they only want to know what I have to say about it.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, right, it was directed to you, so it doesn’t matter what I think.

Fr. Stephen: You get a bye, I guess, completely.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, no, go for it. Number one, listen to a three-and-a-half-hour episode about giants...

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, exactly, in terms of the giants in Genesis 6 and everything, we’ve got to go back to the giants episode, because all of the other people with questions would get mad if we rehearsed that three-and-a-half hours… [Laughter] But in terms of Cain’s wife, we don’t know!

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, she’s not mentioned. It just says he knew his wife.

Fr. Stephen: Well, not named, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: She’s not named, right.

Fr. Stephen: And so folks who want to take a very literal read of Genesis 4 and 5 say, “Well, it must have been his sister,” which is certainly possible. There are other people who have various theories that come under the heading of what’s called co-Adamism. Co-Adamism is basically just any theory in which there are other people besides Adam and Eve who are around. Those theories run into a bunch of problems, and we have to distinguish among those theories. So co-Adamism in the 19th and early 20th century was mostly racist. I mean, very literally. It’s pretty horrific the stuff you will find if you do a Google search for co-Adamism now that I’ve told everybody that term. [Laughter] Because it was an attempt to say that there are multiple races of humanity.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and the ones you don’t like are descended from Cain.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, and the one you do like is descended from Adam. Oh, no, this is co-Adamism; they’re not even descended from Cain.

Fr. Andrew: Oh! Oh, wow. Okay.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. Yeah. You also get this sometimes in terms of different people trying to incorporate the story in Genesis into various evolutionary theories. So there’s like a whole bunch of humans who evolved, but then God creates Adam separately.

The places where all those theories run into kind of a problem is that you have to have death come to humanity through something other than Adam’s expulsion from paradise, which we’ve talked about a lot in different episodes. And if you break that connection to death, if you’ve got most humans just living and dying and death is natural to them, that creates real problems on the other end when it comes to Christ defeating death.

And the fact that everyone now today… So there’s a revised-revised-revised recent version of this theory that’s become very popular among various certain internet Protestant apologists, where they point out that “well, even if there were these other people who evolved and Cain marries into them and stuff, by today, all these thousands of years later, we’re all descended from Adam anyway, so it’s okay.” The problem is, you have a whole bunch of generations that aren’t, and to whom death was natural. So there’s a lot of problems that come with that.

Some kind of co-Adamism in that sense, in having some more people around, I understand why people would find that attractive, because it would let you solve certain problems, like who’s Cain’s wife and some other things, and how does he build a city, how did there get to be that many people; but you end up with theological problems that are way worse than just having to say, “I don’t know who Cain’s wife was; the Bible doesn’t tell us.” And we have to remember that not just Genesis 1-11 but the whole Bible was not written to answer our questions and our curiosity. God has specific things he wanted to communicate to us, and so, especially if our answers to our curiosity start to conflict with or make us fiddle with those things God is trying to communicate, we’ve gone aground. Shipwreck time.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, so we’ve got another question. This one is from Emilian.

Emilian: Hello, Fathers. I am Emilian from Romania, and I have a question about the soul. In the last episode, Fr. Stephen said that we shouldn’t think of the soul as being a thing, an eternal, immortal element of our being; rather, we should think of it as the life of the body. Could you elaborate more on this idea?

How should we understand the afterlife, given that the soul is really not the spirit you get to wander around with when you die in Hell, World of Warcraft? And what about the process of demonization? Because the nephilim’s souls seem to me to get that Warcraft treatment when they possess human beings.

And also, what about the Old Testament idea that the soul descends into the underworld after death, but that it also returns to God? Thank you for these and for your very helpful and useful work.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, so the question seems to be: if the soul is not a thing, à la Descartes, if it’s the life of the body—

Fr. Stephen: Or Plato.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, exactly, sorry. Well, you know.

Fr. Stephen: Then a sphere.

Fr. Andrew: Well, you know, all philosophy is just footnotes to Plato, right? The thing about human beings being spheres was that—isn’t that Origenism? Isn’t he the one who’s really about the spheres?

Fr. Stephen: Well, he’s getting that from Plato. If you read the Timaeus, humans started out as just like a spherical head, but then they’d roll around and fall into a ditch or something and they couldn’t get out, and so that’s why bodies… to carry the head around. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: You know, in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, where you also have the film version, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, you do have Violet who becomes essentially a sphere. So it is an Origenistic film, a Platonic film, really. Just throwing that out there. [Laughter]

So the question is, if souls are not things, if they are the life of the body, then how does that explain the sense of them journeying or them being parted from the body? What exactly is going on there? And then of course he mentions demonization, demonized souls.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and World of Warcraft.

Fr. Andrew: Right!?

Fr. Stephen: So next time you’re doing a corpse run, tell the Spirit Healer “hi” for me. [Laughter] So, yeah, the idea of the immortal soul is from Plato, and when Plato says the soul is immortal, he means it. So Plato has the transmigration of souls, aka reincarnation, because if something’s immortal, it’s immortal, in and of itself. And then the body is the prison of the soul, etc., etc. So even though Calvin quoted that, it’s not Christian. [Laughter]

If you go back to the Hebrew Bible, “soul” just means life, nephesh; it just means life. So when God creates the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, it’s the souls that swim in the sea and the souls that fly in the air. And everyone from Aristotle to St. Gregory Palamas—that covers some ground!—says that animals and even plants have souls; they just have souls of a different type than human souls. And the reason you can say that is because they’re alive. The Latin word for soul is anima, so we call something that is not alive an inanimate object, a soulless object, as opposed to one that has a soul.

When we talk about the soul leaving the body, in that original Hebraic context, we’re literally talking about the life leaving the body. The body is still there. It is no longer alive; it is now inanimate. And so the question then becomes: What happens to that life? And so, yes, we get spatial language, going down into the underworld or up into the heavens, but we have to take that by way of analogy, because even somebody like Plato doesn’t think that a soul fills physical space or weighs anything. They did those experiments!

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right, I was about to say that.

Fr. Stephen: But has mass and takes up space. So this is part of that “you don’t know what it’s like to be a bat,” and as we’ve talked about, what is the intermediate state, the period between our physical death and the resurrection of the dead, what’s that like? Well, we just get analogies in Scripture, because we don’t know what’s that like. We know that our life is hidden in Christ, but what exactly does that mean?

So we believe that our life continues even as it leaves the body, that that life doesn’t evaporate into the ether, so that that life continues, but it continues contingently, because it’s still created; it’s not uncreated, the soul. And so it is contingent all the way through. It is God who is preserving it. And then we believe that that life will return to the body in the resurrection for every human. And, yeah, do I want to get into it? Yeah, yeah, I’ll leave it there.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah, I was going to say…

Fr. Stephen: I was going to get into the relationship between the soul and consciousness, but we have other questions to answer.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, we do.

Fr. Stephen: We can talk about that at some other point.

Fr. Andrew: The thing that I would add with regard to his references to demonization—

Fr. Stephen: Oh, yeah!

Fr. Andrew: —would be simply that that life becomes demonized; it becomes a demonized life, and so that’s the nature of that way of being is that it’s evil; it functions in a demonic way. I mean, just as a human person who is not dead yet, they can function in a demonic way. That’s exactly—the Fathers say that.

Fr. Stephen: Right, right, and parallel to the way in which the souls of the saints, most of whom are not yet bodily resurrected—a few are, but most are not yet! Their soul is functioning in an angelic capacity.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly. Okay, so here’s one from Evan.

Evan: Hello, Fathers. I’ve read about and heard about how, in ancient times, catechumens and penitents were not present in the nave of the church during Liturgy, or rather stood out in the narthex or otherwise outside the nave. With our understanding of holiness by death, I was wondering if there was a connection there, since penitents were not present where we understand Christ to be present in the assembly of the people in the nave. If you could talk about that a bit or answer if there is that connection or what that connection is, I would appreciate it.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, so, he said “holiness by death,” but I’m sure he meant “death by holiness,” because holiness by death, that would be martyrdom, wouldn’t it, basically?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, one of the martyrs who wasn’t a Christian before his martyrdom, for example, yes.

Fr. Andrew: Which is a thing! It’s definitely a thing. Yeah, so, I mean, I haven’t studied this question, but my hot take on this is that it does have a symbolic way of expressing this question of death by holiness, in other words that the catechumens and the unbaptized don’t get so close because, to do that—they’re not ready for that yet, basically. Am I—what do you think?

Fr. Stephen: Right, they haven’t yet experienced purification. Remember, when we were talking about the tabernacle, the laver is there so that when the priests come in they can wash.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. So, yes, Evan, you got that right. Okay, so now we’ve got one from—

Fr. Stephen: That was a quick one!

Fr. Andrew: Yeah! [Laughter] Well, we’re going to need some quick ones.

Fr. Stephen: I don’t have to ramble about everything.

Fr. Andrew: You don’t! I mean, you could, but you don’t. Please don’t. [Laughter] Yeah, so this one is from Jessie, who has a very non-controversial thing to ask about.

Jessie: Hi, Fathers. This is Jessie Crosby. I have a question about Genesis 3. In Genesis 3 when God is condemning the serpent, he says that there will be enmity between the serpent’s seed or offspring, between the serpent and the woman, and that reference to the serpent’s seed is… I’m wondering if that is referring to nephilim or to the behemoth or to just other fallen angels. Who exactly would be considered the offspring of the serpent? Thank you so much.

Fr. Andrew: Okay. I’m reminded now… So a few years ago I did a speaking engagement in Louisville, Kentucky, and I asked the pastor, Fr. Alexis Kouri, actually, at the time, to take me across the river to—there’s a cemetery there, and there’s a guy buried there named William Branham, who was a big faith healer in the charismatic world in the middle of the 20th century, and there’s a whole bunch of his disciples buried in that cemetery. And one of them, whose tombstone is not far away from his, is this massive thing that has this sort of this long poem on it, summarizing all of his wackiest teachings, and one them is this question of the serpent’s seed. He has this idea—and this is out there—that there’s this serpent’s seed that’s within mankind that functions as a kind of Illuminati cabal or whatever that are poisoning the world and are trying to turn everyone to destruction. So is that what’s being taught in Genesis 3?

Fr. Stephen: No.

Fr. Andrew: That’s what I thought.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] No, more common than that—I mean, not common, but more common than that—is this idea that the serpent and Eve…

Fr. Andrew: Right.

Fr. Stephen: Had Cain.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] That the serpent was literally Cain’s father.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, in fact I think that that’s what Branham’s teaching was, is that—

Fr. Stephen: Okay.

Fr. Andrew: So there’s this Cain line out there, and there’s also this Seth line.

Fr. Stephen: The Twist of Cain!

Fr. Andrew: Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: And then you get, you know, bad ‘90s gothy vampire picture out of that.

Fr. Andrew: As one does. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, but so really the New Testament lays this out pretty clearly. Christ says to the people who are out to kill him, “You are sons of your father, the devil.”

Fr. Andrew: Right, exactly.

Fr. Stephen: And in 1 John, St. John is not identifying Cain as literally the son of the devil, but he’s using him as an archetype. So as we’ve talked about before, sonship is primarily about image-bearing. The son is the image of the father. And so the one who bears the image of the serpent, the one who becomes like the devil, is his son; and those who bear the image of God are sons of God. And Christ is the Son of God, capital-S, because he is the perfect express image of the Father.

That’s what this seed or offspring or son language is about. This is not something that’s new in the New Testament. A lot of people, they’ll attribute this to St. Paul, like St. Paul does this huge break with the past, where he says, “Oh no, you’re sons of Abraham if you share his faithfulness, if you’re like Abraham and not otherwise,” like this is this big— Everybody before that just thought it was ethnic.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, no.

Fr. Stephen: Which of course, even though there was no concept of ethnicity, etc… And, yeah, that is not the case. You find that well before that in Second Temple Judaism, this idea, because this is what it means to be a son. Yeah.

Fr. Andrew: I mean, Adam is called a son of God, and there are angels who are called sons of God. It clearly is not about biological descent in any exclusive kind of way.

Okay, so this next question is from Josh.

Josh: Fathers, bless. My name is Josh, and I’m from Oklahoma. I’ve only known about Orthodoxy for about a year now. Would you be willing to explain or define what’s meant by the “kingdom of God”? We see it a lot in the gospels, and it seems to play a pretty prominent role. I was wondering if you could shed some light on that. Thank you very much.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, so the kingdom of God. I mean, so I’ll just say this. We tend to think of “kingdom” in the modern world as being about nation-states, but really, my sense of the way it is in the Scripture, and of course certainly the way it is in liturgical writings, in the writings of the Fathers, is that the kingdom of God is… That a kingdom is the extension of the influence or rule of the king; it’s all those who are under his sway and are obedient to him, which is why you can be outside the kingdom of God by being disobedient. So again, it’s not like a state with borders or even a sort of spiritualized version of that, but it’s rather those that are under God’s influence and who are being obedient to him and are doing what it means to be a citizen of his kingdom. Is there anything that needs to be added to that, or adjusted or corrected?

Fr. Stephen: Well, sort of the other side of that—I mean, you’re right that the word “kingdom” is another place where Latin and then English haven’t been kind to us in reifying things; it’s much more of a verbal idea in Greek, of reign or dominion.

Fr. Andrew: I was going to say, in early English, the king— I think I’ve mentioned this on this show before. The king is the cyning; he’s the kin-person. He literally is— It’s about the guy who’s at the center of the family and kind of tying everything together. And so then those who are part of his cyning-dom, those who are within his judgment, is literally what that means, are the ones that are tied to him. So I mean early English has it, but, yeah, as you said, later English, it’s more reified.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and so from the other side—sort of, as you said, people who are obedient, that’s one side of the covenant… The other side, as we’ve talked about before, what the king does is establish order. And so it is the—what’s a good word… See, all the good words that are sort of reified and spatial in English, like the arena or the realm or the… [Laughter] in which Christ is placing things in order already. So the idea is that the last judgment, the culmination of this is when this becomes true of all of creation. Christ is enthroned and already reigns; that’s an eternal reality, and as we’ve talked about before, that then plays out in real time, in the lives of actual people who are finite and therefore experience things in time and space.

Fr. Andrew: Right. Okay, well, we’ve got one from—it’s spelled C-a-v-a-n; I’m going to guess that’s pronounced Cavan, but I’m not entirely sure.

Cavan: Hello, Fathers. I was hoping to gain some understanding on the feast of tabernacles, which is currently being celebrated by our Jewish friends. So I know that it is commemorating the time between Jewish Passover and Jewish Pentecost with the Israelites wandering in the desert. It’s acting as a link between Passover and Pentecost, so there seems to be a connection with the 40 years in the wilderness with the 40 days of Christ being with the disciples after the resurrection, since that would be the time between the Christian Pascha and Pentecost. So the Church has taken up celebrating Pascha and Pentecost, but not explicitly the feast of tabernacles. Are we somehow indirectly celebrating it, or we don’t celebrate it because it’s already been fulfilled? Any insight here would be appreciated. Thank you.

Fr. Andrew: All right. What do you think? Are we celebrating the feast of tabernacles?

Fr. Stephen: Not right this second. [Laughter] No, so, yeah, the feast of tabernacles originally served a couple of purposes. The main one was that one thread running all the way through the Old Testament and then that shows up again in the New Testament, especially in St. Peter’s epistles, is the idea that Israel was not to sort of settle in the land and put down roots, because, of course, as God warned them over and over again in the Torah, especially in Deuteronomy, “Now out here in the desert you’re dependent on me and so you’re sort of aware of the fact that I’m caring for you, but once you get into the land and you plant your fields and your vineyard and everything, you’re going to forget about God and just attribute all this stuff to yourself and your own hard work and your own ingenuity.”

And so we see all the—this plays out all through. When you have Abraham and Lot decide to divide the land, Lot wants to go live in the city and go settle there, and Abraham lives out in the plain in tents. When you get out to Jeremiah, there’s apparently one clan in Judah that never settled; they lived in tents the whole time, for centuries, and they’re like lauded as the most righteous family in all of Israel for having done that. And this is where then St. Peter gets the “live as strangers and foreigners in the world,” which is something we need to hear, because we’ve settled pretty well.

Fr. Andrew: We’re pretty settled, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: But the feast of tabernacles and that celebration and going to live in booths, as the King James would have it, you’re unsettling yourself, and you’re unsettling yourself at the time of the harvest. You’re unsettling yourself at one of the times when you would have been most settled, like this is the agricultural period, which was the mark—being able to plant crops was the mark of the settlement, of when they were going to forget God, and they’re sort of forced to uproot themselves at that moment.

There’s also the interesting thing that I know we’ve talked about with the 70 bulls being offered for the 70 nations, where, in unsettling, Israel is sort of offering these sacrifices for the nations, and therefore serving as a priestly nation among the other nations.

Fr. Andrew: So like the Levites then were—

Fr. Stephen: Right, exactly.

Fr. Andrew: Who themselves had no land, but—

Fr. Stephen: Right, parallel to the way the Levites functioned within Israel itself. That’s why the things are connected in the feast. So for us most of that stuff—a little bit of that stuff has shown up around Pentecost, actually, but most of it shows up around the feast of the Transfiguration.

Fr. Andrew: Right, which happens during the tabernacle celebration within the biblical narrative.

Okay, we’ve got one now from Marcus.

Marcus: Hi, this is Marcus from Cornwall. I have a question about the use of the term pharmakeia in Galatians 5:20. It’s translated at “sorcery” or “witchcraft.” When I’ve asked people in the past, they’ll say pharmakeia equals drugs or pharmakeia equals demons, so I want to know: Does the term pharmakeia as it’s used there refer to or include a reference to the use of psychoactive drugs? And, relatedly, were psychoactive drugs used in a ritual or religious context with which Paul would have been familiar? I’ve heard it mentioned by other people, one T. McKenna, that opium and cannabis, henbane and belladonna, were used in the ancient world, but I can’t find much information about their use in a religious context. Thank you.

Fr. Andrew: All right. On a completely non-controversial question. I think he’s our first caller from Cornwall! I think. I mean, we’ve had other British callers, but this is our first Cornish one. Pretty cool. You know, the one thing I’m reminded about is the oracle of Delphi. Apparently they were inhaling something, right? Do we know what that was?

Fr. Stephen: Well, yes. That’s kind of a theory. People are still arguing about that.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, okay. Well, it’s something I’ve heard about. [Laughter] Let’s just put it that way.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, but one popular theory is that there were sort of gases coming up in that area, because, like most of Greece, it’s very tectonically active. So the theory is that some of those visions were triggered by inhaling the gases.

Fr. Andrew: I bet that’s really healthy.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah… Which may be true, or maybe not. That’s one of those things that’s hard to prove, too. So, I mean, Zack Snyder had it that way, so, I mean, you know, maybe. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: But, yeah, drugs, sorcery: are these all one thing or separate things? Or one thing and another in the ancient world?

Fr. Stephen: So they aren’t all one thing, but the Venn diagram has significant overlap, which is how pharmakeia gets its usages. It was very common within magical practice to use psychoactive substances, so part of the issue here with him trying to find more information is that when you get into academic stuff, there’s a pretty big divide, because, you know, everything has to be divvied up and is subject to taxonomy in academia. People who are talking about magical practice and people who are talking about religious practice may be the same people, but it’s rarely in the same place. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: That’s irritating.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Those are sort of discussed separately. Well, there’s reasons why, because they’re not—in the ancient world they weren’t always the same practitioners, and then the further you go forward in history… Like if we’re going to talk about German or English folk-magic versus the Christian Church in Germany or England, those are going to be radically different.

Fr. Andrew: Well, yeah, especially because they do exist simultaneously by, as you said, a certain point in history.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and the further you go back in history, it is true, the more they kind of mingle together. So, I mean, when you go back to a lot of very early Near Eastern stuff, magic is invoking gods that are the same gods who are being worshiped in temples and stuff. That then gets sort of shifted around as you go. Magical practice, for the most part, was always sort of a folk practice. You wouldn’t go to one of the scribal priests in Egypt at the temple to get him to do a love spell. There was somebody in your village who could do that or who knew how to do that, had the techne of how to do that.

Fr. Andrew: Your local pharmacist, as it were.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yeah!

Fr. Andrew: No offense, pharmacists! I know of at least one who listens to this show, actually.

Fr. Stephen: So there were… And then there were different methods for doing different things, and in some cases those involved psychoactive substances or just alcohol and other physical techniques to induce an altered state of consciousness, lots of those kinds of things, all mingled together.

So not all pharmakeia in the sense that St. Paul’s using it in Galatians, is about psychoactive drugs, but some of it is.

Fr. Andrew: Okay.

Fr. Stephen: And there weren’t a lot of people using psychoactive drugs in other contexts at that point in history. There weren’t sort of recreational drugs: “Let’s all go to a party and drop acid.” That wasn’t what happened in the ancient world.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Not a thing, yeah. Okay, all right, well, have one more question we’re going to take before our break, and this is another Ben.

Ben II: Fathers, bless. In Daniel 4, in the 18th year of Nebuchadnezzar, the Babylonian king receives a warning in a dream that judgment was coming. He destroys the Temple in Jerusalem in his 19th year, and then—surprise, surprise—judgment falls that same year. The judgment is said to have been handed down by the Watchers and was announced by a Watcher and a holy one, or a mighty one sent from heaven in the old Greek.

Are you aware of the theory that Nebuchadnezzar’s transformation was intended to depict the reversal of Enkidu’s humanizing? Enkidu was set in the mountains, was shaggy, had long nails like talons; he progressively moved toward “civilization” and away from the gods until he becomes allied to Gilgamesh the king. Nebuchadnezzar was driven away from civilization into the mountains. His hair became long and shaggy, and his nails grew like talons. In the old Greek version, the angels are even said to feed Nebuchadnezzar like a beast. If Nebuchadnezzar’s punishment is meant to depict the reversal of Enkidu’s humanizing, would this be a picture of Nebuchadnezzar becoming totally demonized for a time? Why does this make me think of the Gadarene demoniac? Thank you, Fathers.

Fr. Andrew: Well, that’s pretty cool! I was fascinated by this question. So is there a link between the transformation of Nebuchadnezzar into a beast-like form and the humanization of Enkidu from that epic of Gilgamesh and that related literature? What’s going on there?

Fr. Stephen: So we’re going to partially punt here.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, okay.

Fr. Stephen: Because, as you know, and our listeners probably don’t, we had a whole section for the Halloween episode this past year about mad men.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that we skipped because of time, frankly.

Fr. Stephen: That we had to cut out because of time. And so I think there’s going to be a “divine madness” episode in the future.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Add that to the spreadsheet. [Laughter] Where we’re going to do a kind of a deep dive into this. But I don’t want to leave it totally unanswered, so there is a connection here, and I wouldn’t say it’s a reverse; I would say it’s an inversion. And we’ll get into that more in that episode, but the reason I prefer the term inversion is that Enkidu’s humanization was seen as a negative thing; it sort of culminates in him sleeping with the cultic prostitute, and that ends up getting him killed, whereas this reversal is seen as a negative thing that he becomes like a beast. So there’s something going on there in terms of inverting that pattern. And we will go into a deep dive on that, a deeper dive than we could go into right now even if I wanted to, in that forthcoming episode.

Fr. Andrew: Excellent. Okay, spreadsheet-keeper, you can add that to your spreadsheet. But meanwhile, we’re going to go ahead and take a quick break!

Fr. Andrew: Welcome back. This is the second half of the show. We’re not taking calls, despite what you just heard from the Voice of Steve, but we are playing your pre-recorded messages. This is a SpeakPipe-palooza episode, where we’re just answering questions. We got through ten in the first half, and now we’re going to roll along with some more. So our first one is from Nathaniel.

Nathaniel: Dear Fathers, my question is about the nature of priestly agency during sacramental rites. There was a story recently of a Roman Catholic priest who had been using the phrase, “We baptize you,” instead of “I baptize you,” and in his tradition evidently this rendered the baptisms invalid. So what is the essence of priestly agency? How does he represent us, the faithful, to God?

The issue in this story seems to be about singular versus plural pronoun usage. The “we” usage might imply that the priest is a figurehead for the congregation, and the “I” usage might imply that the priest is the singular performer, and the congregation are either witnesses or co-participants in a secondary or subsidiary role. But both readings can be construed as compatible with the idea that the priest is representing man to God and God to man.

Lots of our petitions and prayers have the priest using “we” language in explicitly priestly functions, like litanies, kneeling prayers, etc., and very few of the sacraments have the priest using “I” language. In considering this question, I’m struck by how many examples have the priest using the passive voice—baptism, chrismation, Eucharist, even ordination. So is our conception of the priesthood that much different [from] the Catholic conception? In our tradition it seems that he’s not the focus the way the story implies that he is in the Catholic tradition.

Relatedly, what kinds of mistakes can make the sacraments invalid? Thank you very much.

Fr. Andrew: All right! I mean, we all—well, probably not all of us, but there was that news story… And this has now popped up two or three times within the past year or two that I can recall, either priests or deacons within the Roman Catholic tradition—and again it’s this same thing, using this “we” language, and it being declared by Rome to be invalid. Which I have to admit, I can’t quite understand that, because, at the same time, Rome has its Eastern Rites. Now, they don’t tend to use “we baptize” language, but, like Nathaniel was saying, they’re using the same language we are, because they’re generally using the same rites we are, which, for instance… “The servant of God, John, is baptized in the name of the Father…” etc.

The other thing that occurs to me is that baptism by non-priests or even -deacons is a thing. Like, it’s considered traditionally to be truly a baptism if it was necessary. Setting all the caveats aside of what constitutes a valid baptism, it does include the possibility of a layman actually baptism. So what do you think, Father? The “we,” the “I”—who is the priest in the midst of all of this?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and without resorting to Roman Catholic-bashing. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right, that’s not what we’re trying to do, but, yeah, that’s an interesting question.

Fr. Stephen: We don’t need to pick on them.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, they’re suffering themselves enough over this that we don’t need to add to their suffering.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and we have to be honest, there is a little absurdity to it, that one word in the English language being said differently… In one case, this was a priest whom they watched the videotape of his baptism as a baby, and because that one wrong word was used, he was not a valid priest, and so every sacrament he had ever performed was not valid, like retroactively.

Fr. Andrew: Right! It definitely seems to have this very strong focus on the priest himself being sort of an absolute nexus of validity, if that makes any sense.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and this gets back to actually what we were talking about in the first half a little bit in terms of the way in which officium was used in Latin in the West.

But so one of the big changes that comes when you go from Greek to Latin and that ends up… I don’t want to overstate it, but I don’t know that you can overstate this. This ends up becoming—this one translation thing ends up becoming the source of much of the difference between Western and Eastern Christian theology, and that is that the word in Greek, energeia, like the energies, was— So, for example, in Aristotle, if you read Metaphysics Theta, it’s an ontological category. He says, “Energies are.” He has dynamis and energeia; these are two modes of being, or two aspects of being. And energeia, by and large—it takes a little while for a Latin translation to be settled on, but ends up being effectus: the effect produced by something.

Fr. Andrew: The effect. Huh. Because I know there was also operatio. Isn’t that also used?

Fr. Stephen: Yes. Yeah, we can get into operatum. Man, we’re… It’s turning into Latin and Greek philology day. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Got you.

Fr. Stephen: Operatum ends up being used in related but other contexts, but operatum, the working, is again activity. This is a case where it went the other way, where what was sort of a reified category—an ontological category, a category of being, “energies are”—became a more verbal idea, of working, of producing an effect.

And so what you get—and we’ll talk about both of these in the development of later Western theology related to the sacraments and the… The sacraments become effects, but the sacraments themselves become what is doing the work, ex opera operatum. The sacrament itself does the work and produces the effect. And then as we talked about officium, the priest is that necessary instrument, through which the sacramental effect is worked.

And so in the West they never deny that God is ultimately—God is the ultimate minister of the sacrament, because they’re not Donatists. So the priest can be a heretic, the priest can be a complete evil-doer, he can be an atheist in the Western system. That in and of itself does not affect the validity, because he’s the instrument; he’s the “through which.” But the sacrament itself does the work. And since the sacrament itself does the work, if the sacrament becomes incorrect, then it doesn’t do the work.

And so if we shift now to the East, where we stick with energeia, where we stick with this ontological category which is directly connected to God—we’re talking about the divine energies in the sacraments—when we talk in the Orthodox Church about every time, place, space, every bit of matter in the universe being potentially sacrament or potentially mystery, potentially the vehicle for the divine energies, that’s not just hippie stuff. “Hey, man, the whole world’s a sacrament!” [Laughter] That’s not what that’s getting at; it’s that the divine energies, which are God himself, because it’s still an ontological category, is working in and through the mystery.

So in baptism you have material water, and God himself is working in and through the water. God is not at the beginning of a chain that passes through the instrumentality of the priest and then the water itself becomes capable of purifying sin.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, no, it’s God doing that work, which then explains why it is that a layman can theoretically baptize.

Fr. Stephen: Right, because God himself is in the water, purifying from sin.

Fr. Andrew: Right. Yeah, the water’s not changed to become magical water.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and again, I don’t want— I mean, the term “hocus pocus” does come from the Latin Eucharist.

Fr. Andrew: I mean, that’s a distortion of the understanding of hocus corpus meum, but that is the world in which that distortion arises.

Fr. Stephen: Right, yeah, and the… But, again, with the Eucharist, the priest as that instrument has the charism, has the power, to make it the body and blood of Christ, and then once it is the body and blood of Christ, it performs its function, ex opera operatum. Anyone who receives it will receive the body of Christ.

It’s even interesting that in most modern Roman Catholic—it’s hard to generalize any more about Roman Catholicism; it’s almost as hard as generalizing about Protestantism nowadays—but it’s interesting that the whole idea of the Eucharist being dangerous when received unworthily kind of drops out at some point. But then, because it simply now is the body of Christ, now you get eucharistic adoration, now you get… But it is now the host itself who is…

Fr. Andrew: It’s objectification, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so that flows out, as well as a whole bunch of other things—flows out of this move from the understanding of energeia, energy, and its relation to dynamis that comes out of Aristotle and then gets used, gets picked up by the Greek Fathers, helpfully, to explain not just the knowledge of God, which is where we usually think about it, with St. Gregory Palamas, but also the work of God in the world, the holy mysteries, why we don’t have a set number necessarily. All of that is part and parcel of that. And the role of the Holy Spirit in the Eucharist: all of these things sort of play out from that.

Fr. Andrew: Right. Okay, so here’s our next question. This is from Nicholas.

Nicholas: Hello, Fathers. This is Nicholas Mataya, first-time caller, long-time listener, from San Antonio, Texas. I’ve got two quick questions. One, during the flood, did the sea-creatures also get destroyed? And, two, in the Life of St. Columba, a late antique hagiography from Scotland, there’s a mention of the Loch Ness monster. Have you read this, and if… and how does that fit in with monsters and how Columba deals with this monster? Thank you, Fathers.

Fr. Andrew: All righty. So that’s fun. I have read the Life of St. Columba, although it’s been a long time, and my recollection is that it just mentions him seeing it, but there might be more to it that I’m just not remembering, because I think it’s been close to 20 years. I don’t know. What do you think, Father? Are sea-creatures killed in the flood? If so, then… I mean, if they were, then where do they come from? Because it’s not like we see Noah with any aquariums on board the ark! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so part of this is the Cain’s wife thing.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right, we’re just sort of curious about stuff.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. [Laughter] So, curiosity…

Fr. Andrew: Which is understandable.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, if you want to work on a real material level, well, I mean, you know, with a flood like that you’re going to get salt and fresh water mixing together. That would probably wipe out a lot of sea life. There’s going to be other environmental factors, the destruction of habitats for different creatures and stuff, so, okay. [Laughter]

The key, though, is that the idea of what’s going on in the flood—and this becomes really clear if we back up and read Genesis 5, which we don’t because it’s a genealogy and we find those boring, is it becomes clear the prophecy that’s given regarding Noah’s birth. It’s through Noah that God is going to save his creation, and what’s he saving his creation from? Humans.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah!

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Human evil. So the goal of the flood was not to wipe out all the creatures; it was to wipe out all the humans. And Noah takes the animals to save the other creatures, who weren’t responsible. So even if all the sea-creatures survived, that’s fine; the sea-creatures weren’t the ones tainting the world with their evil and wickedness.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Right.

Fr. Stephen: A few of them, you know, Leviathan and stuff, but I mean other than them.

Fr. Andrew: So what about the Loch Ness monster then, and St. Columba?

Fr. Stephen: No matter how much he asks, don’t give him the three-fiddy.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Okay! All right. Yeah, I mean, there is stuff—if you read St. Columba and St. Patrick, the Celtic saints, there’s a whole lot about facing off against demons and this kind of stuff. I’ve actually been to the place where St. Columba supposedly saw the Loch Ness monster, which is, you know, Loch Ness, which is in northern Scotland. There’s a castle there, actually, Urquhart Castle, where he… Although the castle I think is much later than he was, but the location is where he cured I think it was King Brude was the name of the pagan king that he cured of a disease and then converted him to Christianity? I don’t know. My memory of the Loch Ness monster stuff and St. Columba is kind of murky, so I just don’t know.

Fr. Stephen: Pun not intended.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, yeah. Pun fully now intended, now that you mention it! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Well, yeah, so in general, in a general sense, it’s important that we don’t take sort of a naturalistic view of these things. Sorry, Ken Ham. So, like, when the Loch Ness monsters and other monsters show up in a story, it’s not a plesiosaur that survived or something.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. I don’t know, but lochs are really deep, Father. Come on!

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] That’s not what it’s aimed at. So usually—and again, I’m not super familiar with the details, because, other than Dr. Who, I’m not that much of an Anglophile—sorry, guys…

Fr. Andrew: It’s Scotland, not England, Father! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Oh, sorry. See? That shows you.

Fr. Andrew: That just shows you. Yeah, exactly.

Fr. Stephen: I should have known that.

Fr. Andrew: Although St. Columba himself was Irish.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and the Scot—well, the Scots and the Dutch have a bitter rivalry over who’s stingier and more Calvinist, so…

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Wow! Tough but fair.

Fr. Stephen: The idea is generally that the saints are confronting sort of the demonic powers and the powers of chaos and stuff that are resident in these lands that they’re coming to with the Gospel, in a general sense.

Fr. Andrew: Well, speaking of Noah and his flood, here’s a question from someone named Noah.

Noah: I have a question about the Divine Liturgy. I know it’s been mentioned before that it is a kind of liturgical apocalypse and that at least the first half has its origins in the liturgical worship of the Temple and the synagogue, but, given that the synagogue doesn’t really show up until after the Babylonian captivity and isn’t really mentioned much in the Old Testament, what are kind of the origins of the synagogue, and how or why it was sanctioned by God when he had previously said that worship was to be conducted at the Temple only?

Fr. Andrew: All right, so what was the origin of the synagogue and how does that relate to the Temple? And to Orthodox worship?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. Well, so remember, in terms of worship only happening at the Temple, we’re talking about sacrifice specifically.

Fr. Andrew: Right, no sacrifices at synagogues.

Fr. Stephen: Right, no sacrifices at synagogues. Now, the temple at Elephantine Island… Ehh, you know…

Fr. Andrew: Dun-dun-dunn! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: But there weren’t sacrifices at the synagogue. That’s why, when we’re talking about the synagogue service, we’re talking about the first part of the Divine Liturgy, with the Scripture readings, singing of psalms. And I mean, the origin of that is the Jewish Diaspora. So you have the end of the Babylonian exile, but you only have a small segment of the Jewish community that actually comes back to Judea. There’s a massive Jewish population still in Mesopotamia, there’s a massive Jewish population in Egypt where they fled before the exile, and then you get, as time goes on, you get Jewish families resettling and communities rising up sort of all around the Mediterranean and then points further east.

And so during the exile, of course, they didn’t have a temple, and so there had to be sort of certain accommodations, and those were not easy accommodations. How can we sing the songs of Zion here in a foreign land? But those accommodations get made, because, again, not everybody goes back. And so synagogue is literally a gathering place; it’s a place where the Judean community in any given place begins to gather, and they can read their sacred texts, they can talk about and apply them in their lives, they can sing psalms, they can encourage each other and function as a community within whatever place they’re in. They are sort of a nation within a nation, and that then creates this idea that there is—that Judeans, that we translate as Jews, includes people who may have never set foot in Judea in their life, because they’re part of that nation, because that synagogue is sort of an outpost of that nation.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so I was going to say, does a synagogue then function in some ways as a kind of community elevated form of the private prayer that the people would be doing at their homes anyway?

Fr. Stephen: Yes! But doing it together, yes. And so that model gets brought directly over into the Church. That’s how the early Christians understand themselves; they understand themselves as a nation and as a people that’s not based on or tied to one particular piece of land in which they all live. They’re all over the place, but they are the race of Christians; they are a people. And so wherever they’re living, they, as a people, gather together around a place of worship. And so all of those are sort of embassies of a nation that doesn’t have land in this world, per se. Sorry, Vatican City.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] All right, so, that said, here is a question from Patrick.

Patrick: Greetings, Fathers! This is Patrick from Cheyenne, Wyoming. I have a question regarding Asherah as Yahweh’s wife or consort. This was something that was brought to my attention by a deconstructing Christian as a proof against most biblical claims. I’d like to hear your opinion. Thank you.

Fr. Andrew: All right, this is one we’ve heard before. So is Asherah “Mrs. Yahweh”? Where does that come from? Is there any validity to it?

Fr. Stephen: No.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] No, right.

Fr. Stephen: But, yeah, just to lay this out briefly, there is an inscription that was found that is generally translated into English, especially translated this way when it’s going to be weaponized by your village atheist-type, as referring to Yahweh and his Asherah. And they say, “Oh, well, Asherah, this is Baal’s wife, so, oh, see? Polytheism. They thought Yahweh was married.” So, first of all, even if that were true, as we’ve said a thousand times, if you actually read the Old Testament, most of the Judeans and Israelites were a bunch of pagans. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I was just reading the end of Joshua recently, and it’s notable in there. Basically when Joshua dies… Or maybe it’s the beginning of Judges, and it says, essentially, the people of Israel did not know the Lord their God, and they fell into idolatry, and they kept falling into idolatry. [Laughter] Like, it’s very… Yeah. Very, very explicit in that regard.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so even if that is what the inscription said: “Wow. You found an Israelite who was a syncretist. Shock. Horror.” [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: But…

Fr. Stephen: But why that inscription would be taken to be an official statement of the religion of the entire people, I don’t know how you get there. That’s number one, but, number two, that’s not even what that says! [Laughter]

I don’t want to get too technical, but, Asherah, the way it’s written, that particular way of spelling it, essentially, of writing the word, is never used for the goddess.

Fr. Andrew: Ahh!

Fr. Stephen: So it takes a whole bunch of special pleading that doesn’t really work to get that to be about the goddess, because that same word is used to refer, conjugated exactly that way, including in the Old Testament, to refer to ritual poles. These ritual poles, usually wood or stone, sometimes deliberately phallic, that were used for ritual purposes. So what the inscription actually refers to is Yahweh and his ritual pole or tree, and, again, wow, you discovered an Israelite who was worshiping Yahweh incorrectly, just like the Old Testament tells us they almost all did, so.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Right, so there you go. That’s quick and easy. Okay, this next one comes from our friend Pedro!

Pedro: Fathers, bless. This is Pedro Sarsamă, phoning it in from Icewind Dale. I have a question about baptism and possibly an interaction with sacred geography, although that’s my own speculation. In the Didache and early Christian texts apart from that and in our own canonical tradition, the preference is given to immersion with an allowance for pouring of water where immersion is not feasible. Moreover, early texts specify immersion in living water, in running water, and then give collected water as kind of an allowance. This is also found in early Jewish texts when discussion ritual washing.

One thing that I’m curious about is the temperature of the water. In the Didache it says to use cold water rather than warm water, and so I’m wondering if you could speak to why that might be. I don’t know if any other texts address the temperature of the baptismal font. I haven’t finished reading the 2,000-page Ablution, Initiation, and Baptism: Late Antiquity, Early Judaism, and Early Christianity, so maybe the answer’s there, but I’m curious about this specifically from an Orthodox Christian perspective, and one that is informed from a sacramental, non-materialist worldview. Thank you.

Fr. Andrew: All right, so why is baptismal water traditionally cold? I mean, I remember that from the Didache, although, frankly, most Orthodox churches you go to these days, if you were to stick your hand in the font, usually they’ve made it warm—don’t want to shock the baby I think is really the idea. Although it’s kind of a shocking thing to do to a baby anyway… [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, I don’t even try. It’s cold.

Fr. Andrew: It’s just cold. So it specifies cold, though, right?

Fr. Stephen: Let me also say I hope Pedro was not cosplaying his Drizzt when he made that call, because otherwise we’re going to get canceled like Community, and we don’t need that. If we get canceled, I want it to be for something I said live, not for that.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, well, if they’ve read Icewind Dale, if they’ve read that stuff, then probably they’re okay with… If you haven’t, don’t bother, everybody. Yeah, so why is it cold? What’s the deal?

Fr. Stephen: So this is conjecture on my part.

Fr. Andrew: Okay.

Fr. Stephen: And I’m going to say that because I don’t think anybody actually knows. But my bias is I always assume a pragmatic explanation, because what I’ve found tends to happen in churches is that something is done for a pragmatic reason, and then over time, sort of spiritualized reasons develop as urban legends, like fanning the Gifts was mainly to keep insects away originally. So my surmise would be that this is related to the running water thing, because spring water that’s just coming up out of the ground is usually cold, unless you’re at a specific hot springs. And when you’re at a hot spring, those are usually stagnant pools. And warm, stagnant pools breed bacteria, whereas cold running spring water does not so much.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and the capability that we now have of simply turning on the faucet and getting water from a water heater was not… I mean, they certainly could heat water; it’s not like they couldn’t do that, but I know for instance a lot of early baptismal fonts were cut into the ground and connected to aqueducts. So if you took the lid off, there’s always this water that’s flowing through it all the time. So you stepped down into it, and you’re basically in a kind of redirected river, much like the Jordan—not redirected, but it is a river.

Fr. Stephen: But the context in which that rule comes is talking about which water source you should choose. And so that’s how I’m interpreting it, but it’s conjecture on my part.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, so it’s a guess. Well, this next one is from another friend of this show, and that’s Michael Landsman.

Rev. Michael Landsman: Hey, Fr. Stephen, Fr. Andrew. Rev. Michael Landsman here. I have a question for you about the temptation of Jesus in the Gospel of Luke. I was reading the Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture, and the selection from Origen talks about the devil trying to tempt Jesus because he doesn’t know that Jesus is the Son of God. Origen takes this to mean that Jesus is a son of God. So I was wondering if there was a textual issue there with the Gospel of Luke.

And I also wanted to know if Origen was onto something or if this is just some speculation. In other words, Jesus was just a man who had power from God, and so the devil is using the temptation to sort of get him to tip his hand or to get him to identify himself. I want to know what you thought about that. Thanks so much for taking my question, and I look forward to hearing the answer.

Fr. Andrew: All right, so, yeah, I guess the question partly is: What does the devil think—Who does the devil think Jesus really is? Does he realize he’s truly the Son of God, or that he’s some kind of elevated whatever? I mean, I always had the impression that the devil knew who he truly was, because whenever Christ encounters demonic beings, they call him the Son of the Most High so often, not every time, but they often do. What’s going on here, Father?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so in response to noted Origenist Michael Landsman…

Fr. Andrew: Ooh! [Laughter] No, he’s not!

Fr. Stephen: But he’s calling to talk about Origen!

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Wow.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so I think Origen is just wrong on this one, and I think the best piece of evidence of that is there’s this kind of funny bit that people don’t notice that… where he mentions the “He shall not allow your foot to be dashed against a stone”—he quotes a couple verse from a psalm, and he skips one. The one he skips is about stomping on serpents and scorpions! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Okay…

Fr. Stephen: And so he literally skips the part about Christ stomping on him in his quotation! [Laughter] So that implies to me that he kind of knows whom he’s talking to. Yeah, a lot of times I think the “Don’t put the Lord your God to the test” there gets misinterpreted, too. That’s less like “Yeah, I could jump off this building and God would save me, but, you know, I’m not going to”—what? Check? Like, Jesus is God. What? Yeah, that’s more like “Don’t test me.” [Laughter] Yeah, so I think that exchange shows that both Christ and the devil know who they respectively are.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, okay. All right, well, this next one is from Stephen.

Stephen: Hello, Fathers. My name is Stephen, and I’m calling from Edinburgh in Scotland. This is my question. In the Torah, the death penalty is imposed on those who commit certain grave sins, or more broadly to purify the community and the land from the contamination of sin, as in the case of the 3,000 men killed by the Levites in Exodus 32. In contrast to this, the death penalty is not imposed in the New Testament Church. Sure, there are instances where God causes the death of certain people, as Ananias and Sapphira. There is acknowledgment that the state might exercise power over life and death, and the Church exercises the power of excommunication, wherefore there is a certain kind of death is to lead to the sinner’s repentance. Please correct me if I’m mistaken in any of this.

My question is, then: What has changed which means that now the Church no longer imposes the death penalty? Does it have anything to do with the Christ making true repentance and transformation of the human person possible? Thank you, and I look forward to hearing your answer.

Fr. Andrew: All right, so the question is: Why does the Church not impose the death penalty?

Fr. Stephen: So, first of all, Stephen, I’m sorry about that Loch Ness thing.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] He’s not in that part of Scotland; he’s in Edinburgh. Those are up-country people.

Fr. Stephen: Oh, okay. Did I just do it again?

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I mean, they’re in Scotland, but it’s another part of Scotland.

Fr. Stephen: For Pete’s sake! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, you have to go up to Inverness and that area if you want to see Loch Ness.

Fr. Stephen: Okay, but it’s not that big, man.

Fr. Andrew: That’s true, but…

Fr. Stephen: I’ve lived in California and Texas.

Fr. Andrew: It’s a train ride— Well, okay. It is a train ride, but it’s not in the neighborhood. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: So the death penalty is actually imposed by the Church.

Fr. Andrew: Oh! Okay.

Fr. Stephen: But part of it has to be how we understand what’s going on with death penalties in the Old Testament. So the first thing is that the language that’s most often used is that that person is to be cut off from among the people, and it’s sort of ambiguous whether that means death or exile. And the reason why that’s ambiguous is that those are seen as sort of the same thing. And the reason they’re seen as sort of the same thing goes back to Genesis 3, because what is death? Death is being cut off from the tree of life.

I know I’ve cited this before on this show, but St. John of Damascus… Physical death is the separation of the soul from the body; spiritual death is the separation of the soul from God. And so we tend to get that backwards. We act like physical death, that’s real death, and then spiritual death is like metaphorical death. And in actuality, real death is being separated from God; physical death is metaphorical death.

Fr. Andrew: Oh wow.

Fr. Stephen: Because what does Christ say life is? To know the only true God and Jesus Christ whom he has sent. So to not know them is death; that’s real death.

So every time someone is excommunicated, every time someone is put outside the Church, that’s the death penalty. And St. Paul uses that language about it. You’re turning them over to Satan for the destruction of their body and the salvation of their soul. Destruction of the body and salvation of the soul, that’s death: separation of the soul from the body.

So the real death penalty is applied, but it is applied, as was just suggested by that quote from St. Paul, remedially. The idea is not the total destruction of the person; the idea is it is the ultimate act to drive someone to repentance.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, to bring them to life.

Fr. Stephen: Right.

Fr. Andrew: All right. Okay, so this next one is from yet another of our several Bens.

Ben III: Fathers, bless! Somewhere in the Ancient Faith Cinematic Universe, I encountered the recommendation to read Lori Branch’s Rituals of Spontaneity, and I’m working my way through it, but I don’t think I’ll be done before the episode, so I wanted to ask: What is the role or place of spontaneity in the Orthodox Christian life? I don’t know, it seems that the maybe modern spirituality’s almost deliberately schizophrenic, as I’m reading this book, and I’m not entirely certain how to reframe spontaneity, as it doesn’t seem to be the chief hallmark of a life led by the Holy Spirit, which is kind of the basic understanding that came with me as a Protestant who’s seeking to become Orthodox. I don’t know, it seems like there’s a primarily economic lens of spirituality that needs abandoned, and I was curious if you could comment on that.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, so the book that he’s mentioning is Lori Branch’s Rituals of Spontaneity. Lori is actually an Orthodox Christian. She’s a professor out in Iowa. And the book essentially shows the rise within Protestantism of the idea that spontaneity equals authenticity, and so then the truest prayers to God are the ones that come from the heart, and “from the heart” is understood as being about unrehearsed spontaneity; it just sort of comes out of nowhere apparently. And so Ben is asking: Is that a thing within Orthodox Christianity? Is there any role for spontaneity in the Orthodox Christian life?

It’s an interesting book, everybody, by the way. It’s her doctoral dissertation published as a book. So, you know, don’t expect it to be a super, super light read; that’s not what it is. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Buzz through it in an afternoon?

Fr. Andrew: Right, exactly. Maybe you. [Laughter] But it’s fascinating, because this idea, this assumption, is so built into our modern Western consciousness, that spontaneity equals authenticity, but she shows how that idea has a beginning and kind of makes its way into Christian worship within Protestantism. I don’t know, what do you think, Father? Orthodox Christian worship is certainly anything but spontaneous. I mean, we open books and do what it says in the book, right?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, I’m reminded of the words of a former professor of mine, whom I won’t identify, but who once said, “To confuse spontaneity with the Holy Spirit is, strictly speaking, a heresy.”

Fr. Andrew: Mm! Well, all right.

Fr. Stephen: So… [Laughter] Just strictly speaking.

Fr. Andrew: Yes!

Fr. Stephen: But, I mean, that’s related to what St. Paul says, that the Holy Spirit is not a spirit of chaos and—

Fr. Andrew: Confusion.

Fr. Stephen: —disorder, but of order. And putting things in good order, that is what creation is. That’s important because our culture and society has very much the opposite view. We view creativity as being this sort of chaotic activity, sometimes even a rebellious activity. You’ve got to break away—that’s when you’re being really creative, when you’re outside all the fences and all the boundaries. It’s when you’re innovating. And that, strictly speaking again, is not creativity. You’re not creating when you do that. Strictly speaking, you’re destroying something that previously existed; you’re deconstructing it. You’re breaking it down; you’re twisting it around. And that, strictly speaking, is what evil is. [Laughter]

But the idea is if creating something is putting it in order, and that putting it in order creates things like beauty and goodness and wholeness, then if those are the things we’re pursuing as Orthodox Christians—being put in right order, being justified, being put in right order, putting the world around us in order, we’re pursuing beauty, we’re pursuing what is good, we’re pursuing wholeness—then the way we would pursue that is not through a kind of chaotic breaking of boundaries, but through good order.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, but I mean isn’t there a difference between… So there’s spontaneity that is, like you said, a chaotic breaking of boundaries, but isn’t there also spontaneity— For instance, if someone is just suddenly filled with joy, and they… I mean, don’t we see this in the Scripture when they… Clearly, when St. Elizabeth meets the Theotokos, she’s quoting from the Old Testament, “Who am I that the Mother of my Lord should come to me?” Well, paraphrasing, I should say. But still, you get the impression of… that there is something spontaneous about it, that there’s this sudden response of joy, which is not the same thing as “now let’s gather on Sunday morning and do worship,” where you’re just sort of within that spon— It’s so funny to me actually, though, that even within the kind of realms of Protestantism that really value spontaneity and worship, they still gather at specific times and there still tends to be some kind of schedule and an order of worship—“now we’re going to do this, and now we’re going to do this.”

So I don’t know. I think there’s different modes maybe of spontaneity? Does that make sense?

Fr. Stephen: Well, but that… So, categorizing, for example, that as spontaneous implies that St. Elizabeth is the actor.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, so God is working through her. Well…

Fr. Stephen: Or she is having an experience… That experience would be spontaneous from her perspective because it was not expected.

Fr. Andrew: Unexpected.

Fr. Stephen: Right, like the Holy Spirit rushing upon a person.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because it says she was filled with the Holy Spirit.

Fr. Stephen: Right, or Isaiah suddenly having a vision, or any prophet having a vision all of a sudden, and then they’re reacting and responding to it in the moment. But I don’t know that that’s the same thing as, in prayer or in song, riffing off the top of your head.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because I think that’s the thing. I think those who do that would probably say—in good faith, like really believing—that that’s what’s happening: the Holy Spirit is prompting them.

Fr. Stephen: And that’s where that heresy thing comes in.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Right, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: No, but that’s— The reason a strong word like “heresy” would be used is you’re attributing, then, whatever you’re saying or doing to the Holy Spirit, to God himself. And how many times—I know you’ve had this happen—how many times have you heard someone get up to speak in one of those concepts and say, “Hey, I was going to talk about something totally different, but the Holy Spirit just laid it on my heart to say this instead”—and then they say a bunch of erroneous stuff? Stuff that is just objectively not true about the Bible and whatever. And they’ve now taken their own personal opinions, their own personal failings of study and research, and attributed them to God himself. That is, if we stop to think about it, blasphemous and worthy of that kind of strong language.

So I would not be so quick to attribute my present emotional state or whatever thoughts are coming into my head at this moment—I would be very circumspect about attributing those to God himself in any situation. It’s a complete lack of discernment there.

Fr. Andrew: Right, yeah. Okay, well, so here’s one from—well, actually, it’s two from Svetlana.

Fr. Stephen: Man, the Pentecostals aren’t going to like me. [Laughter]

Svetlana: Hi, Fathers. Thank you for this podcast and for the opportunity to ask questions. I’m not sure if I can ask two questions, but one question is my own and another one came from my adult son who unfortunately can’t ask it himself due to the time difference, so he delegated me to do it. He moved to Russia and is currently living there, and he’s a student at the St. Petersburg Orthodox Theologian Academy. So here’s my son’s question.

Fr. De Young has said that the ancient peoples to whom the Bible was written would not have understood it as either a literal history or a pure allegory, but if that is the case, how can we as modern people correctly apprehend the Bible? How can we conceptualize that liminal space between history and allegory? And is it accessible to modern people who are not biblical scholars?

And my second question, as I said, is my question. In “The Queen Stood by Thy Right Hand” podcast, it was stated that, although the Mother of God is at the same time his daughter, because he has been the God since the beginning and before that, but, following this line of reasoning, it seems to appear that Jesus could be his own Son also, because he had always existed. Does it make any sense? Do you have any comments? Thank you.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, well, I’m going to tackle that second one myself, and you can “Um, actually” me if need be. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: I’ve got one ready to go!

Fr. Andrew: All right! [Laughter] So I would say this. Certainly, we do speak of the Theotokos as being the daughter of God; we also speak of her as being the bride of God and the Mother of God. But the sense in which she is each of those things is not the same sense. So Jesus is her Son and there’s a sense in which God is also her Father, but the way in which Jesus is her Son and the way in which God is her Father are not the same way. So, for someone to be like… I mean, she didn’t put this way, but: Is Jesus his own grandfather? That would imply that the relationships all along the line are exactly the same kind of relationship, and that’s not what is being said by this at all. And indeed, when we refer to the Theotokos as the bride of God, we don’t mean the same way in which my wife is my bride. There’s something analogous there, but it’s not the same thing exactly. I don’t know, any “Um, actually"s you need to apply to that?

Fr. Stephen: Well, there was a—back in the early days of the internet, in days of yore, there was a filk—people don’t even know what that is any more—

Fr. Andrew: Oh, yes! I know what a filk is! F-i-l-k. Look it up, everybody.

Fr. Stephen: —about time travel, called “I’m My Own Grandfather.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah! Well, there’s an old—there was a song from I think the ‘70s called “I’m My Own Grandpa,” which is like some kind of comedy country song or something like this. [Laughter] But that’s about, I think…

Fr. Stephen: That’s another thing. So, yeah, there [are], as you said, different senses. And this “daughter of God” language is related to the “son” language which we were talking about earlier; it’s your imaging language.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right.

Fr. Stephen: And in terms of “in what frame should we take the Bible”—

Fr. Andrew: Yes, that’s kind of the bigger question here, I think.

Fr. Stephen: I haven’t told you this yet, but I’m telling everyone.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, wow. This is the world premiere of this thought! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Next episode, “How To and How Not To Read the Bible.”

Fr. Andrew: There you go. Exciting, everybody.

Fr. Stephen: So we’re going to— I am impressed by the term “liminal space.”

Fr. Andrew: Well, he is a theological student, so.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] But we’re going to get in there, to that liminal space, next time on Lord of Spirits.

Fr. Andrew: Excellent. All right, well, that’s a little bit of a punt, but it’ll be next time, so it’ll be a couple of weeks—

Fr. Stephen: A short punt.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s a very short punt.

Fr. Stephen: A field goal.

Fr. Andrew: Just a couple of weeks away there, Svetlana’s son, just hold on. Okay, so before we go to break, we have one more question, and this is from Tyler.

Tyler: Fathers, bless! My name is Tyler, and I’m an Orthodox Christian from Louisville, Kentucky. I was wondering what is the evil eye? It seems ubiquitous around the world, and I’m not clear whether it’s what you’ve called the taint of sin, envy in this case, or if it’s demonically animated, or if it’s literally just superstition that doesn’t actually exist. Using harnesses or beads or charms for protection against it seems like idolatry, and I’m assuming the sign of the cross or prayer or holy water would be the true way to defend against the evil eye, if it’s even something real that can hurt us. So a broader question I guess could be: Are curses and spells real? Are they something like the energies of demons? Can a person fall victim to them without direct demonic participation, as in the case of evil-eye victims being on the receiving end of envy? Thank you for your time to answer.

Fr. Andrew: All right, the evil eye, that pulsating, glowing-blue eye that we see. I mean, it’s all around the Mediterranean, right? Both Christians and Muslims and whoever else, they’ve all got the evil eye stuff there.

Fr. Stephen: Yep.

Fr. Andrew: So what’s going on with that? What is up with the evil eye?

Fr. Stephen: The evil eye goes way, way back.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and there’s a prayer. I should mention there’s a prayer in the Euchologion, which is sort of the priest’s book of prayers for lots of occasions. There’s a prayer against the evil eye in some of those Euchologia. I think I’ve got it in a couple of the ones that I have.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so I have not surveyed all of Ancient Near Eastern literature on this…

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

Fr. Stephen: I know!

Fr. Andrew: I’m a little shocked.

Fr. Stephen: On the evil eye. Not my thing. Maybe some future, you know, when I get another PhD, I’ll do my dissertation on the evil eye. Maybe, probably not. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: That would be the only thing you would ever be asked to speak on from here on out if you did that! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: So definitely not, yeah. But the earliest reference I have stumbled upon is from what’s basically a death curse in Ugaritic. So we’re talking about second millennium BC. There’s some debate about part of the inscription. So I’m just saying that to cover my bases, because I take one side of that debate. There’s one particular word that’s argued about who or what it’s identifying. But essentially the way I take it is that there is this curse, that’s pronounced against someone you don’t like, is directing the eye, particularly of Anat, who’s that real friendly goddess we’ve talked about in the past, who—

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, isn’t she the, uh, incestuous wife of Baal, his sister/wife?

Fr. Stephen: Yes, the “I’m going to crack my father’s skull open if he doesn’t give her…” [Laughter] Directing her eye upon the person. So you’re essentially siccing her on them. And what’s really fascinating about it is that that’s the main body of the curse, but then at the end there’s a part where you ward her eye off of yourself, because apparently it’s expected that that person might send them back at you.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, yeah, there’s kind of collateral damage, potentially.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so you have to kind of put up a shield in case it bounces back at you.

Fr. Andrew: Man.

Fr. Stephen: Because you’re getting her attention by trying to sic her on somebody. And so the reason I bring that up is not just to say how old this idea is, but that I think all the way through this is the core of what the idea is. The idea is that you, out of envy or bitterness or whatever, are sort of trying to sic an evil power on somebody.

And certainly people who are outside of Christ are capable of being victimized by demonic powers; they’re subject to the demonic powers. That’s one of the things Christ does is set us free from that. So, yes, such a kind of thing can happen, happened all the time in the ancient world, but also, yes, trying to ward that off with amulets and stuff is exactly the kind of practice that’s forbidden all through the Old Testament.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and I mean I’ve seen… There’s variants on this. Often you see it, the little amulets looking like an eye, but there’s also a version that’s just a little blue stone that doesn’t particularly look like an eye. And you can find—unfortunately you can find Orthodox Christians who wear these little things, and even I’ve seen them brought to baptisms, and I’ll say, “Nope. You’ve got to leave that. You cannot bring that into a baptism! Bring the cross, yes, we need that.” And then I know there’s some people, especially Middle Eastern people, that like to add icons of Christ and his Mother to the chain on which they wear their baptismal crosses. But, yeah, no blue beads, no amulets. That’s—no.

Fr. Stephen: If you’re really worried about that, go and pray Psalm 91 (or 90 in the Greek numbering). Second time we’ve referred to it today. But that psalm is an ancient exorcism prayer and is literally all about God protecting you from various pagan gods/demons.

Fr. Andrew: There you go. All right, we’re going to be back after a short break!

Fr. Andrew: Welcome back, everyone. It’s the third half of The Lord of Spirits, and, once again, this is not an actual call-in show, so don’t call that number. You will not reach us. We don’t know what you’ll reach. It’s a subject of much conjecture, but you will not reach us, that’s for sure. We’re both going to be in church when this airs. So we’ve covered 20 question so far…

Fr. Stephen: Actually, by the time we get to this third half, we’ll probably be out of church, technically.

Fr. Andrew: That’s probably true.

Fr. Stephen: Let’s be honest.

Fr. Andrew: That’s true, yeah. [Laughter] All right, well, we are in the third half. We’ve done 20 questions, and let’s go ahead and roll on to the next one. This one is from Will.

Will: Hey, Fathers. I had a question about just this whole idea of re-enchantment and the sacramental life. I was wondering: is it possible to enchant or kind of sacramentalize techne, specifically like pure mathematics or the physical sciences? And if you were to do that, what would that look like? Thank you very much.

Fr. Andrew: So re-enchanting pure techne like math or science: yeah, is that a thing? What do you think, Father?

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: Okay! [Laughter] Come on, let’s move, let’s move! Lightning round! [Laughter] I mean, you can enchant… If we understand enchantment in the way we have generally talked about it on this show… I mean, there’s a bunch of ways to use the word, but the way we’ve generally talked about it is in terms, like in the blurb at the beginning of every show, “the union of the seen and the unseen, bringing the presence of Christ into everything.” Yeah, of course! Right? Of course?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, the way I talk about it is making your weapons more powerful.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, yes!

Fr. Stephen: Throw some gems in them.

Fr. Andrew: Plus-five lab beakers! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, I’ve been—for reasons, I’ve been reading Simone Veil, and she actually talks about this in an interesting way, because she kind of contrasts the way—and this is written in 1943—the way that science had become an idol, because it had become an end in itself rather than something that points to something of greater and ultimate value. And she contrasts the way science was already being done at that time—of course, this is also during World War II, so there was Nazi “science”—contrasts that with the way science and math were done by, like, the Pythagoreans, and by Archimedes and the ancients in general, whether we’re talking about ancient Babylonian mathematics or ancient Greek mathematics. And they saw what they were doing, in both math and science, as discovering something in the universe far greater than humans, that they were uncovering and discovering… that were things of sort of divine beauty, that showed sort of the handiwork that lay in the background of the universe and created things.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which is probably a little bit easier to do with some sciences like, say, astronomy. That’s kind of the obvious one.

Fr. Stephen: Right, but even with mathematics. She talks about… These discoveries, like you could put a right triangle within a circle, and the ratios of the angles, these sort of beautiful symmetries in mathematics and that kind of thing. I mean, even—and this goes even up into the medieval period, the idea that there was sort of a spiritual reality behind musical… And music is just sort of implied math. That in musical intervals, which are basically mathematical intervals, there was either goodness and beauty or the opposite with certain ones that were forbidden, as they sort of conjured or evoked a kind of negative spirit. [Laughter]

And so that’s a very different way of pursuing mathematics or science than trying to create cheap consumer products or using mathematics and science instrumentally toward an end, like using technology to sort of shape culture, using technology to enrich yourself, using technology for power and control, whether we’re talking about social media now or what the Nazis were doing to make weapons of destruction.

I mean, just looking—a contemporary example to her, Robert Oppenheimer. There’s a certain beauty in uncovering the secret of the atom, being able to split it, being able to generate an infinite amount of power. Then you can also use that as a weapon and drop it on thousands of unsuspecting civilians.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, you know, I was going to say, it wouldn’t be a Lord of Spirits episode if I didn’t get to drop at least one Tolkien reference. [Laughter] But I was just reading chapter four of The Hobbit, because I just recorded an episode of my other podcast, which is a different podcast, Amon Sûl, about that chapter. It’s actually interesting. In there, it’s the first time in the Legendarium where you meet goblins or orcs, and Tolkien actually has this little discursus in there about how much goblins love—they love clever things but not really beautiful things. He mentions even that weapons of mass destruction are probably invented by goblins, even the ones that exist in his time. That he attributed—he gives a very deliberate attribution to the use of technology in that way to his race of almost pure evil.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and so, I mean, mathematics and science, just as much as language and poetry, can be a way of discovering and conveying a reality that isn’t purely material—and were that way for most of human history, until the modern period, when they, like everything else, got stripped of the spiritual element.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Okay, so our next question is from Alex.

Alex: Hey, Fathers. This is Alex from Tampa. I so appreciate your show, and I guess I still have some questions after the revelation episode you both did. I guess the second judgment is a question I have and many of those I meet have. For those in paradise, does the second judgment do anything to those already in paradise? To those in perdition, is the second judgment meant to be for that period where the Church Militant and the Church Triumphant are praying for those in perdition, that they may be redeemed? I guess the—we understand that there’s a first judgment for us when we die, when we repose, but I guess I’d like to hear some more expounding on the second judgment. Thank you both for everything you do in this podcast; it’s fantastic. God bless!

Fr. Andrew: Okay, so this is touching on what we’ve referred to as a two-stage eschatology: here’s what happens to you immediately when you die, and then eventually there’s the final judgment, the resurrection, and all those kind of big, solidifying events at the end. So he seems to be asking: What does that second one actually do to people? What’s the difference from there on out? I mean, we see this in Matthew 25. That’s the last judgment.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and that’s sort of a reverse. The question is sort of a reversing the reality, in the sense that what’s being called here “the second judgment” is the actual judgment, because judgment, again, is not rendering a verdict on people.

Fr. Andrew: Right, it’s putting things in their proper order.

Fr. Stephen: It’s putting things right, and that judgment, at Christ’s glorious appearing, is when everything is finally, permanently, eternally set right and put back in order. And so that’s the actual judgment. To even call the other one a judgment, you have to shift the definition of judgment.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s often called the particular judgment. I’ve heard that phrase.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, but even that is coming out of a Western view of what judgment is.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, a more juridical corpum for them.

Fr. Stephen: Right, this juridical thing about the fate of humans: You go to heaven; you go to hell. And, again, that’s not really what judgment is. So what happens at that point is really a continuation of this life.

Fr. Andrew: Right, “let him that is unjust be unjust still; let him that is righteous be righteous still,” which—I can always hear Johnny Cash singing that in my head. [Laughter] Is that the song, “When the Man Comes Around”? I think that’s it.

Fr. Stephen: Yep.

Fr. Andrew: That’s a great song, great song.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and so that’s what that is, and it’s precisely because the judgment hasn’t happened yet that we continue to pray for those who in their lives may or may not— I’m phrasing it that way deliberately, because we pray for people who, from our perspective, were good Christian folks, but we don’t know.

Fr. Andrew: No, we don’t. We just see what we see.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and we pray for people who, from our perspective, may be rotten folks, because we don’t know.

Fr. Andrew: Right.

Fr. Stephen: But we continue to pray for them in part specifically because that judgment has not taken place yet. And so, yeah… I mean, he didn’t make up this terminology, Alex; he’s inherited it. But part of the answer to the question is breaking down that terminology.

So what that—what is being called, in the question, the second judgment does is it sets all of creation aright, so that the righteous can dwell with Christ forever.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. All right, well, our next question, very brief, comes from Adam.

Adam: Hello, Lord of Spirits! My question is: Did the devil fall after creation? Do we know when the devil fell? Thanks.

Fr. Andrew: You know the way he started that off, “Hello, Lord of Spirits,” I mean, he’s literally addressing Christ. So do we have to answer this question, or—? [Laughter] Yeah, did the devil fall after creation? I mean—

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because he’s part of creation; he doesn’t exist before creation.

Fr. Stephen: Right. I think he was referring to the creation of the world, the answer to which is also yes.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah! I mean, we see him fall in Genesis 3, right?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and, you know, just because people have been listening for a while now, I’ll proof-text this. [Laughter] And that’s if you read, for example, St. Andrew of Caesarea, his Commentary on Revelation, when he talks about Revelation 12, describes the dragon and the third of the stars and all of that, he says—and Ancient Faith’s own Dr. Jeannie Constantinou did a good translation of it… Now, I have to say, there’s another English translation, not as good of a translation, but a much nicer-looking book. Not Dr. Jeannie’s fault. Her translation is in a series so it has the trade dress of the series, but there’s a hard cover that’s fancy cover and looks nicer but not as good of a translation.

Anyway, and in that section of the Commentary, St. Andrew says we must accept, as the Fathers have taught, that after the creation of the world the devil fell through envy.

Fr. Andrew: Well, there you go. That’s pretty straight-forward.

Fr. Stephen: So that’s in the sixth century. He’s looking back at the preceding Church Fathers, of which he had more of their writings than we do, and now he summarizes it.

Fr. Andrew: There you go. Okay, so this one is from our panoply of Bens.

Ben IV: Fathers, bless! My wife and I are going to our last catechism class on March 6, and Fr. Stephen had recently commented on one of the podcasts that catechism’s not supposed to be about swapping out our old propositional realities in order to take on the Orthodox set, but he seemed to imply that ideally it’s something more, and I was hoping that you both might be able, be willing to comment or expand on that vision of what catechism ideally is, not so that I can criticize my own or anything like that. But, having come from a low church background where it goes—like listening to the sermon is the discipleship; it doesn’t seem to radically change our lives. In trying to work it out, I encountered Rich Mullins who pointed out that the Information Age seems to lead to the belief that if we just have the right information, we’ll believe the right thing, and that doesn’t work, but it’s about being connected to a great God who really is life. So that’s kind of some of the thrust even of coming into Orthodoxy.

I work at a homeless shelter, and the program that we do—I guess you could call it catechism for the homeless—and we’re trying to empower them to address the chaos and brokenness in our lives, which has atrophied their capacity for self-responsibility in their web of relationships. So I was just hoping you might be willing to comment ideally on what catechism is so that, as for those of us who maybe have opportunities to extend that in other areas of our lives. Thanks.

Fr. Andrew: All right! I mean, this is a great question. I mean, he mentions that he’s helping to form homeless people at the end. To me, he’s got a bead on what I think catechism needs to be. I saw this—I mean, I did parish ministry for 13 years, and for a lot of those years I did catechism in kind of the conventional way, which is: Here’s some information that you need to know about Orthodox Christianity. Here’s what we teach, here’s what we believe, here’s what the services are, and all that kind of stuff. And that information is super important, for sure, but the question that I ended up asking and trying to redirect catechism towards, especially toward the end of my time in pastoral ministry was: Okay, so what to me as a pastor is an ideal parishioner, an ideal Orthodox Christian? And how would I teach someone to be that?

And that’s different from being able to pass, essentially, a freshman-level course in Orthodox Christianity. It includes teaching people how to pray, how to fast, how to give alms, how to keep silence, how to meditate, how to see what the Church’s prayer is really for and what it does. And, sadly, I think that that’s fairly rare or is kind of a secondary effect of a lot of catechism that’s going on these days, that a huge amount is really just giving information.

And I don’t fault the people doing that, because, largely, they’re just doing the thing that they were taught to do, but I also think the fact— Let’s just face it, right, we’ve got a big loss of Orthodox Christians here in America, generationally, and I don’t know if that’s in other places in the world as well, maybe. And so, clearly, what was being done with those people did not result in their long-term participation in Church life.

So, yeah, I do think that catechism should be more about forming people into holy people, like teaching them: Here’s your tools; here’s how you do this thing. Showing them how to do it, and then, you know, staying with them. I don’t know, Father, is there anything you wanted to add to that, or adjust or correct or whatever?

Fr. Stephen: Well, yeah, I mean, it’s related to a bad idea of what education is.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right!

Fr. Stephen: Because catechism is a subset of education, really. And this is not actually how education is done and how it actually works, but a lot of folks think about education as, like, well, we have this information, we have this knowledge: we’re going to impart it to you. Now you’re educated, because you now possess it. So if I give you the lecture, I lay out all the information, I give you a test, you regurgitate the information, okay, now you know the information: you have accomplished the task of education. [Laughter]

And even like—citizenship in the United States works this way. There are always these things where they point out that if you come from another country to the United States and you want to become a United States citizen, you have to take this test with all these questions about American history and civics and all this. The thing is always 99% of Americans who are born here can’t pass it in a million years. And the same, frankly, would be true if we did the same thing in most of our parishes.

Fr. Andrew: Right.

Fr. Stephen: If we gave a quiz to them based on the stuff that we teach in a catechism class in the US, can most of your parishioners who haven’t been through a catechism class—or even those who have if it’s been a while—give you the dates of the Ecumenical Councils?

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Or how many there are even, in some cases!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah! And that kind of thing. That’s not what makes you part of the community. That’s not what makes you an American; that’s not what makes anyone part of a culture and community.

But you look at how education actually happens, a little sub rosa beyond what we talked about. So, post-World War II in the United States, how is education structured? It’s not a coincidence. Kids have to show up at a certain place at a certain time. They have to sit behind a desk for a certain period of time until they get a break. Then they leave their desk, they take their break, and they have to be back on time. Then they get a lunch break, and then they go… It was setting them up to be office workers.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly.

Fr. Stephen: It didn’t matter what you taught. The information was not what was important.

Fr. Andrew: And how much retention of that is there, really?

Fr. Stephen: Right. You were enculturating them to go and have an office job. And the reason you didn’t need education to work that way before the war is that’s not how people were working. People were going and getting apprenticed in trades and that kind of thing; that’s how education took place, because that was preparing them, then, to be an adult and have a job and be… So catechism in the same way needs to be about—and this is what it was about in the early Church. The length was based on the repentance needed, a change of life that was needed, not about how much of the internet and how many books they had read. It was about how much change was needed in their life. So it was about enculturating them to make them ready to become adult Orthodox Christians who were going to live an Orthodox Christian life and function within the community of the Church. And how long it was and what needed to be talked about was all based on that, what each person needed to get to that point.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, how to be faithful.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and the whole sponsorship-godparent thing, too, was originally like a legit mentorship, in a way someone would be apprenticed in a career.

Fr. Andrew: Right. Okay, so this next question comes from Steve.

Steve: Greetings, Fathers. This is Steve from Grand Rapids, Michigan. First, I just wanted to say thank you for the show. I’ve been curious about and have felt drawn to Orthodoxy for many years, but this podcast has finally lit the fire in me to actually go and participate, so thank you for that.

My question is about yam, the Hebrew word for “sea.” I took some biblical Hebrew way back in the day at a very liberal liberal-arts college. The professor loved to try and scandalize his students by pointing out all the places modern translations demythologize the text. I never quite had enough of a grid for how to deal with his critiques, but thanks to this podcast—and also shout-out to Jonathan Pageau as well—I now feel like I do.

One of my professor’s favorite examples was what he called Yam, the sea-god. It seems that any time the text would say the word yam, he’d wink an eye and kind of chuckle to himself. So I’m curious about the connection between yam, the word for “sea,” and more explicit references to Leviathan and Behemoth. Is every reference to the sea a reference on some level to these lesser gods? Thanks. Love the show.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, so, Yam, whom we’ve mentioned previously on The Lord of Spirits. Is every reference to the sea actually reference to Yam, the sea-god, or how much can we…? This is my addition: How much can we distinguish the two in the biblical text?

Fr. Stephen: Right, I mean, this even goes back to—all the way back to I think it was our very first question. And that’s… See, we’ve got this either/or. How do we tell if this is referring to the water, the H₂O with a certain saline content in that large collection in the Mediterranean, and how do we know when it’s referring to Yam, the god? And it’s always referring to both, because, for ancient people, those weren’t separate realities.

Fr. Andrew: So “calming the sea,” then is literally putting Yam to rest, so to speak.

Fr. Stephen: Right.

Fr. Andrew: Hmm.

Fr. Stephen: And so you can’t talk about a thing without talking about the spirit of the thing, and you can’t talk about the spirit of the thing without also talking about the thing. And remember, as we talked about way, way back in one of the early episodes, using Philo as an example, ancient Judaism—the ancient Israelites—and early Christians did not disagree with the pagans. There were spirits related to everything. They disagreed about the status of those spirits.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and how should you relate to them.

Fr. Stephen: Right, where, you know, we pointed to Philo saying that those gods—he even calls them “gods,” small-g gods—he says those are not gods to be worshiped in their own right; they’re part of the God’s administration at various ranks. But, yeah, there is that dimension to all realities.

And I’ll just touch it here. I avoided veering off completely into this earlier, but just to touch on it here, and since Pageau was mentioned… [Laughter] One of the times I talked to him, this bit got clipped out about cities having souls, and people lost their minds. [Laughter] Which, you know, hey, it makes it all worthwhile!

The idea there is that, first of all, cities have a collective life, but also, the idea that everything has a soul, as we were talking about with animals and plants, doesn’t mean they have a human soul. It’s not the same thing. But there are spirits, there are powers and principalities, of families, clans, cities, nations, assigned to them. This is one of the basic things sort of all through Scripture. And those spiritual realities, those souls or those spirits, can be holy or they can become demoniac. Nazi Germany would be an example of a corporate entity becoming demoniac. The giant clans. The Assyrians, for most of their history. That this can happen.

And so we sort of cut off that idea to our peril. And it’s really inadequate. When the chips are down, even the most hardened materialist knows that there’s something inadequate about it, that just “oh, a whole bunch of individual people made bad decisions” doesn’t cut it to describe real evil when it manifests in the world.

Fr. Andrew: Right, yeah. Okay, so this next question is our final question from one of our many Bens.

Fr. Stephen: The ultimate Ben!

Ben V: Fathers, bless! My name is Ben, and I’m a most-of-the-time listener and one-time telegram-pre-order-sender—and don’t banish me for that—and have a question of the Orthodox understanding of small-r revelation. And I have a somewhat charismatic Evangelical—whatever that is—background, and was encouraged, at least then, to daily be asking God for revelation, and learn to discern whatever forms the revelation takes, whether it’s dreams, prophecy, visions, words and knowledge, etc., with the idea being learning to grow in discerning what God is saying to you and what I’m going to do about it.

I do want to add that, at least in my experience, the idea was not that the small-r revelations had the authority at all of Scripture, but were more like touchpoints for obedience or like a daily outworking of a “life led by Holy Spirit.” I’ve been going to Divine Liturgy for a few months now and haven’t heard a single sermon exhorting me to do that! Or, sorry, homily. And I’m hoping to start catechumen classes soon, but I was hoping you might be willing to expand a bit on the Orthodox understanding of revelation today and how or if I should seek it or “move in those gifts,” so to speak. And we’ll close the quote. So, yeah, hope to hear from you. Peace!

Fr. Andrew: All right, well, we’ve heard some of that kind of stuff before. I’m suddenly reminded there was one time when I was talking with my wife about that whole sort of charismatic-ish world and its functioning along those lines. She was not raised with that. I was raised Evangelical, so we weren’t charismatic, but certainly charismatic-adjacent in some ways, so people talking in that way was totally normal in my upbringing. But I remember, I was trying to explain it to her, and she said to me; she said, “Do people think that God tells them to tie their shoes in the morning?” Like, that was her way of putting it.

And while I think that most people would not have a revelation related to shoe-tying, there does seem to be, for sure, this idea that “I feel strongly about something” or “here’s a good thought that I have,” and so “this is God specifically telling me to do this or encouraging me to do that.” I even still— I mean, you and I have gotten emails where people said, “Well, God told me to write to you” or “the Holy Spirit told me to write to you” or something like that. And I don’t know if— For me, I have— It’s not a reaction against that, but I tend to kind of go: “Well…” It’s not because I’m skeptical that God speaks to people, but that… I guess the way that I think of it is that people expect God to be a micromanager in their lives. I don’t know, am I making any sense?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. Man, the Pentecostals are all going to hate me.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] You said that earlier, I think. Oh wow.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, doubling down. I can live with it.

Fr. Andrew: It’s funny. When we did, several episodes ago—I can’t remember when it was—when someone called in with a question about speaking in tongues, and we didn’t really have anything positive to say about that, we got several emails from people, kind of shocked that we turned out not to be Pentecostals, and it’s like… We never pretended to be on board with that way of thinking and believing and practicing, so… But, you know, everybody is welcome to listen. We’re very happy you’re here, whatever your background is, whether you agree with us or not.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and I frequently pray for those who hate me, so if you’re hating on me, it might work out okay for you.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] That’s right, there’s a special category of prayer just for you!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, yeah. That’s a big category for me, but anyway… [Laughter] Part of the key here is that revelation in general, like let’s talk about biblical revelation— For us as Orthodox Christians, biblical revelation is not a series of logical propositions. It’s not sort of a—and this is a place where we differ from some Western confessions. I’m not thinking of the Pentecostals now; now the Calvinists are going to be mad at me.

Fr. Andrew: That ship sailed a long time ago!

Fr. Stephen: But the Bible’s not a series of sort of logical propositions and sort of truths about God or Christ or salvation or points of doctrine. So it’s the revelation of Christ, who is God himself. And so when— I mean, obviously, in the most direct example of saints who have had personal revelation in the Orthodox Church, are those saints who have had the vision of Christ in his uncreated glory. But note that’s a vision of Christ in his uncreated glory. That’s not Christ appearing to them and telling them, “This is the person you should marry,” or any other discursive content.

And so when we’re talking about revelation, we’re talking about Christ’s self-revelation, because it’s all oriented toward the Person of Christ. So that means we shouldn’t be looking— If we don’t have that kind of discursive revelation in the Bible, we shouldn’t be looking for that kind of discursive revelation in our life, that God is going to come to me and tell me some logical proposition.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I guess probably the point where a lot of Pentecostals and charismatics and Evangelicals and stuff would… Like, where they’re going I think with this is they see, for instance, particularly in the Old Testament God appears to someone and says, “Now I want you do the following.” Now, that’s a thing in the Old Testament, for sure. And Jesus certainly gives commands in the New Testament. So that’s what they’re expecting on some level, but, of course, barring the Lord appearing to them visually and saying, “Now go do the following,” it tends to be filtered, then, through “I have a strong feeling” or “This makes sense to me.”

Fr. Stephen: Right, and those are two different things. But even then the primary revelation— Like, Isaiah doesn’t receive some kind of new knowledge. God reveals, Christ reveals himself to Isaiah, and then Isaiah is sent to do something. Christ reveals himself to St. Paul, and then St. Paul is sent to preach the Gospel.

But so there’s also—and I know they’re not going to want to hear this, our Pentecostal friends—there’s also a heavy dose of Calvinism here. There’s a view of divine providence in the background of this, which is that God has a specific will for every decision you make, and if you make the wrong one, that’s a sin: God has a person he wants you to marry, or not, and if you marry someone else or don’t marry that person, or marry somebody and you weren’t supposed to get married, you’re sinning, and so you have to find a way to sort of “divine” whether you’re supposed to be married and who that person is. And this puts people through agony.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right, there’s a whole… It’s funny. “What is God’s will for my life?” I’m like: Well, actually, it’s pretty straightforward. God’s will is that you repent of your sins, that you love your neighbor, that you love him above all else, that you worship him and remain faithful till you die. That’s God’s will for your life, and anything that’s actually lining up with that… Congratulations! You’re doing God’s will.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and Calvinism, at least, sort of puts the imprimatur on whatever.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. “That was God’s will.”

Fr. Stephen: Whatever happens, that was God’s will. But this is projecting it out into the future, and you have to try to discern it.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, or else.

Fr. Stephen: And the truth is—and people don’t want to hear this. The truth is there is not one perfect person for you out there to marry. And that’s good news, because if there were they’d probably be in China. That’s the odds, based on the world population. And you’d probably never meet them! The reality is there are a bunch of people out there who, if you dedicated yourself to it, you could have a successful marriage with. And there’s a much bigger group of people whom you couldn’t, but— [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: But didn’t The Proclaimers say they would go the whole wide world just to find her? Just to find out where they hide her?

Fr. Stephen: Well, my wife and I are an exception to this; my wife and I are America’s sweethearts. We’re perfectly made for each other. But for most folks…

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Right!

Fr. Stephen: …there are actually several possibilities. And that’s a very unromantic notion, but the same is true of every other decision you make in your life. There are multiple things that you could eat for breakfast or lunch or dinner that would be fine. They would be nourishing, they would follow the fasting rules, even, and it would be good. There are other things you could eat that would not be good.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and I think that there is often this sense that there’s one right thing and everything else is wrong.

Fr. Stephen: Plato.

Fr. Andrew: And the truth is, for most situations in life, there’s one or two wrong things, and then everything else is right. For like… That holiness actually is infinitely interesting and creative, and it’s evil that is banal and limited and restrictive. I think this idea that God is micromanaging every single decision flips it, and, like you said, it causes a lot of agony for people.

Fr. Stephen: Right, yeah, it’s Plato-brain. And so the discernment is not: Okay, I have to make the decision; I have to figure out what it is that God wants me to do, what choice he wants me to make. The discernment is coming to know Christ and then, based on that, discerning what you should do. [Laughter] Like, what is the right thing to do in this situation? If you understand the principles of bodily health, you can make a good choice as to what to eat, and what you shouldn’t eat.

Fr. Andrew: Right. The question is: Is this good? Is this action good? Not: Is this the one good action that I could possibly take?

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so that’s where the discernment—the discernment is making good choices. The discernment is not trying to discern and figure out what—which available choice has the divine imprimatur on it, without knowing.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Okay, so this one is from Mary.

Mary: So my question is about death. My dad recently passed away. He was not a Christian; he had made many mistakes. He was suffering from cancer, but he died suddenly from a heart attack, and I had been kind of really struggling with that, with that especially, since I did not really put a lot of emphasis on his caring for his salvation and caring about his afterlife. I definitely thought I had more time, and I was waiting for him to move to be near us. So it has been a very devastating loss for me.

My priest told me to pray for him using the Jesus Prayer, and I do that whenever I think about it, and often on my prayer rope, I will use that to pray for him. Last week, on the morning of my son’s birthday. In the dream, my dad was kind of like re-animated. His head was kind of on this stick sort of, and all of a sudden he was warming up, his face kind of moving around and kind of re-animating, and his whole body appeared, and I gave him a hug. It was a very long hug. It felt very real, everything about it, and he seemed okay and well. And I wasn’t sure what we really believe as Orthodox Christians about the afterlife when we pray for somebody who did not know God, how that person fares after they pass.

Fr. Andrew: All right. Well, what do you have to say to that, Father?

Fr. Stephen: Well, I mean, in terms of the dream, we’ve talked before about how you sort of discern those kind of things by their fruits. So if that dream brings you a sense of peace and comfort, then that’s a good thing. Now, that doesn’t mean you just: “Oh, he’s fine. I can stop praying for him now.” [Laughter] Like, you would never do that for a living-in-this-world person. So, you know, you continue to pray for him, and if you have something like that that brings you peace and comfort, then that’s a good thing.

But we can’t— We’re not going to get like an objective—and I know we all want that. I want to have a sense of assurance in my heart that this other person is in heaven, or is going to be on the right side of things at the judgment, however we want to phrase that. I want to be sure of that for this other person. And that doesn’t really come most of the time.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, we just don’t know.

Fr. Stephen: In very rare cases. That isn’t something that we should be worried and upset about, because, as much as we love another human, God who created them loves them more. And so we continue to pray for people, but that has to be combined with a trust in God, that the Judge of all the earth will do right and that we can trust God with that person. That’s where the—that’s the only place the assurance comes from. You’re not going to get something more than that; the assurance has to come from trusting God.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because I think that, for most of us probably, if an angel—and we were convinced it was truly an angel—showed up and said, “Your father is fine, and he’s going to be fine.” For a lot of us, I think that would—we would stop praying for them. “Well, I mean, I had a revelation. He’s fine.” So I think that’s… I think if someone were to ask why we don’t get that kind of assurance, I think it’s because it helps us to be faithful, that we don’t have that sort of absolute, epistemic “I know for certain this is the way it is” kind of knowledge.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and even then we can fall into doubt.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, yeah, of course.

Fr. Stephen: “Was that really an angel? Was that a demon trying to trick me into not praying for him any more?”

Fr. Andrew: “Am I remembering correctly?” Yeah. Okay, I hope that’s helpful to you, Mary. So here’s the next one, and this is from Caitlin.

Caitlin: Hi, Fathers. This is Caitlin calling from New Orleans, Louisiana. I have a question about the Theotokos. First, how should we understand the Theotokos’ title of Panagia, or All-holy, specifically in light of biblical passages, such as Romans 3, which states that all men have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God? Second, what does the Tradition of the Church teach about her title of Panagia? And how can this deepen my understanding of the Gospel? Thank you for taking my question.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, yeah, two parts. How can we call her Panagia, All-holy, when the Scripture says that all have sinned? And what is the Church’s teaching about this title? I mean, with regards to the second, I don’t know that there is a dogmatic teaching about it. I’m sure some saints have reflected on this, but I don’t know that I could point to something and say, “This is the teaching about this title,” in the way that, say, Theotokos—there’s a very clear dogmatic teaching about that title. But Panagia is something that we call her; we call her All-holy. And I don’t think that’s contradictory with the Scripture that says that all have sinned. What do you think, Father?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so I think we need to separate the idea of holiness from the idea of sinlessness.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, exactly.

Fr. Stephen: Now, there’s also teachings within the Church regarding the Theotokos’ sinlessness, but that’s a little separate from this title: Panagia, the All-holy one. So we call the ecumenical patriarch “His All-Holiness.”

Fr. Andrew: Yes, Panagiotatos.

Fr. Stephen: I’m not going to name any names, but some of them have been sinners along the way.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Right!

Fr. Stephen: Nestorius, for one. And so holiness, remember, at its sort of core usage, is talking about being set apart, being set apart for a special purpose. And so what we’re saying about the ecumenical patriarch is that he is a human who has been set apart for this most-special purpose, this most-special service in the Church. And we’re saying a similar thing about Panagia, that she was, from her—well, really, from her conception, but from her birth to her death, she was set apart. She was holy. She was devoted, and she devoted herself entirely to God, her Son.

And so the importance of that title is then that it also represents a call to us, to likewise devote ourselves to the service of Christ, rather than all the other things that we can devote our time and attention and focus to.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Okay, so this one is from Catherine.

Catherine: Hi, Fathers. This is Catherine from Canada in the great white Zaphon. I was wondering if you could tell me what the heck is going on with Samson. The guy’s an absolute savage, and I just see a connection with him, the pillars falling, and that he does that—and it’s rocks, obviously. And if it’s a connection symbolically to Cain with how, in the book of Jubilees, that his house falls in on him, which I’m assuming is stone. And if there’s a connection there with the Watchers and being buried underneath all of these rocks and under the mountains and things. And if there is something that is being transmitted that way. If you could explain that, that’d be amazing. Thank you!

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I have to say, number one, I love the fact that she says she’s from the great white Zaphon! And the fact that she described Samson as “an absolute savage.” That’s just great.

Fr. Stephen: I didn’t know Baal lived up there.

Fr. Andrew: Right!? Apparently, Baal lives in Canada.

Fr. Stephen: Since we already mentioned him: Pageau, can you confirm?

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Right! I mean, this is what Catherine is saying, so… I mean, well, for those who may not know, obviously we’ve talked about Baal in the past and how Baal lives on Mount Zaphon, but in… I think just within the Hebrew Bible generally, isn’t zaphon just the term for “the north”?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, it’s the word for “north.”

Fr. Andrew: So she’s making a very funny pun.

Fr. Stephen: Now that you’ve explained the joke to people.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, well, you know, I’m an explainer of jokes. What can I say? [Laughter] I live with four small people. They need to have jokes explained to them sometimes.

Fr. Stephen: Okay…

Fr. Andrew: It’s just a habit. It’s true. Is there something that she’s got going on here… She talks about Samson being buried under rubble, and I think she says in Jubilees Cain’s house falls in on him, and there’s this reference to the Watchers being buried underground. Is this a deliberate symbolic parallel going on here?

Fr. Stephen: There is this pattern. It goes back pre-linguistic. So, hey, we get to go back to the Neolithic Era again!

Fr. Andrew: Yeah!

Fr. Stephen: Well, first time this episode, but as is our wont in general. So we have these burials where rocks are placed on the bodies. And there’s a lot of debate as to exactly why, because it’s pre-linguistic, so we don’t have written sources explaining what’s going on. So in general people have the general agreement that it’s to somehow keep the person or the body down. There’s one interpretation that is that they thought this person might come back, like vrykolakis-style, to off the community, and so they’re weighing it down with rocks. There’s also the thought that they’re trying to push them down into the underworld or keep them down in the underworld, which is related to the other one. But either way, that would indicate that this person is under a curse. It’s not a blessing to have them put the rocks on.

And we do—there are other examples, too. You look at the Testament of Abraham, and Azazel gets buried under rocks…

Fr. Andrew: Doesn’t Absalom get buried under rocks?

Fr. Stephen: Yes. Job’s family has the house fall on them. And so that is a general indicator that this is a death under some kind of curse. That’s kind of what’s going on in Job. It’s not just that his family all dies; it’s that they die in this sort of horrible way, kind of unblessed way. And part of that, with building collapses and that kind of thing, part of that is that you’re not actually buried, also. Like you’re in this rubble, you’re under these rocks, so you can’t get to the body and bury it. So there’s sort of an abandonment thing connected to it. A lot of times when we’re talking about the Watchers and Azazel and stuff, it’s out in the wilderness, too.

But so, yeah, these are all bad things. This is a bad end that Samson meets. Now, I know people love when I talk about it, but, yes, this is to indicate that he met kind of a— He got his revenge, but he met kind of a bad end in the process.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Cool question, Catherine. All right. Our final question now is from Clay.

Clay: Hey, Fathers. This is Clay from Columbus, Georgia. I was calling in to ask a question about the creature called a Ziz, Z-i-z, which seems to be a primordial creature similar to Leviathan and Behemoth in Jewish mythology, and mentioned a couple of times in the psalms. But it doesn’t seem to have that same chaos implication. I was wondering if there was any similarity here to cherubs, or there’s a reason why you think that one may not be portrayed as bad in mythology, whereas the other two are. Any thoughts or comments would be great, thanks.

Fr. Andrew: Okay! [Laughter] I had to save this one for last. What is the Ziz? Z-i-z. I had to look this up, and I only have the slightest touch of knowledge about this now. What is a Ziz, Father?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so I’ve been told that Nytol will help you get the ZZs.

Fr. Andrew: Oh! [Laughter] Wow, that’s an old ad! Man, I haven’t thought about that in a long time.

Fr. Stephen: Digging in the crates, yeah! But this is also not ZZ Top, though the Ziz did have legs and presumably did know how to use them, though primarily flew!

Fr. Andrew: Right, and there is a Wikipedia article about Ziz, which defines it as “a giant griffin-like bird in Jewish mythology, said to be large enough to block out the sun with its wingpsan.”

Fr. Stephen: Yes, which is a big bird. Now we’re going to ruin Sesame Street for people.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Is Big Bird a Ziz? Write in! Let us know!

Fr. Stephen: So the places in the Hebrew Bible where it shows up are Psalms 50 and 80 (or 49 and 79) as mentioned, and it gets lost in a lot of English translations. Both of those are not really negative references. There’s a… One of the funniest things I’ve ever read in a Jewish Haggadah—

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I just like that clause! “One of the funniest things I’ve ever read in a Jewish Haggadah!” Sorry.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. —is actually about the Ziz, because one of the Haggadot, talking about the Ziz, talks about how one time the Ziz accidentally laid an egg while in flight, and the egg fell and, like, wiped out a bunch of cities from the embryonic fluid in the egg. The egg white, I guess, flooded and wiped out a bunch of cities, and leveled a cedar forest in Lebanon with the explosion when it landed.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Wow!

Fr. Stephen: But this is the great part, is that after telling that story, the Haggadah says, “Fortunately, such things do not often happen.” [Laughter] And that is just amazing. I think we can all be glad that that only happens once in a while.

Fr. Andrew: Wow.

Fr. Stephen: It is not an everyday occurrence.

Fr. Andrew: So I’ve seen the idea that it’s sort of like the Jewish idea of a phoenix?

Fr. Stephen: Well, it’s actually—it actually seems to be the Hebrew version of Anzu.

Fr. Andrew: Anzu! I don’t know what that is.

Fr. Stephen: We have mentioned Anzu once before on the podcast.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, I didn’t remember.

Fr. Stephen: Living in a tree… Anyway, but Anzu is usually just depicted as a giant bird. It’s sort of this magnificent creature of the gods. It’s this primordial creature. It’s descended from, like, the sky and the earth, so it’s this creature… And it’s portrayed as sort of noble, but also kind of mischievous, because its most famous exploit is stealing the tablet that gave Enlil rule of the universe.

Fr. Andrew: Oh!

Fr. Stephen: When Enlil was the most-high god, he had this tablet that was like the deed…

Fr. Andrew: The one Ring. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Well, no, it was literally like the property deed for the cosmos.

Fr. Andrew: Property deed, got you. Yeah, I mean, you know. But if it gives you rule of the universe— Yeah, no. Well, the right to rule the universe, basically.

Fr. Stephen: You can see the scroll with the seven seals in Revelation, by the way, on that.

Fr. Andrew: Ohh! That should be a future episode.

Fr. Stephen: So he has this tablet that says he’s the boss of everybody, and Anzu flies by and grabs it and takes it to his nest up on a mountain. And so then Enlil says, “Hey, somebody help me out with this!” [Laughter] And so in the earliest form of this, Ninurta, who, as I think we’ve mentioned before on the podcast, is linguistically identical to the Nimrod of the Bible, who remember is described as “a mighty hunter before the Lord”?

Fr. Andrew: Right, right.

Fr. Stephen: Ninurta goes and manages to, in a feat of archery, kill Anzu and get the tablet back.

Fr. Andrew: Nice.

Fr. Stephen: So he is sort of—Ninurta sort of has this hunter thing, too, and that’s kind of how Ninurta gets promoted up the ranks. But so the Anzu was used by the Assyrians and Babylonians as sort of a symbol of power with their kings.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I see that some depictions of it are of a lion-headed eagle.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so sometimes… Usually it’s just a big bird, but you’ve got some where it’s got a lion head. That’s where you get the griffin thing, the griffin connections.

And so when, for example, I think it’s in Psalm 50/49 that God says, in the Hebrew, “The Ziz is mine,” it’s Yahweh sort of reclaiming this symbol of power from these foreign gods, like: “No, these magnificent creatures belong to me. They aren’t symbols of your power; they’re my power.” Sort of in that reclaiming kind of context. So that’s why we didn’t talk about the Ziz on the monster episode, because he’s not really a monster; he’s sort of in a different category.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, a mythic being of sorts.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and through Anzu people have tried to tie it to the Greek phoenix, but I think it’s closer to the Greek griffin than to the phoenix, even though the phoenix is also obviously a bird.

Fr. Andrew: Right, nice. Well, that is our SpeakPipe-palooza episode, from A to Ziz. Thank you very much, everyone, for listening. If you can’t get through to us live, we’d still love to hear from you. You can email us at lordofspirits@ancientfaith.com; message us at our Facebook page; or, like this episode, leave us a voicemail at speakpipe.com/lordofspirits.

Fr. Stephen: And we will speak back down the same or another closely related pipe. 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, assuming soon.

Fr. Andrew: And if you are on Facebook, like our page, join our discussion group, leave reviews and ratings everywhere, but, most importantly, please share this show with a friend whom you know is going to love it, or that you know is going to hate it, because, like I said, we have special prayers for those who hate us.

Fr. Stephen: Or just ambivalent toward it. And finally, be sure to go to ancientfaith.com/support and help make sure we and lots of other AFR podcasters stay on the air.

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