Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick: Good evening! 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. You’re not listening to us live! Normally this is the part where I say, “If you’re listening to us live, call,” but you’re not listening to us live because this is a pre-recorded episode. So that means that even if you call that number that you’re going to hear the Voice of Steve saying, you’re not going to be able to get through, because Fr. Stephen is at a retreat, and so we’re not able to do this one live. But we are recording it.

Fr. Stephen De Young: I prefer to call it a “strategic withdrawal.”

Fr. Andrew: Okay, yes. That’s true. More of an advance.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, he’s gathering his troops together. So anyway, we still wanted to make an episode for you, so here it is. But again, don’t call, because no one’s going to answer the phone.

Fr. Stephen: I mean, hey—if you want to. If that’s how you get your kicks on a Thursday night, calling a number that no one answers…

Fr. Andrew: Right, that you know no one answers. True. That sounds very sad and lonely, but okay.

Fr. Stephen: There are Doomers out there who are lined up for that, I think.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] All right, well, people often say, “The Church isn’t a building,” or “We could worship anywhere”—but is that actually true? Why do ancient Israel and the Church worship in buildings? Is it merely practical, to have a roof over our heads, or is there a purpose given by God? Well, in this episode we’re going to start with the Taj Mahal and end with parading around corpses. So if you can connect the dots between those, you can skip this one and wait for the next episode. If not, though, welcome!

So, Fr. Stephen, what does the Taj Mahal have to do with the worship spaces of the people of God?

Fr. Stephen: Well, nothing if you’re talking about the casino resort.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I am never talking about the casino resort, but yes.

Fr. Stephen: Okay. As is our wont when talking about just about anything, we’re going to begin at the beginning—of everything.

Fr. Andrew: It’s a very good place to start.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. Stealing my Rogers and Hammerstein joke! And that is paradise—not by the dashboard light.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Starting off at the beginning now…

Fr. Stephen: With apologies to the late, great Meatloaf. Some of this here at the beginning are things we’ve already talked about in other episodes, but we’re taking kind of a different trajectory through them this time, as is our wont. And so as we’ve talked about before, paradise, the word “paradise,” is actually a Persian loan-word that gets taken over into Greek that refers to a particular type of walled garden. And it is sort of an apt word and an apt design to take over for that, because some of the features, including the four waterways, reflect the description of Eden, of the garden of God in Genesis 2.

So the Taj Mahal is probably the most well-known current example of such a walled garden structure that still exists in the world that you can see aerial photos of.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, if you go to Google Maps and just type in “Taj Mahal”—again, not going to the casino, but look at the Taj Mahal in India—and turn on the satellite photo, then you can zoom in, and you will see—at the [northern] end you will see the building that everyone refers to as the Taj Mahal, which is, and then directly to the [south] of it, you will see this walled garden with four quarters in it, and these—there’s a fountain in the middle, and these—are these actually waterways now? I can’t really tell from the photo, but in any event I think they traditionally are, that there’s water flowing in four directions out of that fountain that’s in the middle. This is an ancient, as you said, pattern. And I actually wanted to—since I want to look like a scholar, too, just a little bit; I want a chance—

Fr. Stephen: It’s time.

Fr. Andrew: It’s time!

Fr. Stephen: It’s time for Fr. Andrew’s Etymology Corner.

Fr. Andrew: Doot-doot-doo!

Fr. Stephen: Insert public domain string music here.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I actually had someone send me a couple of suggested themes for Fr. Andrew’s Etymology Corner that he created himself. So maybe we’ll see about incorporating them. Anyway, so the English word, “paradise,” as you said, it’s a loan-word from Persian into Greek, and then from Greek it gets into Latin and then from Latin into French, and from there actually into very late Old English, where we’ve got the word paradys, which becomes the origin of our modern English word, “paradise”

So here’s something that’s kind of fun, though: before we had “paradise” in Old English, earlier Old English had this amazing word, which is neorxnawang! Neorxnawang, which includes the element wang, which means a field, w-a-n-g, and it seems—linguists are not entirely sure about this, but it seems that this word, neorxnawang—which actually you can see in earlier Old English translations of the Bible, so this is a word that does have a Christian history in English, although completely gone now; there’s nothing as far as I know descended from this word in modern English—but neorxnawang seems to come from Germanic paganism originally and may have referred to a heavenly field or meadow. So again you’ve got this idea of a divine garden. So English has had this concept in it, but then we dragged in “paradise” much later on. I mean, nothing wrong with that word—it’s lovely—but we did have this awesome word, neorxnawang: n-e-o-r-x-n-a-w-a-n-g. So there you go: Fr. Andrew’s Etymology Corner.

Fr. Stephen: This has been Fr. Andrew’s Etymology Corner.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Thanks, Father! So, okay, why—we’ve talked about this a little bit, but just to kind of review for those who have not listened to 84 or whatever it is hours of the podcast up to this point—

Fr. Stephen: And counting.

Fr. Andrew: And counting. What’s the point—why is a garden significant as paradise? Why that image? Why not a big, glorious, golden mansion or something like that?

Fr. Stephen: Right, and it’s not just in Genesis 2 that God lives in a garden. This is common in the Ancient Near East that a particular god or the gods, when we’re dealing with Israel’s neighbors, live in these sort of garden settings: the hanging gardens of Babylon.

Fr. Andrew: And clearly ancient Germanic paganism, too. Thus neorxnawang. I just have to say that Old English word as many times as I can.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. Was there a bright golden haze on that meadow? [Laughter] Anyway.

Fr. Andrew: Nice. I didn’t think you would make show tunes references! This is really wonderful, actually.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, there is no end to my pop culture sub referenceability.

Fr. Andrew: Nice, nice.

Fr. Stephen: There are no boundaries.

So on a very surface level—not that this is untrue, but this is very surface level—when you consider the Ancient Near East, you consider the terrain, you consider what most of the land was like outside of the river valleys—there’s a reason why civilization showed up in Mesopotamia and along the Nile.

Fr. Andrew: Because there’s water.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yeah, you’re dealing with mostly desert and wilderness, and so if you’re living in sort of a desert wilderness setting, if you’re sort of clinging to a river and hoping for healthy flooding in order to grow crops and that kind of thing, then sort of a green, lush garden is sort of the dream spot, is sort of the heavenly spot. So, on a surface level, you just have that contrast.

But if you push that contrast a little deeper in terms of what it really represents, then, as we’ve talked about before, what’s going on in Genesis 1 and creation, things being put in order and things being filled with life, a garden is sort of the perfect combination of that, because by virtue of being a garden, it is ordered—it is tended and put in order—but it is also, obviously, filled with and producing life. And that is over against the wilderness, which is obviously, by virtue of being wilderness, not put in order, is not tended, and comes to represent sort of death, because things go out there and die.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and it’s fun—even this word, “wilderness,” that we use now, it’s kind of used in a romantic way, like “the pristine wilderness,” but in that word, “wilderness,” is the word “wild.” The concept of wilderness, the wild place—when the word is conceived in English, anyway, it’s this sense of a chaotic space which is dangerous and full of death, because the pristine wilderness that you would go and experience as a kind of tourist is just not a thing for most ancient people! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yes, there are predatory animals out there.

Fr. Andrew: And thieves and robbers, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: And dehydration, all around. Yeah, most of the Ancient Near East is not a good place to try to forage. We’re not talking about the forests of Europe or something, where you can find nuts and berries. So, yeah, that is really sort of the deeper and key element. And as we’ve talked about before, paradise is wherever God is. Wherever God is, that place becomes paradise, and so we see this reflected all through our hymnography. We call the Theotokos, at one point, a paradise endowed with speech.

Fr. Andrew: Or a mystical paradise, in the canon for the cross.

Fr. Stephen: Right, because God comes to dwell within her, within her womb. And this also is then used in the New Testament, sometimes in some of the weirder passages, like in—I believe it’s John 10, where Christ promises that people will have rivers of water flowing out of their belly.

Fr. Andrew: Right, yeah, we let that run by, but if you think about that, that’s like: Okay, that’s kind of a weird image.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, the last time I had rivers running out of my belly, it was because I went to Taco Bell very late at night, and it was a mistake.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Wow!

Fr. Stephen: But this is the opposite of that.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, yeah, this is paradise.

Fr. Stephen: This is talking about the Holy Spirit, who is God, coming to dwell within a person, and so they become paradise, and paradise of course had four rivers running out of it to water the world, and that’s the idea, that not only will the person who has the Holy Spirit dwelling within them be filled with life themselves, but that life will also overflow out of them into the world around them.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and also that sense that paradise is also God’s presence with mankind, so not just wherever God is, but this sense of communion with God and being with God, that, like you said, wherever God is becomes paradise, but of course it’s the experience of human beings of that—

Fr. Stephen: —is the paradise part.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, exactly. Right.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and this is also why paradise can be used in terms of where the righteous go at the time of their death. It’s not saying they go to Eden as a plot of land somewhere, or they go to some physical garden space somewhere; it’s that they come into the presence of God.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and so when Christ says to the thief on the cross, “Today you will be with me in paradise,” that’s almost redundant actually. For him to be with Christ is—in a sense, that moment, even both of them hanging on the cross, he was in paradise.

Fr. Stephen: So as we mentioned before, not only are we talking about a garden as the place where God dwells, but that garden tends to be situated atop a mountain, the mountain of God. And so we’re really starting here—we maybe didn’t lay this out at the beginning, but if we’re going to talk about the place where God is among his people, we have to start with the place where God is, and then move from there. That’s why we’re starting where we’re starting. But so that is on top of a mountain, and that mountain is the mountain of God.

This again, much like the gardens—you see this throughout the Ancient Near East, throughout Israel’s neighbors. They have an idea that a god or their gods live on a mountain some place, whether it’s Mount Zaphon, Mount Olympus, take your pick; there was some kind of mountain or hill or high place where God lives.

So some people who maybe haven’t heard us talk about this before may be saying, “I don’t see anything about a mountain in Genesis 2.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right, it’s not explicitly said, “And on top of a mountain was Eden,” but what you do get is that there are four rivers flowing out in four directions, which—the only way that that’s possible is if you’re on an elevated space.

Fr. Stephen: Right. Rivers flow downhill, and ancient people knew that. They had figured that out. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: I think one of the difficulties is we often read the Bible as discrete pieces rather than, as I think you said in another interview, intertextual elements, that are related to all the other parts of the Bible all at once. For instance, a classic example is in Exodus where Moses receives the law, it does not say in that passage that there are angels present and involved with receiving the law, but it says that in the New Testament. And so you have to imagine that—and I love this; this is one of the things that I love to point out—you have to imagine that when the Charlton Heston Ten Commandments film was made, they were not actually looking at those New Testament passages that made reference to the law being received via angels; they were just looking at the Exodus passage, and so that’s what you actually get on the screen, is Moses, kind of by himself with God, and he gets the law from God that way, but there’s no actual angels present on the screen.

So this is another one of those examples, where in Genesis it does not say explicitly that it’s on a mountain. Of course, it’s implied, as you said, by the rivers, but you do get other passages that do say that Eden is on a mountain. It’s just not there in Genesis.

Fr. Stephen: Right, not explicitly.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, not explicitly. So one of those is in Ezekiel 28:13-14, and this is actually referencing the devil, and so it’s talking to the devil, and it says this:

You were in Eden, the garden of God; every precious stone was your covering: sardius, topaz, and diamond; beryl, onyx, and jasper; sapphire, emerald, and carbuncle; and crafted in gold were your settings and your engravings. On the day that you were created, they were prepared. You were an anointed guardian cherub. I placed you; you were on the holy mountain of God. In the midst of the stones of fire you walked.

And then of course it goes on to say how God cast him out, because he was evil. [Laughter] But there you get it: Eden was on this mountain of God; it’s a garden of God. It’s all right there in those couple of verses in Ezekiel.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, the next verse is basically: You were holy and perfect until you weren’t.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Exactly.

Fr. Stephen: But, yeah, so that right there is: You were in Eden; you were on the holy mountain of God. So this is about as clear as you can get. And just like with the garden, there’s sort of a surface-level reason, and then we can push a little bit deeper. So, surface-level reason that you usually get is that, well, they thought that gods were up on the mountains, because they kind of thought that gods were up in the sky, and mountains were up close to the sky, and they’re kind of inaccessible. And, you know, there’s something there: high place, proximity to the heavens. There’s something there, but these mountains we’re talking about are only relatively inaccessible. Mount Olympus is not Mount Everest.

Fr. Andrew: Right, you’re not going to die by climbing up.

Fr. Stephen: You can climb up there and see what’s going on. So we have to push a little deeper to sort of fully get at that. And one of the interesting ways to push deeper is to see what all of these cultures and all of these people groups see as the opposite of the mountain of God or the gods, and that is usually some form of the abyss, or Tartarus in Greek, that we’ve talked about before. And you find this language used for the abyss, where it’s described as an inverted mountain, as an upside-down mountain.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that’s weird. Is the idea that it’s like a big hollow mountain…? Because when I think of the abyss, I think of a crack in the earth, and you just fall and fall and fall. [Laughter] How did they conceive of that?

Fr. Stephen: They’re thinking of it as sort of conical hole that you go down. In the same way that you have a peak of a mountain, you have sort of the depths of the abyss. So it is really about this concept of the depths of the underworld, deep in the earth, below the pillars of the earth, contrasted with the heights, near to the heavens. And that mountain language actually shows up in an interesting place, in the book of Revelation.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, yeah. Right, another one of these passages that is so full of this crazy kind of imagery, you can just walk by and not really realize what’s going on. So Revelation 8:8:

The second angel blew his trumpet, and something like a great mountain burning with fire was thrown into the sea, and a third of the sea became blood.

Which is very disturbing, kind of weird imagery again.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, but the abyss, in the book of Enoch, is not only using that inverted mountain language but has it on fire.

Fr. Andrew: Right, a flaming mountain, thrown into the sea…

Fr. Stephen: And so what Revelation is talking about there is: the abyss is used for the depths of the sea. It’s sort of a sacred geography sense. This is talking about the sea actually becoming the abyss in Revelation.

Fr. Andrew: Oh wow. Okay.

Fr. Stephen: Because the sea, if you’re someone who lives around the Mediterranean basin, is, yes, the storms blow off of it, it’s scary, there’s the chaos stuff, but also you get fish out of it, you use it for trade, you use it for life. So if the sea goes full abyss on you, you’re in a lot of trouble.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and I note the image of a third of the sea becoming blood as sort of a death image for sure.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And remember, that’s obviously borrowing from Exodus. In Exodus, when the Nile turns to blood, all the fish, all the life in it dies and starts to stink.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right, it’s about—the life characteristic of the water becomes negated by virtue of its association with death and the underworld.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so it just becomes fully that, fully chaos, fully destruction, fully death. Yeah. Fun with Revelation!

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right. I thought we’re not supposed to read that book! [Laughter] No. Surprise!

Fr. Stephen: So then the flip side of the abyss, getting back to the mountain of God, we see, as we talked about in our sacred geography episode, there are a whole series of holy mountains going through the Old Testament, and those holy mountains all at various points are being the mountain of God.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. We mentioned this. I mean, if you go back and listen to our sacred geography episodes, there’s one called “The Mountain of God and the Boat of Theseus.” That kind of lays out these ideas. But one example I think suffices to understand this, and that is, for instance, if you read Exodus, when Moses sees the burning bush and speaks to God in the burning bush, it says in Exodus that this is Mount Horeb. But if you were to ask most people, “Hey, where did Moses talk to God in the burning bush?” almost everyone—every Christian, and probably certainly every Orthodox Christian—would say, “Oh, that was on Sinai,” but if you read Exodus, it says it’s Mount Horeb. And it gets even further confused if you were to go to Mt. Sinai now and go to the Monastery of St. Catherine, which actually is traditionally the Monastery of the Transfiguration, they could point you: “Ah, here is the burning bush, here inside the monastery grounds, on Sinai.” And so then, the question is: Well, where did that actually happen? [Laughter]

And I know that sometime people, when trying to work out the geography of the Scriptures, they’ll try to solve this in a material way by saying, “Well, Moses was on this one mountain, but here it’s called Horeb and in other places it’s called Sinai.” But if you understand sacred geography, then what you actually see happening is Horeb is being the mountain of God when Moses is speaking to him with the burning bush, and then Sinai is being the mountain of God, and then even is being the place of the burning bush, later on, by virtue of, again, Moses speaking there with God by virtue of, frankly, the monastery treating that bush as being the burning bush.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so it is.

Fr. Andrew: It is the burning bush. Whether you can establish some kind of genetic connection or proof—like, how could you prove? How many thousands of years ago was that? [Laughter] It’s not like Moses took a DNA sample of the burning bush so that we could analyze it later. You have to think differently about these things, people. You can’t just say, “Oh, we can prove through technology that this is this.” That’s not the point at all. So the mountain of God is one, but human beings can experience the mountain of God on different material mountains, even to the point that the burning bush itself is on at least two different material mountains.

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: Yep. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: And we don’t need to go back to everything in that episode, but this is just… Yeah. We have this weird— And it’s not even like a fully contemporary, materialist view, because, again, if you understand that a living human body changes out all its matter over the course of several years, realize that there are particles of matter that were part of Christ’s human body that are now part of other people’s bodies…

Fr. Andrew: Right, but we don’t say that those people’s bodies are Christ.

Fr. Stephen: Right, because those individual particles are not being Christ’s body now.

Fr. Andrew: Right. And it’s funny: when people try to read the Bible and figure out this stuff, there’s kind of two takes on it that are sort of both modernist, materialist versions. There’s the take you might describe as a liberal take, which is essentially to say, “Ah, see, look at these contradictions. There is no way that this is true; or this is made up, or whatever.”

Fr. Stephen: “There’s no historical reality whatsoever,” yeah.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, “There’s no historical reality whatsoever.” And then you’ve got the other end—and I’m using this word in the earliest 20th century sense—the fundamentalist take on this, which is to say, “No, no, we can make this all work out, and kind of empirically, scientifically prove that this is this.” But both takes are essentially assuming modernist, materialist—a materialist framework.

Fr. Stephen: Categories.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, categories. Exactly. “Which mountain is it, exactly?” Well, it can… We’re saying it can be several. One at a time, usually, but—

Fr. Stephen: But only usually.

Fr. Andrew: Right! Right, because— Well, not to get too far ahead of ourselves, but Mount Athos can be the mountain of God at the same time that I am experiencing the mountain of God here in Emmaus, Pennsylvania.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and that St. Catherine’s is at the mountain of God.

Right. So we’re now at: garden on a mountain. And so this we’ve talked about a few times, I think, so people are probably used to that, but we’ve got one more step to go here, and that’s that God—or the gods, depending on, again, whom we’re talking about here—wasn’t just viewed to sort of hang out and lounge and luxuriate in said garden on top of the mountain.

Fr. Andrew: Not like in Clash of the Titans where they’re just hanging out around some…?

Fr. Stephen: Eating some ambrosia? Yeah, leaning on a couch. [Laughter] Because, of course, they conducted business and this sort of thing. And the way they did that was really intense.

Fr. Andrew: Dun-dun-dunn!

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Right, so the idea was that they had actual tents.

Fr. Andrew: Tents.

Fr. Stephen: And this is not just tents the way we think of tents, like they were all camping up there.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, this is not the winter of our discount-tents.

Fr. Stephen: Wow.

Fr. Andrew: Ahh! See?

Fr. Stephen: Wow. That was uncalled-for. [Laughter] We have to bleep that out.

Anyway—and this is not like you may be picturing from some Roman military movie, the military camp with all the tents. Not that sort of thing. So we’re talking about the kind of tents that nomadic peoples of the Ancient Near East lived in.

Fr. Andrew: So, yurts?

Fr. Stephen: These were big tents. And the way this typically functioned was that sort of the head— Remember, we’re not talking about nuclear families; we’re talking about big, extended families, big households, that included… There was some patriarch figure at the head of it, and then you also had all the sons and daughters, their kids, all the cousins, all the aunts and uncles who are all together, plus all the hired servants, plus all the indentured servants, plus all the slaves, plus the animals, the families of all of those servants and slaves, in this huge organization, this huge clan structure. And so the people who were members of the family, who were at the head of the clan, typically were in one large sort of pavilion tent.

And the way that worked was: when someone came of age and got married—so when one of the sons or grandsons of the patriarch or the paterfamilias came of age and got married, which would typically be around 13, so it was when they became basically physically mature, they’d be married off… Their marriages were all arranged: probably to a cousin. So they were now going to form—they were going to begin having their own children. A portion of that large tent would sort of be sectioned off. They would hang up partition curtains, so there would be this new area of the tent that that couple would have, and these things would kind of get reshuffled when there was a new head of the whole family, but other than that it was fairly constant.

So this kind of arrangement is how, typically—and we’re going to go now to the Baal cycle, as one example of this; how the northern Canaanites and later Phoenicians saw this—this is how they saw their gods living, because, remember, as we talked about a little bit last time, they saw their gods as being related genealogically…

Fr. Andrew: So this is kind of “big tent paganism,” then.

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: Sorry. I have to get my jokes in here where I’ve got them! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Okay. So, for example, using the Baal cycle and those gods as an example, El, who is sort of the most high god and the father of the gods, those two being sort of equivalent titles, has this big tent in which the gods and goddesses who are considered to be his children have their own spaces. And so in the Baal cycle, those spaces for the other gods are referred to as the seven rooms, which are those sort of sectioned-off places; so they had their own space.

So then a big part of the overarching arch of the Baal cycle is that Baal sort of doesn’t have his own place within El’s tent, and his sister/wife, Anat, who is a very violent war goddess, gives out this rant to El, her dad, about how Baal should have his own place, and if El doesn’t give it to him, she’s going to crush his skull until his beard is soaked with gore.

Fr. Andrew: And you can read the Baal cycle online in the English translation, everybody, if you want to see what this actually looks like! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: It’s a beautiful religion.

Fr. Andrew: I was told that paganism is peaceful and nice and egalitarian and stuff, but…

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, well, it is a woman threatening, and not a man, so there you go. Women’s voices, being heard!

Fr. Andrew: Wow.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] But you can see here, too, as we’ve talked about before… We saw how in Daniel 7 some of the El imagery is used for God the Father. So you see the relationship between the gods of the nations and the most high god sort of reflected here.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, obviously this is a super dysfunctional family!

Fr. Stephen: Right, and it’s not friendly. They’re making demands; they’re issuing threats. And so then the big part of the arch, as we’ve described it before, in the Baal cycle, sort of ends up with Baal building his own palace—in the underworld, after he totally wins, like, totally. [Laughter] Defeats everyone… Doesn’t lose a single battle…

Fr. Andrew: I’m surprised this is not a t-shirt yet, what you’re saying right now.

Fr. Stephen: So that’s sort of that idea. Now, obviously there’s a lot of discontinuity between that and the view that the Israelites are going to hold. But they do have this view that this sort of this… When this is talked about, they don’t primarily see Yahweh the God of Israel as living in a big castle or palace; they have this tent idea. And one of the very—there’s a very familiar place in the New Testament where this comes out, but it kind of gets buried by the English translation.

Fr. Andrew: Right, there’s that point where Jesus is talking to his disciples about—when he’s about to ascend into heaven, and he says he’s going to prepare a place for them. And he has this line—and here’s the version that most people probably know: “In my Father’s house are many mansions,” which, then, of course, is the inspiration for that classical—I don’t know if it’s a Baptist song, but a lot of Baptists sing it: “I’ve got a mansion just over the hilltop,” where you’ve got this image of a kind of strange, suburban heaven. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, with McMansions lining the roads.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly!

Fr. Stephen: The streets of gold! Lined with mansions.

Fr. Andrew: But, no, it’s not “In my Father’s house are many mansions”; it’s really: “In my Father’s tent are many partitions.” That’s really the image that Christ is really saying, which means that Christians are going to live with him as part of this extended family. It’s not that everybody has their own great little nuclear-family mansion. Think about that for a second, right: If every Christian has a mansion just over the hilltop, does anyone live with each other? Is there an actual communion or love going? Everybody’s got their own private—this is hell. Hell is where everybody’s… [Laughter] It’s really awful.

Fr. Stephen: And somehow everybody’s mansion is inside one house, too.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. “In my Father’s house are many…”

Fr. Stephen: So it doesn’t even make any sense as a translation.

Fr. Andrew: No. Yeah… But this is the image that’s being used, and of course it’s not just image of being part of God’s family and dwelling with God, but there’s also also contained in that, when Christ said that, is this notion of theosis, because he’s referencing an image which they would have known, which is the image of the gods all living together in a big tent.

Fr. Stephen: The sons of God.

Fr. Andrew: The sons of God, right!

Fr. Stephen: The sons of God would be the ones who have their own partitions within the big tent.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and that’s not the end of the episode, everybody! [Laughter] But it’s a great little conclusion to some of the stuff we’ve been talking about. But we’re not even done with the first half!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and just as a tease, that understanding—remember, it’s the sons who have the place in the tent. The slaves and the servants don’t. And so think of all the language in St. Paul about distinguishing us as sons of God from slaves or servants. This understanding plays into all of that, but we can’t go down that rabbit-hole right now. Maybe a future episode.

Fr. Andrew: In a future episode.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Mark off your bingo card. When you kind of put this all together—our big tent, in a garden, on a mountain—you get to the idea we’ve talked about before, of the mountain of assembly, or, in Hebrew, har mo’ed. And we’ve talked before about how that is actually what gets transliterated into “Armageddon” in Revelation. It’s nothing to do with Megiddo; I’m sorry. I know we want to find physical places for everything, but it has nothing to do with Megiddo. It has to do with the nations motivated by demonic powers laying siege to the mountain of God, har mo’ed. And the reason you get a “guh” in there is that mo’ed has—language nerds—an ayin in it, which was originally pronounced as kind of a “guh” sound.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, sort of a glottal—almost a glottal stop, almost.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so the e in har— Har mo’ed is pronounced—spelled, well, transliterated, I should say—in English: H-a-r, har (that means mountain), and then “assembly” is mo’ed; that’s usually transliterated m-o-e-d, and the e there is the ayin. So if you imagine replacing that e with a g so it’s m-o-g-d, mogd, you can see how you get “Armageddon” out of it.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, har mogd. That’s Fr. Stephen’s Philology Corner! There you go.

Fr. Stephen: There you go! [Laughter] Nothing like guttural sounds. So anyway, this is the mountain of assembly, because this is the gathering place of the divine council; this is the place where they gather in the tents. So this is, as we mentioned, depending on your neighbor of Israel… There are several mountains of God in Israel but they— Mount Zaphon, if we’re talking about Baal; Olympus, if we’re talking about the Greeks; and you can throw in your northern European one.

Fr. Andrew: My bit of Norse mythology? Not exactly a neighbor of Israel, but you’ve got Himinbjörg which actually interestingly is Heimdallr’s mountain, but it does actually mean the heavenly mountain or the heavenly fortress, because fortresses and mountains are pretty much the same thing in ancient Germanic.

Fr. Stephen: You build them on the high place, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly. And, weirdly enough, it’s also a term used for where you bury people, because it’s usually in hills and stuff. So there’s that sense of the inverted— You’ve got the kind of inverted mountain built into the word. But, yeah, this sort of heavenly mountain where the gods are, with some variation in the mythologies as to exactly what that means.

Fr. Stephen: Right, but there’s always some kind of council meeting happening, where they gather. And this shows us that St. Peter knew what was going on actually, even though we tend to pick on him a lot, on the Mount of Transfiguration. So on the Mount of Transfiguration, when he sees Christ conversing with Moses and Elijah, and he suggests that they build tents on top of the mountain for them…

Fr. Andrew: Or booths, as it gets translated in some translations. But, yeah, it’s this idea—

Fr. Stephen: Mansions. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: I hope you brought your construction lumber there, James! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: So, yeah, he understands he’s watching a divine council meeting.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: That’s what he understands is happening here, and that’s why he thinks it would be the appropriate thing to do, because this is the image and the understanding he has in his mind.

And so all this means now—I think we’re actually going to get to our topic in the second half tonight rather than waiting till the third half. So when Moses goes up on the mountain of God, to receive the Torah, when he goes up there—when they send him up there, because everybody else is terrified—

Fr. Andrew: You go! Yeah, because they see all the thunder and the lightning and all that kind of stuff going on.

Fr. Stephen: The darkness shrouding the peak. They’re like: “Yeah, you go see what’s going on up there, Moses.”

Fr. Andrew: “Let us know.”

Fr. Stephen: “Report back to us.” This is where Moses is going. Moses is going up to the peak of the mountain; he’s going up to the garden; he’s going up to where the divine council is meeting. He’s entering into this tent. And this is why—this understanding is why you have, as you alluded to earlier, you have these texts in the New Testament that refer to the law being given by or through angels. Like St. Stephen refers to it in his sermon in Acts 7:53; it gets referred to in Hebrews 2:2. St. Paul develops it a little more in Galatians 3:19-20, but that’s because there St. Paul is wanting to point out that it was Christ himself serving as a mediator who gave the law through the angels, when you throw in verse 20, because if you just read verse 19—again, if you chop things up and don’t read context—it says it was given by angels through a mediator. You might think: “Oh, Moses!” But if you read verse 20, St. Paul immediately says, “Now, ‘mediator’ implies more than one, but we know that God is one.”

Fr. Andrew: Right. It’s God: one.

Fr. Stephen: So who’s he talking about?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s Christ. And he’s not saying— It’s funny, because he’s not countering the idea of it being Moses; he’s sort of countering the idea of there being a second God.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so if he was just talking about Moses, then saying that makes no sense. It’s irrelevant to anything. But he is picking up on a further elaboration of this tradition, that you can see, for example, in the book of Jubilees. The book of Jubilees, sort of the frame story is Moses on top of the mountain. So Moses receives the contents of Genesis 1-11 as an apocalyptic vision, for example. And so Jubilees has all these elaborations. So not only in Jubilees is Moses there in the divine council and there are angels through whom the Torah is received, in addition to the angels, plural, there is one particular being, the Angel of the Presence, who is this Angel of the Lord figure that we talked about in the episode so named, Angel of Yahweh, this figure. And so that’s what St. Paul is really referencing there in Galatians 3; he’s referencing not only the angels, plural, being there, but also this figure, and this figure who is and isn’t Yahweh the God of Israel, whom St. Paul is—not so subtly when you know the context—identifying with Christ.

So the important part of this is when Moses goes up there and enters into this tent where the divine council is, and bears witness to all this and receives the Torah, when he comes back down and we start talking about worship spaces for humans, beginning with the tabernacle, the tabernacle is made after the pattern of what he saw on the mountain. And Hebrews says so.

Fr. Andrew: Right, exactly. Okay, so this is Hebrews 8:1-6. And you’ll hear this; you’ll hear this in here.

Now the point in what we are saying is this: We have such a high priest, one who is seated at the right hand of the throne of the majesty in heaven, a minister in the holy places, in the true tent that the Lord set up, not man. For every high priest is appointed to offer gifts and sacrifices; thus it is necessary for this priest also to have something to offer. Now if he were on earth, he would not be a priest at all, since there are priests who offer gifts according to the law. They serve a copy and shadow of the heavenly things. For when Moses was about to erect the tent, he was instructed by God, saying, “See that you make everything according to the pattern that was shown you on the mountain.” But as it is, Christ has obtained a ministry that is as much more excellent than the old as the covenant he mediates is better, since it is enacted on better promises.

It’s interesting, that line from verse five: “See that you make everything according to the pattern that was shown you on the mountain.” I imagine one reading of that might be to say: “Oh, God gave him a kind of a set of blueprints for the tabernacle,” but if we understand what he saw on the mountain, it’s: “No, no, no. You were in the tent of God, and so go make that down there.”

Fr. Stephen: Right, and that’s the beginning of verse five that they were to make a copy and shadow of the heavenly things.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly.

Fr. Stephen: Right, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: All right, well, that is our first half. We’re going to take a short break, and we will be right back.

Fr. Andrew: Welcome back. This is the second half of the show. Again, though, we’re not taking any calls, despite what you heard from the Voice of Steve, because this is a pre-recorded episode, because Fr. Stephen is away at a retreat when we normally would be airing this live. We’ll be back in a future episode live, but it’s going to be a little while.

Okay, so we just finished up talking about that passage from Hebrews 8, where it references that Moses is told by God to make the tabernacle after the pattern of what he saw when he was up on the mountain of God, that tent there that he saw. So that’s where we left off. All right, well, as you mentioned, we’re going to actually get to our officially stated topic, which is the tabernacle, right here in the second half. So welcome back!

Fr. Stephen: Yes. Yeah, what we were talking about before was in-tents, and this is going to be even more in-tents.

Fr. Andrew: Yes. Wow. The dad joke list in this episode is already very long! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yes. And really, a lot of these are going back to the same well, just over and over again. Milkin’ it! I’m Dutch: we do dairy farming; it’s a thing.

So the tabernacle, as such, is a tent-shrine. And it’s not the only tent-shrine in the Ancient Near East. It is a little unusual in that it is presented as, in the Torah, and treated as if, at least in the early historical books, as permanent, as this being—this tent-shrine is going to be the sort of permanent shrine, temple for Yahweh the God of Israel, whereas typically in the Ancient Near East, those were—you’d have a temple: the permanent temple would be a permanent physical building.

Fr. Andrew: Made out of stone.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and tent-shrines, then, were usually used on sort of temporary and occasional bases. So one example is we have an Ugaritic ritual where at a certain time of year, they would sacrifice a donkey, and they did it at a particular spot. And so they put up a tent-shrine at that spot at that time, and then they would go and get the idols, the bodies of the gods, and sort of process and haul them out to the tent-shrine, offer them the donkey sacrifice, and then sort of take them all back home, to their temples.

Fr. Andrew: Now, would this donkey sacrifice be something that the people would eat as well, or was it like a whole-burnt thing?

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: So they would eat it. And since you become what you’re in communion with, then through this sacrifice they were literally making asses of themselves.

Fr. Stephen: Wow.

Fr. Andrew: Thank you very much.

Fr. Stephen: Wow.

Fr. Andrew: I didn’t even write that joke down beforehand. It just came to me.

Fr. Stephen: Next pre-record, we’re doing in the evening, because… Yeah.

Fr. Andrew: Am I too punny in the morning? Is that the problem?

Fr. Stephen: A little bit, yeah. This amount of punishment…

Fr. Andrew: I’ve got more coffee.

Fr. Stephen: ...is more than we can take.

Fr. Andrew: A lot of coffee in me this morning.

Fr. Stephen: So we need to let your children sort of wear you down a little bit.

Fr. Andrew: “Come back when you’ve been beat up by your kids a little bit, Fr. Andrew.” [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Right, so it’s that kind of temporary thing and not a permanent thing. And this is what sort of creates the tension when we get to David, because sort of culturally and everything, David is thinking, “Hey, this is weird. I’ve got a capital city now; I have a permanent home. Shouldn’t the God of Israel also have…?”

Fr. Andrew: Right, there’s that line in the psalms where he says, “I’m not going to sleep until I’ve made a place, a habitation for the God of Jacob.”

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so there’s this idea that… So he is aware that this is irregular, because this is irregular for the ancient world. But we have to remember that one of the constant themes all through the Old Testament was that Israel was never really supposed to fully settle in the land, because, as it says in Deuteronomy: “Now out here in the wilderness you’re dependent on me”—and things already weren’t going that great in the wilderness—“but once you get into the land and you settle down and you plant crops and you harvest them year after year, and you plant vineyards and everything, you’re going to forget about God, and you’re going to sort of fall away from all this.” So there’s constant things like the feast of tabernacles.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, to bring them back out to go live in booths, in tents again.

Fr. Stephen: Bring them back out.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, so a question just occurred to me. Obviously, we’re not saying… David has this idea that he needs to build a temple, something actually more permanent. And I mentioned that line from the psalms, where he says he’s not going to rest until he’s made a habitation for the God of Jacob. And I haven’t checked whether any of the Fathers interpret this way, or if there’s any indication in the New Testament that this gets interpreted, but could we say that David fulfilled his own prophecy by being the ancestor of the Theotokos?

Fr. Stephen: Right, yeah, by being the ancestor of Christ.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that he—

Fr. Stephen: Through the Theotokos, he became the grand-parent of Christ, as it says in the hymn.

Fr. Andrew: That he does form a habitation for the God of Jacob, through his distant granddaughter, the Theotokos. Cool.

Fr. Stephen: And in terms of the physical building, God is always kind of resistant to David on it.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah! [Laughter] Like: “No… No, that’s not…”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so, again, part of this is: Yeah, God’s not settled; you shouldn’t be either. That you should continue to… And we’re going to get more into that later in this third half. We’re going to talk more about when the Temple actually gets built and why—more of the reasons why God was resistant to it.

So we’re going to start with the tabernacle, because the tabernacle is— If you’ve read through the book of Exodus, you’ve read in excruciating detail everything about the tabernacle, its construction, and the furnishings and all of that, twice.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s basically blueprints and architectural plans in verbal form.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, and so first you have all the instructions, and then you have the narrative of them fulfilling the exact same instructions, so you literally read it twice, in the same level of detail. So we’re going to kind of start on the outside and work our way in, to give an idea of what the tabernacle, as patterned, looked like. So we’re starting with the outer court. When we think of the tabernacle, we tend to just think of the tent, but the tent of the tabernacle is inside a sort of courtyard that’s formed by hanging curtains. So there’s a demarcation.

Fr. Andrew: And if you go and just do a Google image search—really, you can just type in “tabernacle” and do a Google image search on it—you will come up with a lot of diagrams and images that are pretty good for this.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, models kids made in Sunday school.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] And I have to say… So my great-great-grandfather, who was a Baptist preacher up in New England, he had a thing that he did… So he served at a bunch of churches up there, but he also had a touring talk that he did about the tabernacle, and he had some kind of model that he would take around with him and give sort of tours of it to people and explain it and so forth. And I’ve seen actually—I saw a flyer for this at one point. It’s maintained somewhere in my family’s archives. So, yeah, I mean, this is totally a thing, and especially if you grew up low-church Protestant, you’ve probably seen these models, like you said, stuff that kids build in Sunday school and all that kind of stuff. But, yeah, there’s a lot of pretty decent diagrams and illustrations and stuff that you can find online.

And you’ll see, like you said, there’s this tent in the middle, and then there’s a kind of fence all the way around it, made with curtains, effectively, although it’s not curtains like you’d have in your living room.

Fr. Stephen: No.

Fr. Andrew: This is structural curtains that you have, essentially.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, like you’d use for the side of a tent.

Fr. Andrew: Right, exactly. There’s a tent-fence, and then a tent in the center, and there’s a big courtyard that’s made by the fence.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and, frankly, a lot of the stuff that we think about as happening in the tabernacle actually happened in the outer court, inside this outer court area. This is where sacrifices take place. This includes the area called the prothesis, which is where the animal was sort of butchered and separated, or, if we’re talking about wheat cakes, where the cakes were separated and sorted and whatever was being sacrificed, where it was sort of portioned out and everything, whatever it needed to be, before the actual sacrifice.

But then the two major pieces of furniture in this area, to sort of facilitate that, were the copper laver—

Fr. Andrew: Right, which is a big bowl on a stand.

Fr. Stephen: A big copper bowl on a stand—but the word “laver” shows up in a lot of Antiochian translations.

Fr. Andrew: I love that word, “laver.” It does. I think it’s from the King James is where you get it.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, it is, so you get a lot of— If you read Quasten’s Patrology, he loves that word. But, yeah: big copper bowl on a stand; it’s full of water, and that water was used for ritual washings for the priest, as they’re coming in and going out: coming into the courtyard, going from the courtyard into the tent proper.

Fr. Andrew: And that’s to sort of wash off whatever uncleanness they’ve brought with them.

Fr. Stephen: Primarily hands and feet: washing their hands and washing their feet. So that is there, and then the other major piece of furniture is then the one we think about most in the courtyard: the altar of burnt offering. Both the place where the sacrifices are prepared and the place where the sacrifices are offered is in this outer court.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, so there’s sort of two tables out there: the one where stuff is actually burnt up…

Fr. Stephen: Right, that’s not really a table; that’s more of a big grill with coals.

Fr. Andrew: Oh! Oh, interesting. But that’s the altar of burnt offering.

Fr. Stephen: Right.

Fr. Andrew: And so there’s probably more of a table, which is for—the prothesis, for butchering and separating and cutting.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And so, as we’ve mentioned before, people would come to the entrance and give whatever they were sacrificing. It would be taken into the courtyard by the priests. They would take it to the prothesis, they’d get everything arranged how they wanted to, they’d go and offer the portions that are being offered to God on the altar of burnt offering, and then come back and give the offer, whatever parts are for them and keep the parts that are for the priests.

Fr. Andrew: Now they would stay outside, the offerers?

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, they don’t get to go into the fence.

Fr. Stephen: Right. They didn’t get to just go in there and mill around.

Fr. Andrew: There’s a lot of references—I’ve noticed this in Exodus and Leviticus and Numbers—there’s a lot of references of people being brought to the gate of the tabernacle, and lots of things happening right there at that gate.

Fr. Stephen: Right. So these two things, you can see—and this is especially— I mean, it’s kind of obvious that this laver, this washing, this is sort of preparatory purification, like for service in the tabernacle, but the same applies to the sacrifices. Most of the sacrifices, most of the sacrificial system, is aimed at establishing and continuing communion with God to allow for what’s going to go on inside the actual tabernacle.

Fr. Andrew: So what’s happening out in the outer courts is prep for going into the holy place.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so it’s purification, it’s allowing God to continue to dwell there, allowing people to draw near without experiencing death by holiness. Yeah. So as we move into the holy place, this is the more substantive part of what’s going on.

Fr. Andrew: Right, so this is hidden by this inner tent.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and there are going to be certain priests who are allotted at certain times to have this inner ministry. And the reason I say this is more central is that when we get glimpses—we already talked about how Moses is constructing this as an icon, as a representation of what he saw on the mountain—but when we see, for example, Isaiah or Ezekiel see heavenly worship, or St. John, for that matter, see heavenly worship, the heavenly worship they see is not the stuff that’s going on in the courtyard. They don’t see people offering animal sacrifices and washing their hands. What they see in the heavenly sanctuary is what goes on inside the tent.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and we should again—just to double down—the tent here is deliberately patterned after this tent that is the dwelling-place of God with the sons of God that Moses sees on the mountain.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so now, as we move into the tent proper, now there’s going to be the back portion of the tent—the most holy place is sectioned off by this heavy curtain. And as we talked about before, only the high priest can go back there, only one day a year, on the day of atonement.

Fr. Andrew: So in the tent there’s a kind of larger space, and then there’s the most innermost place that’s sectioned off within that tent.

Fr. Stephen: Right, where most of the time don’t nobody go. So most of the worship is taking place, obviously, outside of that curtain, but within the tent proper of the tabernacle.

And so we’ve got some more pieces of furniture in here. We’ve got that we talked about recently, the table of the shewbread.

Fr. Andrew: The “shew” bread. The King James Version… [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: As it’s spelled, yes. And we’ve talked about that, the bread of the presence, that this is the table where the bread is not to feed to God, but through which God feeds the priests who are in there during their allotted service, to strengthen them for service so that they can carry out their duties. And it’s important that they’re fed in there, because again there’s this whole elaborate thing about them coming and going. This allows them to remain there and be strengthened.

And then, central to the tabernacle, is the altar of incense, which is a horned altar.

Fr. Andrew: Right, which kind of looks like… It’s hard to describe exactly what it looks like, but it’s sort of a plinth of sorts. There are stone versions of this. I’m assuming the version they carried around with them would not have been stone, or it would not have been—

Fr. Stephen: Right, you can read all the details in the book of Exodus.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly. So it’s sort of a plinth, flat place on top, and then there’s four “bits” that stick up on the corners, and these are regarded as the “horns” of the altar. They’re not actually made of animal horns; it’s just that they’re horn-shaped. And so the overall effect is it’s almost like a brazier, but a brazier is usually kind of more basket-shaped on top, but it’s the same sort of idea, that you’ve got this flat spot where the incense gets burned and then these four horns sticking up on the corners.

Fr. Stephen: Right. Coals are kindled on that and kept burning on that. It’s sometimes slightly concave, not like a bowl, but a little concave. And you have the coals burning in there, and then incense is offered on the coals. And then, when you’re using a censer from that, that was used to transport incense. So one of the coals and some incense was taken from the altar of incense, put into the censer, and that would then make it mobile so you could take the incense.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, sort of taking this sacrifice, being offered on this altar, kind of on the road, so to speak, or out from the altar itself.

Fr. Stephen: In order to bring the purifying effects of the offering to some particular place or thing. Again, the style of the incense altar is not—as you alluded to, there’s plenty of pictures of stone ones—it wasn’t like a completely different style than other ones in the Ancient Near East. Slightly different composition of materials, but there may have been very similar ones for materials that we just don’t have any more, because, you know, wood deteriorates.

Fr. Andrew: And again, if you go to Google image search and just type in, “incense altar,” in between stuff from video games, interestingly enough, you can see various drawings that seem to basically kind of fit, that would be this sort of thing.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. It’s like when you search for “Lord of Spirits,” you either get this podcast or a bunch of anime stuff.

Fr. Andrew: I don’t think I’ve discovered that! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Not related in any way. I am not a weeb, ladies and gentlemen. Anyway. And then the other major piece of furniture in that space is the candlestand, which we now probably think of as a menorah, the seven-branch lampstand.

Fr. Andrew: But why are there seven?

Fr. Stephen: Yes, some people ask why are there seven lights. Don’t ask Picard; he gets all worked up about this, how many lights there are.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] That’s right. Four.

Fr. Stephen: There are seven lights, because there are seven planets.

Fr. Andrew: So what are the seven planets?

Fr. Stephen: Those being the sun, the moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.

Fr. Andrew: Right. Obviously, defined differently than we do in the modern era, because this is what they call a geocentric model of the universe.

Fr. Stephen: They’re planets because they’re wanderers because they don’t follow the general track of the stars.

Fr. Andrew: Right, because the word “planet” means wanderer.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so the fact that we don’t hold to that cosmology any more is not relevant to this, because the point is you have these seven lights within the tent, as there are seven lights in the sky under the heavens.

Fr. Andrew: Right, there’s this concept, then, that the tabernacle itself is a microcosm of the universe, and this is being represented by this seven-branch candlestand.

Fr. Stephen: Right, because, ultimately, where does God live? He doesn’t live in a place outside his creation. He lives in his creation. And of course, within this…

Fr. Andrew: Though not contained by it. We should make that clear.

Fr. Stephen: Just like he wasn’t contained by the tabernacle.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly!

Fr. Stephen: Right, and then of course, as we mentioned before, woven into the veils, the sides of the tabernacle and into the curtain before the holy of holies, are images of cherubim, the heavenly throne-guardians. So there is this iconographic recreation of the divine council as well. And the primary worship, remember, the first commandment on worship that’s given in the Torah is that incense is to be offered at morning and evening with prayer. So that’s the kindling of the lamps and the trimming of the lamps, at morning and evening: that’s sunrise and sunset. So this incense is the sort of regular pattern, and it’s what we see, as we mentioned a little bit ago, when we see the worship of heaven. When you go to Isaiah and he’s standing there in the divine council, this is the worship that’s being offered. There’s an incense altar there, and you see angelic beings with censers, Revelation across the board: this is the worship. So this is what’s going on inside the tent, by designated priests, at designated times, unless you want to end up like Nadab and Abihu, with even a particular recipe for the incense, that all allows them to draw this close.

Then you get to the most holy place, or the holy of holies, the sanctum sanctorum, minus Dr. Strange.

Fr. Andrew: Is Dr. Strange meant to be a priest? Tune in next time—

Fr. Stephen: No. He’s not, no.

Fr. Andrew: He’s a sorcerer.

Fr. Stephen: But he calls his house in Greenwich Village his sanctum sanctorum.

Fr. Andrew: I know.

Fr. Stephen: That’s the reference.

Fr. Andrew: No, I know; I know.

Fr. Stephen: Okay. So within the most holy place, obviously the most prominent thing, while it was still around, before Ethiopians or whoever else took it, is the ark of the covenant. And we talked last time about how—about the differences between the ark of the covenant and idols, and how that worked. But again you have this imagery of the cherubim of the footstool of the throne of God, and that “footstool” language is important, because it’s not that they thought God lived inside the box, but that this footstool, this is the point of contact. If you’re going to go and meet with the king and make a request, you go and bow down by his feet where he’s enthroned, and you make your request. So this is a point of contact.

And then, of course, the other stuff that was back there, at least for a while… Within the ark were the two tablets of the covenant, and just to reiterate: this is two copies.

Fr. Andrew: It’s not commandments one through five and then six through ten?

Fr. Stephen: No, it’s not that they ran out of space. The commandments are really short in Hebrew. [Laughter] That they ran out of space, it wasn’t making a point about “these are about God and these are about your neighbor.” None of that is original. It’s two copies of the same covenant, and that’s because, as I believe we’ve mentioned before, it was common when a covenant was issued in the Ancient Near East that there would be two copies. One the king would keep, because he was going to—obviously, he was party to it. He was the one issuing the covenant; he was going to then enforce it. The other one was taken and placed at the feet of the god—the idol of the god, obviously—the god in the temple: they’d place it at his feet. The god was called upon to bear witness to the covenant and help with the enforcement. So their king and their God is Yahweh.

Fr. Andrew: Right, he’s both.

Fr. Stephen: And so both copies are put in the ark at his footstool. He’s the one issuing the covenant and the one enforcing it and God.

And then, not in the ark—I know! People think these were in the ark, but they were not in the ark; they were next to the ark.

Fr. Andrew: Next to the ark.

Fr. Stephen: In the holy of holies were the jar of manna, Aaron’s rod that budded, that designated him as the high priest. Those two things were kept there also, and they disappear even before the ark does. And there’s a comment in the Old Testament that they had disappeared at a certain point, but we’re never told how, why, to whom.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I was going to say. No sense that God took them or that someone stole them or they’re just gone.

Fr. Stephen: No. I mean, the ark disappears and we’re not even actually told that they realized it had disappeared at a particular point. But we are actually told that they’re like: “Well, the ark’s there and the tablets are still in it, but this other stuff’s gone.”

Fr. Andrew: So that’s the tabernacle.

Fr. Stephen: Those are the contents.

Fr. Andrew: The outer court, the inner tent with its two partitions.

Fr. Stephen: The accoutrements.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly. With all of its furniture and so forth. And as you said, though, David thought that there needed to be a stone temple, because he’s got his Jerusalem now, and David lives in a nice house: shouldn’t God live in a nice house?

Fr. Stephen: Right. There’s a certain logic to it. But, beyond even just what we talked about, about God wanting to try to help Israel not feel so settled, there are other issues with having one. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so what else is going on there? And, surprise, surprise: paganism is involved.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so I mean it’s very clear. He’s pretty clear with David: “I don’t really want this!” And then, when David really pushes through, he says, “Well, you’re not doing it.” He basically forbids David to do it.

Fr. Andrew: Right, Solomon ends up doing it—and doesn’t give any instructions on how to build it.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and he says, “Your son will build it,” but even that isn’t: “I want your son to build it”; it’s more: “Enh, your son’s going to do it.” [Laughter] And then even with Solomon, there’s this ambivalence. And God doesn’t give— You see the excruciating detail given twice in Exodus with the tabernacle.

Fr. Andrew: Right!

Fr. Stephen: And there is nowhere in the Old Testament any kind of similar instructions for the Temple. We get a description of the Temple and what Solomon did, but he’s never sort of commanded. Now, there is this verse—there’s somebody out there already listening to this, that they probably forgot we’re not live and they picked up the phone to try to call in and “Um, actually” us, with this verse in 1 Chronicles 28 that talks about David giving Solomon plans. And David says, “Hey, I planned everything out the way God put it in my heart.”

Fr. Andrew: Right, but that’s not—

Fr. Stephen: And they’re going to say, “No, God did give David plans! See?”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, but the thing is, it’s such a contrast to the way that God lays out the tabernacle. Like, he’s going to tell Moses with all this sort of blueprint kind of language, and then he’s just going to sort of put it in David’s heart? And, here’s the thing, it’s just David saying that; there’s no point where it says, “And the word of the Lord came to David, king of Israel, and said unto him…”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and what David is literally saying in the original is: “God put it on my heart to build him a temple, and here’s the plans I came up with.” Which is not the same thing. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Right, so I’m looking at the verse. It says:

Hear me, my brothers and my people, I had it in my heart to build a house of rest for the ark of the covenant of the Lord and for the footstool of our God, and I made preparations for building.

And then verse three!

But God said to me, “You may not build a house for my name, for you are a man of war and have shed blood.”

So immediately it’s followed by: “No… no…”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, but: “So here’s the plan, Solomon. Here’s what I was working on.” And you really see this brought out when you read the long prayers about—there’s this long prayer that Solomon gives at the dedication of the Temple, and there’s sort of God’s response. And there’s a very noted contrast there, because Solomon is very much like: “Lord, Yahweh God of Israel, answer all the prayers of all those who pray toward this building, and everything they ask for give it to them, and do whatever we want when we do the ritual in the building…” [Laughter] It’s very much in that direction.

Fr. Andrew: It’s kind of pagan…

Fr. Stephen: “I’m going to enchant the building so it’ll be magic building.” And God’s response is basically: “I don’t live in buildings made by human hands. I don’t want this. I don’t need this.”

Fr. Andrew: “This is not how this works. This is not how any of this works.” [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: And then sort of ends up with: “But—I will condescend to dwell here, and I will answer your prayers when they’re the right prayers.” [Laughter] And so God very much—not just continues to express ambivalence, but says this is a condescension, and he’s not going to be limited by it. He says I’m going to place my name here; I’m going to put my presence here, and at that dedication it is filled with the theophanic glory cloud, so God does dwell there, but he keeps himself detached from the physical building. He says, “I’m not only going to be here, and I’m not always going to be here, but I will condescend to be here.”

And the reason for that is part of the way temples functioned in the pagan world. We’ve talked a lot about in idolatry, how the idol became a body of the god, a hypostasis of the god, but in many ways they believed the temple building, similarly, was itself sort of a body of the god.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and I was just going to say, for those who are kind of wanting to look up the stuff that we just talked about, that’s in 2 Chronicles 6. You can see the prayer of dedication and God’s response and all that kind of stuff is there.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. It’s also in 1 Kings. Once you have that idea, that the temple itself is sort of seen and utilized the way an idol is, then the way Solomon was talking kind of makes sense. We talked about how the idol is sort of this point of leverage, so the temple building itself could be such a point of leverage.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, a god-trap, as it were.

Fr. Stephen: And not just the building of it; it was seen as doing something for: “I’ve made a house for you. I’ve made a place for you to live. I’m your landlord.”

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Wow. Yeah, right. Man.

Fr. Stephen: And it was seen to sort of impose an obligation. So, for example, when Arminius—not that one—the German general defeated the Roman legions in Germany, there was a period of time where the Romans would go and throw rocks at the temples and throw curses at them, because they were saying, “We built you these beautiful temples and we offered you all these sacrifices, gods, and you didn’t—you blew it! Our army lost.”

Fr. Andrew: They see it as hurting the gods by throwing rocks at their temples.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so it’s sort of like: “Ah, bums!” Like when the Yankees lose; everybody’s like: “Ehh!” [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: The worthless ones, to make a call-back to one of our previous.

Fr. Stephen: And you see this reflected not only in Solomon’s prayer but in the design, because he basically built a Phoenician temple. One of the features, for example, is the two pillars, the two prominent pillars at the front, made of different materials. And those pillars are—I mean, everybody argues about this, because, you know, journal articles and dissertations have to be written—but one common way of viewing what’s going on with two pillars in Phoenician temples, made of these two different materials, is that they represent sort of the carotid and the jugular. So the idea being that the temple building is sort of the god’s heart.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and for those of you it’s been a long time since you studied any anatomy or whatever, that’s the “to” and “from” passages to the human heart.

Fr. Stephen: Well, from the heart to the brain, through your neck.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, excuse me. Right.

Fr. Stephen: Which, if you cut, you’re dead. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: So don’t do that, everyone!

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: That’s the pastoral application of what we were just saying.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so that’s sort of the vital power, that there’s sort of divine life embued into this building. And you see this, that this view was sort of—this isn’t just sort of Solomon yielding to paganism—as he was wont—but this is carried on in Judah all the way to the end, because this was one of the problems Jeremiah has. So there’s a whole bunch of people— Jeremiah is coming and giving these prophecies of doom and destruction, and everybody’s calling him a false prophet and saying these other prophets, who were the actual false prophets, who were saying, “No, everything’s good!”—the “ ‘peace, peace!’ but there is no peace” folks—these are the real prophets, and part of their evidence was: “Well, look! Yahweh’s temple is here. He can’t let anything happen to his temple!” So the building itself is this sort of magical talisman that God is somehow bound to. And we all know, of course, that the God of Israel’s response to that was: Nope. [Laughter] He was perfectly capable of leaving. But that was their idea.

Now this idea of the Temple as body of God gets repurposed in Ezekiel.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, he re— I don’t know; he ret-cons it on some level.

Fr. Stephen: Right, he takes it an inverts it a little bit, because here’s one of the interesting things—sorry, dispensationalists… Yeah, let’s talk to the dispensationalists.

Fr. Andrew: Okay. [Laughter] Okay, dispensationalists: sit down.

Fr. Stephen: Our dispensationalist friends—

Fr. Andrew: Oh, no! You’ve called them “friends”! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: —are wont to point out that the Temple built in the days of Ezra and Nehemiah, the Temple dedicated by the Maccabees, Herod’s Temple—none of those temples matched the description of the Temple in Ezekiel. They point that out. But then they conclude from that that, well, that must mean that a temple exactly matching this is going to be built… some time in the future, the end times, within a generation of 1948—oops, never mind that part.

Fr. Andrew: Right, yep.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] So here’s the problem with that—is that if the original hearers of Ezekiel’s prophecy—Ezekiel’s in the exile—if the original hearers interpreted this literally in that sense—“This is going to be the measurements, etc., of the Temple of the future”—why didn’t they rebuild it that way?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, they built something else.

Fr. Stephen: They built something else. Why didn’t the Maccabees, when they rededicated it, build it that way? Herod! Herod’s reconstruction was more elaborate in a lot of ways, and more difficult. Herod was aware of the book of Ezekiel. And the Sadducees who were running the Temple were intimately aware of it; that’s why they called themselves Zadokites. They were trying to cast themselves as those future priests. Why didn’t they want the Temple to match? Because none of them read it that way. This is why we have to say, “Sorry, dispensationalists.” None of them read it that way, and none of the early Christians read it that way.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, you don’t find anywhere early Christians say, “Okay now, we need to build a temple that matches this description in Ezekiel.”

Fr. Stephen: No, you find quite the opposite. The only people you find talking about the Jewish Temple getting rebuilt are people saying the Antichrist is going to do it, and that’s mostly after Julian the Apostate tried to do it, because, you know, they said Julian the Apostate, he’s kind of an antichrist.

But the point being that the original Jewish hearers—so, Second Temple Judaism, worshiping in a Temple that didn’t match this one—read this typologically. They thought that this description of the Temple was conveying certain truths; they didn’t read it as: “There is someday going to be a physical building that matches this.” And so those typological readings sort of found their end and found their fulfillment in early Christians who read this as—read this typologically, but read this referring to Christ.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, not to a building.

Fr. Stephen: So this Temple is the body of God because it’s Christ, Christ’s body. And when I say “early Christians,” I mean like, for example, St. John the Evangelist.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because Christ himself says—he refers to his body… And John supplies this interpretation: “You will tear down this temple, and then I will raise it again in three days.” And then it says: “And by this he meant his body.”

Fr. Stephen: Yes, St. John is good about the parenthetical notes, just in case you’re not tracking.

Fr. Andrew: Thank you; thank you, St. John. [Laughter] So there’s other problems with—getting back to Solomon’s Temple, there’s other problems with it, like big, big problems.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. So we talked about paganism as was Solomon’s wont. I mean, we all know this is why he ended up losing his kingdom. It’s because he didn’t just build this Temple; he built a lot more, to other gods from his other wives. But even this Temple he didn’t do so well. It’s not just that, oh, yeah, he had the Temple of Yahweh the God of Israel, and then he had a Baal temple down the street, and then he had an Egyptian temple down the street from that. He even messed up with this one. So this is a tale of two chariots.

If you go back to 1 Chronicles 28, and you read verse 18, it talks about how part of David’s idea was to have sort of a chariot-throne surrounding the ark of the covenant, within the holy of holies, within the permanent building. And this was there. This was built, and one was built in the second Temple, too, by the way; even though they didn’t have the ark of the covenant, they still had the big cherubim-throne back there, where it would have been. And those cherubim, by the way, for interested people, once when the Romans destroyed the Temple in AD 70, which—sorry, preterists—was actually not that big of a deal, but when they destroyed the Temple in AD 70, those cherubim were taken to Antioch, those huge cherubim from the Temple, because Antioch was the second-largest Jewish population in the world at the time.

Fr. Andrew: So it was kind of rubbing it in their faces.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, and they were put on display there, both to rub it in their face, and they wanted to prevent that Jewish community from revolting the way Jerusalem had. Romans were good at object lessons.

But now this chariot-throne, representing the throne of Yahweh the God of Israel, who got to see that? The high priest, once a year, through a haze of incense smoke.

Fr. Andrew: On the day of atonement.

Fr. Stephen: On the day of atonement, so he wouldn’t die. But Solomon also built another chariot.

Fr. Andrew: Ugh, yes.

Fr. Stephen: And we find out that Solomon built this in 2 Kings 23:11.

Fr. Andrew: Chariots of fire, right?

Fr. Stephen: Sort of, yeah. [Laughter] And we mentioned this briefly back in the Melchizedek episode, that the pagan god who was worshiped at Jerusalem, Ulu-shalim, before David took it, was Tzedekah, or Zedek, who was seen as a hypostasis of Shemesh, the sun-god. So Shemesh-Zedekah, the sun of righteousness—this is why Christ is referred to in our liturgics as the true sun of righteousness, over against this fake one. But so Shemesh-Zedekah, the sun-god, rode in a chariot, and Solomon built one for him and put it at the entrance to the Temple in Jerusalem. And it was there from his time, when the Temple was first built, all the way through the history of Judah to King Josiah’s reforms; King Josiah destroyed it. And that was about 25 years before the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians. So for pretty much the entirety of the history of Judah, people who actually came to the Temple to worship—now, given the whole northern kingdom isn’t going to the Temple to worship; they’re at best going to the golden calves at Bethel and Dan—but those who are actually going to the Temple to worship, what are they seeing and interacting with? The chariot of Shemesh-Zedekah, because they don’t go in. They’re there with the idol, for the whole history of Judah. Centuries.

Fr. Andrew: And, what, a couple hundred years or so, right?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, more than that. About tree fiddy.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, really? Oh, wow.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. So, yeah, this is another piece of that, once again: you get all these shocking documentaries, where scholars, nice-seeming Greek ladies with British accents come on to tell you—I’m not referring to anyone in particular, I promise—that the Bible tells you that ancient Israel was monotheistic, but it’s lying; they were really polytheistic pagans. And you go: Have you read the Bible?

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Right, exactly.

Fr. Stephen: Right, it’s like: yes, they were. The question is not, “Did the ancient Israelites worship more than one God?”; the question is: “Were they supposed to?” That’s the question.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and notably, as you said, if you read the Scriptures closely—or not even that closely, frankly—if you just simply read the Scriptures, you see they present God punishing them for doing this, God condemning them for doing this, over and over; allowing invasions, all this kind of stuff, over and over and over again. So it’s an interesting question then if ancient Israel was totally cool with being polytheistic, if everyone’s been lying to you, it’s like: Well, why would they preserve the Scriptures in this way that’s not—

Fr. Stephen: That say the opposite, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that actually say the opposite; that point out how bad they are. And to me, actually, this is another of these things, like, for instance, the apostles recording their own stupid sayings and sins and betrayals in the gospels, that is an indication of the truth of a lot of this. It’s that if it’s all just propaganda, why would you depict your leaders and forebears and whatever in this bad light? But there it is; there it is: this is God’s opinion about all these things is what the Scripture is.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so the thing here is: God, of course, knew what would happen when they allowed their religion to put down roots, form these permanent institutions: that it would start to become deformed. By keeping it the tabernacle, by keeping them unrooted, by, as St. Peter would later say, us continuing to live as aliens and strangers in the world—the way Abraham lived as opposed to Lot, who wanted to go live in Sodom— that that would help preserve the reality of who God is, rather than having it be deformed, as they formed culture, and a culture like the cultures of the nations around them. And so this sort of thing that happened is exactly why God did not want that permanent temple in the first place.

Fr. Andrew: All right. Well, we’re going to take another quick break, and we’ll be right back with the third half of The Lord of Spirits.

Fr. Andrew: All right, welcome back. It’s the third half of The Lord of Spirits podcast, because this is a podcast and a half. And once again, you can’t call in, despite what the Voice of Steve just said to you.

Fr. Stephen: Well, you can—

Fr. Andrew: You can, that’s true.

Fr. Stephen: You will not get good results.

Fr. Andrew: You’re not going to get us. You will not get the very kind voice of Matushka Trudi on the other end, listening to whatever it is you have to say to her and trying to pass that on to us; you’re not going to get that this time around. It’s okay. It’s all right. We’re here for you, just not live. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: When we do this, when we do this and we’re not live, what we need to do is we need to find recordings of one of those old 976 numbers, like that would tell you scary stories at Halloween or something, or the one that did Bible stories?

Fr. Andrew: Wow! That does take me back.

Fr. Stephen: And just hook that up to the line so that if anybody calls in during a non-live show, they get that.

Fr. Andrew: That’s a great idea, and I’m sure we could find a donor to cover that—no. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: So, all right, well, we just finished up the second half talking about the tabernacle and its actual contents and so forth, its structure and contents; and we talked about the Temple of Solomon and how that really was not what God had had in mind.

Fr. Stephen: Bad. Very bad.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, just not good, not good. So here in the third half now, we’re going to talk about how the tabernacle is understood in the New Testament.

Fr. Stephen: Oh! One more note, though, on Solomon. I’m once again trying to preclude a certain amount of emails that I’ll have to skim. And that is that somebody will say, “Um, actually, Solomon’s a saint.” Okay. So. Here’s the thing.

Fr. Andrew: Okay… I’m ready.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] So Solomon, in terms of the story of Solomon in 1 Kings and in Chronicles, is presented as sort of the prototypical reprobate—but, within the Tradition of the Church, Solomon, the figure of Solomon, includes Kohelet, the teacher of Ecclesiastes. And I’m not going to sit here and argue, because that’s a show and a half all by itself, the authorship of Ecclesiastes when it was written and all that. The point, though, being: Ecclesiastes is taken to represent the fact that, late in his life, Solomon found repentance.

Fr. Andrew: There you go. That works out!

Fr. Stephen: And so this is why Solomon is not considered a righteous king by the Old Testament, and usually does not even— Most icons of the resurrection, for example, just have Kings David and Josiah as the righteous. But that repentance—you can sin mightily and still be a saint if you repent mightily. And that’s what’s going on there. Okay. So.

Fr. Andrew: Thank you for that.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. Now I won’t have to skim those emails.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I’m sure there’s a bunch of people who drop out sometime in the middle of the second half, so maybe you will.

Fr. Stephen: Who will send those emails, yeah. Or were typing it, like, during the half, yeah, and already hit “send.” No, now we’ll get the emails about “What are you saying about Ecclesiastes?” [Laughter] But at any rate, yes. So.

Fr. Andrew: The tabernacle in the New Testament.

Fr. Stephen: Well, and this is important, because that idea that the Temple wasn’t all that hot in the Old Testament is further borne out in the New Testament.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and also why, as you mentioned, the destruction of the Temple by the Romans is not really considered a significant Christian event.

Fr. Stephen: Right, it’s not as big of a deal as the Presbyterians want it to be. [Laughter] And so part of how we see that is that in the New Testament, when we see reflections on both heavenly worship and Christian worship, we see people talking in terms of the tabernacle and not the Temple. And this begins to be telegraphed even in the attitude we see sort of toward Herod’s Temple expressed in the gospels, the kind of ambivalent attitude expressed in the gospels and Acts. I say “ambivalent”: both sides. So on one hand, it’s not outright rejected by Christ or by the apostles; but it’s not fully embraced either.

Fr. Andrew: No, there’s no commandments by them to go to the Temple and do X, Y, and Z.

Fr. Stephen: We read them doing that, but again it seems to be sort of a voluntary association kind of thing. And this is not sort of some kind of radical—this ambivalence is not a radical thing in the New Testament; this is pretty common in the Judaisms of the day. So there are lots of forms of Judaism in the Second Temple period that have varying relationships with the Temple in Jerusalem, Herod’s Temple in particular at that time. So there are groups, like the group at Qumran who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls, who rejected Herod’s Temple completely.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and they were doing some kind of rituals out there in the desert to replace it, is that the idea?

Fr. Stephen: Right. They had taken certain elements of Temple ritual, minus the offering of sacrifices, for example, and were recreating those at Qumran, but they rejected Herod’s Temple outright. There were other groups, similarly… What you see with the Pharisees is a similar kind of ambivalence. So recognition that, yeah, this is the Temple, but also the recognition that there’s something very wrong. The key signifier of the “something wrong” being not just the association with Herod, who’s not Jewish…

Fr. Andrew: An Idumean.

Fr. Stephen: But that the theophanic glory cloud, the presence of God, never returns to the Temple after it’s rebuilt, that being the key major signifier that something’s wrong with it. So then you get this ambivalence.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so there’s a sense of: “Okay, well, God did not come and visually descend into the Temple… We’re still going to use it to worship him, because we’ve got to worship him, so… Okay…”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, what else do you have?

Fr. Andrew: Right.

Fr. Stephen: And then there’s lots of debate as to— At Qumran, they think that’s not correctable. The Pharisees kind of thought that was potentially correctable.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, by everybody keeping the law perfectly.

Fr. Stephen: Keeping the Torah, returning to the Torah, and getting rid of those no-good Sadducees, returning it to the rightful people—that when all that happened, then God’s presence would return and things would be right. And that was associated with the coming of the Messiah and all of those things.

But there’s already also a running theme in the Old Testament that really comes to flower in the gospels that, at a variety of times in a variety of periods, God sort of disassociates himself—and his presence and his name—from the Temple, at least once even from the tabernacle, and that that presence is then located by means of his Spirit indwelling some person or persons. So one of the first examples of this that we see is actually in 1 Samuel, and it’s in the person of the prophet Samuel, who—in the early chapters of Samuel we see Eli and his sons, that the priesthood that’s associated with the tabernacle is corrupted. And we then read about—and people may not even pause to think about it—Samuel sets up his own altar, not at the tabernacle, and offers sacrifices to God there at [Ramah].

Fr. Andrew: That’s a big statement.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah! [Laughter] Where he has a community of prophets living around him, as kind of proto-monastic city of prophets. That’s where Saul goes to and rips off all his clothes and flops around on the ground.

Fr. Andrew: As we’ve previously said.

Fr. Stephen: When the Spirit seizes him and he prophesies.

Fr. Andrew: I was going to say, kind of Israel in exile is kind of the idea, like a government in exile.

Fr. Stephen: Right, that God’s presence has sort of left the official establishment, and has gone there. You’re going to see shades of this in St. Symeon the New Theologian, by the way, a couple thousand years later. So that happens, and this happens more than once. We have this thing that looks like a weird detour in the books of 1 and 2 Kings, which are ostensibly about the kings: we’re going down through the kingly lines, describing what the kings did, mostly how wicked they were. And then all of a sudden we follow the prophets Elijah and Elisha for a long time.

Fr. Andrew: Who are not down in Judah.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and who are not kings! [Laughter] All of a sudden, now we’re following them. Why? Well, because especially when you’re dealing with Ahab and Jezebel—

Fr. Andrew: Who are the worst.

Fr. Stephen: —and their priests, and the religion of the northern kingdom and the golden calves at Bethel and Dan: that’s not the— The king and the priests is not where God’s presence is. His presence was never at the shrines at Bethel and Dan. So, no, it’s with these prophets who were indwelt by the Spirit of God. You see the same thing with Jeremiah, as we alluded to earlier. They’re putting all their confidence into the fact that this building is here, but God has sort of left the building and is now… His Spirit is dwelling in Jeremiah, and Jeremiah is now the focus of God’s activity among his people.

And then when we get into the New Testament, we see this, particularly in St. Luke’s gospel with St. John the Forerunner, whose father is a priest in the Temple in Jerusalem, and who then gets killed.

Fr. Andrew: And who, for a while, his voice falls silent, which is a kind of a literal muting of the priesthood.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And then where does God’s presence go? It goes out into the wilderness with St. John.

Fr. Andrew: Right. The Word of the Lord comes to St. John in the wilderness.

Fr. Stephen: Right, it’s not in the Temple; it’s now with St. John in the wilderness, where he’s bringing together the faithful remnant and gathering these disciples, whom he then turns over to Christ, who, as we already talked about, St. John points out, is now the Temple.

Fr. Andrew: Including my patron saint. He goes from St. John to the Lord.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and so this idea, from the beginning, really, from God’s ambivalent statement at the time he comes to dwell in Solomon’s Temple—there is this idea that God isn’t permanently attached to this building and that this building is, as you said, a condescension, and it’s always problematic. And so this detachment from the building—Ezekiel sees him leave the building—there’s firm precedent and an idea for it. And so when, by the time that Temple is destroyed in AD 70, the reason you don’t see anything about it anywhere in the New Testament is because it wasn’t a big deal at that point for Christians.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because it happens within the scope of the timeline of the New Testament.

Fr. Stephen: Right. They didn’t need it any more.

Fr. Andrew: Not even mentioned.

Fr. Stephen: And so, again, sorry, Presbyterians. But a much bigger deal, historically, and I’ll just note this once again for preterists: If you really want to be a preterist, why not AD 135? Jerusalem gets destroyed, there’s a false messiah whom everybody follows, like, all the stuff is there! Anyway. Moving on from picking on preterists.

And this really comes to fruition when you look at the end of the book of Revelation, you look at the new heavens and the earth, and it’s explicit: there’s no Temple. There’s no Temple—but— Go ahead.

Fr. Andrew: I was just going to say, what you see—and maybe I’m going to state what you were about to say—what you see in Revelation 15, when John the Evangelist sees worship in heaven, it’s not a Temple; it’s the tabernacle.

Fr. Stephen: Literally!

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s always a tent. Worship in heaven always happens in a tent.

Fr. Stephen: Right. It’s not just that we’re saying, “Oh, look, it’s the incense offering that happened in the tent.” If you read Revelation 15:5-8, it says “tent.”

Fr. Andrew: Exactly. So we’re going to read that to you so you can just hear it. This is Revelation 15, starting with verse five through verse 8.

After this I looked, and the sanctuary of the tent of witness in heaven was opened, and out of the sanctuary came the seven angels, with the seven plagues, clothed in pure bright linen with golden sashes around their chests. And one of the four living creatures gave to the seven angels seven golden bulls full of the wrath of God, who lives forever and ever. And the sanctuary was filled with smoke, from the glory of God and from his power. And no one could enter the sanctuary until the seven plagues of the seven angels were finished.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so they come out of—the tent. [Laughter] That’s the heavenly tent, the one that Moses went into, that the earthly one was patterned after.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and I was going to say, it’s notable what it says there at the end of verse eight, that no one could enter the sanctuary until the seven plagues of the seven angels were finished. I mean, what are the seven plagues? It’s them bringing out this incense, this wrath incense that brings the plagues, but, listener, if you remember what we said about these things coming out of the holy place in the tabernacle, the point is to enable entrance. And it says, “No one could enter the sanctuary until.” So the plagues are this kind of incense of purification that’s being enacted eschatologically, so that people can enter into the holy of holies.

Fr. Stephen: Right, to purify the earth so that it can become the sanctuary, yeah. And, of course, as we already saw in Hebrews and read, Christ is the high priest. Where does he serve as high priest? In the tent; in the tabernacle.

Fr. Andrew: Not in a temple.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. So, with that in mind, as one might expect, when we see early Orthodox Christian worship spaces, and even contemporary ones, they’re patterned after the tabernacle.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, we often call them “temples,” because there’s a permanence to them and they’re made of stone and so forth, but their pattern is not after, like, Solomon’s Temple or Herod’s Temple. It’s after the tabernacle.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, we don’t have any sun-god chariots. None of those in the narthex.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, no sun-god chariots out front that you’re offering sacrifices to.

Fr. Stephen: Occasionally a Christmas tree—stir the pot! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Emails are being written right now about this!

Fr. Stephen: Oh, yeah. So once again in talking about early Christian worship space, we can sort of start at the outer court and work our way in.

Fr. Andrew: Just like we did with the tabernacle, yes.

Fr. Stephen: Right. So if you read those great old King James-influenced translations of our baptismal liturgics, or Quasten talking about baptism in the Church Fathers, you find it referred to as the “laver of regeneration.”

Fr. Andrew: And where does baptism normally happen? In the narthex, or sometimes in a separate building that’s kind of near the entrance. But in the narthex is where baptism traditionally happens.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so this is for entrance, and it’s the laver of regeneration because, again, this fulfillment idea: filled up to overflowing. It’s not just washing your hands and washing your feet, and having to do that over and over and over and over again; but this is something that happens once for the purification of soul and body.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and then you also have sort of branching-out washings that still do occur, that are related to this by being a renewal of baptism. So, for instance, the clergy, right when they’re done vesting, they wash their hands, but only when they’re done vesting to serve the Divine Liturgy, for the Eucharist, is where they’re doing the hand-washing.

Fr. Stephen: Or the bishop.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, the bishop.

Fr. Stephen: The bishop ceremonially.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, exactly, during the hierarchical Liturgy, where that happens right before the Great Entrance of the Gifts, because he’s about to receive the Gifts; that’s what’s going on. That’s why his hands are being washed, because they’re about to be handed to him after the entrance is done.

And then, for every Christian, there’s the tears that happen in confession, which are understood and very explicitly said in many cases as a renewal of baptism. And what is one of the reasons you’re going to confession? It’s precisely to purify you so that you can then participate in the sacrifice of the Eucharist. So again you see this washing theme. It’s about being able to enter and participate.

Fr. Stephen: Right, being able to enter in, because, of course, as we’ve said before, the place where we are, or the place where the people are, during the service is the holy place. You’re not now outside the building.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, we’ve entered into the tent. We’ve entered into the tent: that’s what the nave of the church is.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so you’re in the place where the priests were, as we talked about in our episode about priesthood. But so then what’s the other element that was in the outer court that was related to entrance? That was the altar of burnt offering. It’s about purification of sin, restoration of communion, the building of communion with God, which is also—you’re baptized for the remission of sins; that’s renewed in confession and absolution.

Fr. Andrew: I was going to say, there is even a—not everywhere does this, but when the tonsure of the hair of the head is done at baptism, in some cases, it’s placed onto the censer and burnt up as a kind of offering to God. I mean, there’s various things that are done with the hair in different traditions, but that’s one of them; that’s one possibility.

Fr. Stephen: So this also is related to entrance and the cleansing and purification of sins, and this is why, traditionally, if we go back to the early Church, unbaptized people and people who were penitents—people who were repenting but had not yet done the things they needed to do to receive absolution, because sometimes it’s easier to sin than it is to repair the damage we do when we sin.

Fr. Andrew: Pretty much almost always.

Fr. Stephen: Yes! [Laughter] That’s why people sin; you don’t have to go way out of your way. Those folks would be—for a time, would be penitents and wouldn’t be… It isn’t just that they couldn’t receive the Eucharist, but traditionally they were kept outside in the equivalent of the narthex during that time; they couldn’t enter in yet. So that idea is still preserved there, but that’s not the focus.

The focus—and this tends to be, especially non-Orthodox people hearing us, they tend to look at the Orthodox Church and focus on exclusion, like: “You’re saying I can’t come receive Communion at your church. You’re saying I shouldn’t even walk in now.” [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: No, no. Right. No, the point is: The way is open, and here is how you walk the way. And if you don’t want to do that, that’s your choice. You’ve chosen not to do that. But the way is open. There’s no one that’s ever excluded for their whole lives and no matter what from the Church. There’s always a way. There’s always a way—they have to be willing to walk the way, but there’s always a way.

Fr. Stephen: Right. So if we think about it in the terms that we’re talking about it now, that especially doesn’t make sense. So at the tabernacle, the laver and the altar of burnt offering were not there to exclude people; they were the exact opposite.

Fr. Andrew: They were there, preparing them to come in.

Fr. Stephen: Right, they’re the means by which you can be included. They’re the means of entry.

Fr. Andrew: Decontamination chamber, to put it in Star Trek terms. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: So catechesis and baptism and repentance and all these things: these are the means of entering. These are not barriers of exclusion.

So then we go to, in the tabernacle, into the tent, the holy place and the most-holy place. And sort of the basic daily cycle—and we’ve said this before, I know—is vespers and matins, the kindling of the lamps and the trimming of the lamps. That’s where incense is offered with prayer, at sunrise and sunset. This is first commandment about worship in the Torah, and to prove that I’m not totally unfriendly to the Presbyterians, hey, we should worship God the way he told us to, by offering him incense at morning and evening.

Fr. Andrew: Light it up, Presbyterians! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Right, so we see that. We see that pattern. We have the lampstand on the altar.

Fr. Andrew: Right, seven branches.

Fr. Stephen: With the seven branches. And you see the importance of that in the letters to the seven churches in the book of Revelation.

Fr. Andrew: Right, where you’ve got the lampstand is lit as an earmark of the local church existing as the Church, and if that lampstand gets removed, then that means that’s not really the Church any more.

Fr. Stephen: Right, the prayers of the lampstand will be removed, and because it was written after the destruction of the Temple, where the Arch of Titus had that image of the lampstand being removed from the Jerusalem Temple and it no longer functioning as the Temple, that connects both every individual church as Church—as worship space, as microcosm, as place where God is present—but also the reality of it being taken away, was something that had happened in Jerusalem.

Right, and so it functions in the same way. Remember, the lampstand, the seven lights: this is the microcosm. Some churches even have light blue ceilings in the buildings, and you have the dome depicting Christ enthroned in the heavens.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and there’s sometimes stars up there as well in the ceiling.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and the chandeliers. And so the idea is that, as a place of worship liturgically, just like the tabernacle, it becomes a microcosm of the entire creation. And just as the bread of the presence was there to feed the priests during their service, we’re now all in that priest position. And so we have, if you go to a Divine Liturgy, we have the antidoron. If you go to a vigil service or just a vespers service where there’s the litya and artoklasia, there is bread.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and the point of that bread is: you’re going to be at an all-night vigil, is the original liturgical purpose of it. So it’s like: “Here, you’re going to need something to eat so that you can—”

Fr. Stephen: It’s strengthening you for the time of your service. It’s the same purpose.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly.

Fr. Stephen: It’s God feeding his people and strengthening them. And we’re all in there, serving as priests, so it’s not whatever priest happens to be chosen by lot to serve on that day. And then of course, on our altar table—remember what we had on our table in the holy of holies! Unless you’re Ethiopian, you don’t actually have an ark of the covenant there, but, if you are Ethiopian, you kind of do. But we have… So there’s a middle step. Remember we had… And the ark was taken in procession. We had the two tablets of the covenant. By the time you get to synagogue worship, you have the procession with the Torah scroll, and on our altar tables we have the Gospel book. That is resident there at Christ’s footstool, as the new covenant.

And we have the cross, and usually the cross is, in Eastern rite churches, at least, a budding cross; it’s called that, again, because Aaron’s rod budded: life came out from it. And our hymnography has explicit comparisons of the cross to Aaron’s rod that budded forth with new life. And we keep, in what is called the tabernacle on the altar, the Eucharist, because, as Christ said, he’s the bread that came down from heaven, talking about manna in John.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it outright says that. I am… Exactly.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so we have this actual space that is sacred space and which contains these objects, these items, which are holy and sacred objects. And this concept—we’ve broached this a few times before in different ways—is difficult for modern materialist kind of folks. And some of those folks, sometimes, will try to enlist certain things said by St. Paul to argue against the idea of particular sacred objects and particular sacred spaces and to sort of argue that every day is exactly the same. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so the passages that they would use for that, there’s Romans 14:5, in which St. Paul says, “One person esteems one day as better than another, while another esteems all days alike. Each one should be fully convinced in his own mind.” And so people look at that and say, “Well, St. Paul is basically saying that feast days are not a thing and should not be a thing.” That’s the way that that gets read. And then, similarly, Colossians 2:16-17: “Therefore, let no one pass judgment on you on questions of food and drink, or with regard to a festival or a new moon or a sabbath; these are a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ.” And so then the interpretation would seem to be: “All of those feast days and stuff we had in the Old Testament, that was just a shadow and that’s over now. So we don’t do that any more. There’s no more feast days, because now we’re Christians and Christ has come.” So that’s kind of the reasoning of those two verses in that context.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so: “There aren’t sacred times, there aren’t sacred places, there aren’t sacred objects. Everything’s the same; it’s just material.” And that resonates very well with our modern secular culture—but it’s not what St. Paul is saying.

Fr. Andrew: And is not what you actually see early Christians doing.

Fr. Stephen: Right. So the idea of that reading would then be that “when St. Paul says, ‘Treat every day the same, or treat every object, treat every place the same,’ what he means is that you shouldn’t honor the sabbath.”

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] He’s not saying that.

Fr. Stephen: “You shouldn’t treat a church building as a sacred place, or the Temple in Jerusalem, say, that St. Paul used to visit.”

Fr. Andrew: The problem is that often what people will say is that everything is holy, but the problem is that when people say that, what they mean by it in terms of actual, practical application is that nothing is holy.

Fr. Stephen: Right, if everybody is special, nobody is special. Sorry, millennials! Oh, that was a cheap shot. Even I think that was a cheap shot!

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Wow.

Fr. Stephen: I know, you treasure your participation trophies. It’s okay. But—

Fr. Andrew: You know this is, like, 50% of our audience, right?

Fr. Stephen: I know, I know. I’m out of control.

Fr. Andrew: He’s a wild man! I can’t stop him, everybody! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: That’s a stereotype! No, but, yeah, if everything is special, nothing is special. If everything is great, nothing is great. And so St. Paul wasn’t saying either of those things. He wasn’t saying nothing was sacred, and he wasn’t saying everything is sacred. He’s saying everything is potentially sacred. Every space is potentially sacred space, every time is potentially sacred time, every object is potentially a sacred object. It has that potential. So the person who treats every day the same is the person who is able to treat every day like the sabbath. The person who treats his home as just as holy as the church doesn’t do that by degrading how he treats the church; he does that by elevating how he treats his home to being a small church.

So that’s what St. Paul is getting at there, and so we have particular sacred times and sacred places and sacred objects to teach us how to do that. So if we learn how to respect our church sanctuary, then that teaches us how to treat a place as holy, and we can then apply that to other places, and likewise with objects, with things, times. He’s pointing to that potential, not a reality on either side.

Fr. Andrew: Right, or even again when we see worship conducted in heaven, there is still this kind of demarcation of spaces going on. There is a holiest place that things are coming out from. It’s not by any means saying that the age to come, that the kingdom of God is unholy in any way, but there is clearly still a hierarchy within it. That still is happening. There’s still spaces that are kind of better than others in that sense.

Fr. Stephen: Well, or different.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, set aside for a particular purpose. I think that’s one of the things— You can tell just by the way I said that. I think that’s one of the things that a lot of modern people when they hear the word “holy,” what they understand by it is to mean “better than.” But it’s interesting, if you read—for instance, we’ve mentioned a lot of the laws and stuff in Exodus and Leviticus and Numbers, you’ll hear this refrain over and over again, about something being sanctified, sanctified, sanctified. And it’s very clear in context that what that means is set apart for a particular purpose, because there’s some cases where “sanctified” is used where it wouldn’t make any sense for it to mean “better than” or is kind of shining with mystical light or whatever we mean by “holy” or “sanctified,” that it just means, simply, “separated, separated out.”

Fr. Stephen: Right, we’ve got Plato brain, so we bring good and evil into our ontology in weird ways. So we’re human. We all have to go to the bathroom somewhere. We don’t do that in a holy place. [Laughter] We do it in a place set aside for that purpose. But the bathroom is not, like, evil. [Laughter] It’s a necessary thing performing a necessary function, and hopefully you keep it clean.

Fr. Andrew: And you don’t put your icon corner in there.

Fr. Stephen: Right.

Fr. Andrew: That’s just not what you would do.

Fr. Stephen: Right, but it’s not because it’s evil, it’s because that’s not its purpose.

One of the things, though, with Christian worship spaces in particular, is that they have, since the very beginning, been made holy not just by “this is the place we’re going to set aside for worship” but because they are built surrounding a particular thing, and that is the relics of saints, originally, specifically, martyrs. And this is something that a lot of our friends and listeners probably are really uncomfortable with, even some of the Orthodox ones, probably.

Fr. Andrew: It’s true!

Fr. Stephen: Get a little…

Fr. Andrew: Right, get a little ook-ed out, yeah. And how do we know that this was the case early, early on? Well, there are testimonies about worship happening in the catacombs in Rome, and what are catacombs? It’s not just hidden-away places. They specifically were performing the Divine Liturgy on top of the grave of a martyr who was buried down in there. So that is going on.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. St. Jerome just said as a summary statement, “The graves of the martyrs are altars to Christ.”

Fr. Andrew: Right, not that they make handy spots to do worship on.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, or that’s where you should build one, but they are.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, by virtue of being the grave of a martyr, it’s an altar to Christ.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and that understanding develops out of what we’ve been talking about in this third half, that what’s serving now as a temple, when God separates himself from the building, for the tabernacle for the temple, he comes to dwell within the saints, the Holy Spirit: the Holy Spirit dwelling within Elijah, Elisha, Samuel, St. John the Forerunner. And so that is the place—that is the place of God’s presence. And the righteous—part of being a saint, part of being righteous is that, as St. Paul says, you offer— Your members become the members of Christ, as we just heard in the epistle yesterday as we were recording this. Our members become the members of Christ when the Holy Spirit dwells within us. Our body becomes the body of Christ, through which he acts, meaning, body of God: that imaging function, but that’s transformative of the human person. It doesn’t just transform their soul and make their soul like an angel. A soul is not a thing; it’s not a sphere like Origen thought; it’s not this eternal, immortal thing. A soul is your life; it’s what makes your body alive. And so when it leaves—when your life leaves the body—the body dies; it decomposes. We believe our life is hidden with Christ, and Christ returns our life to the body, but the body is still the person.

Fr. Andrew: Right, it still belongs to that person. For a lot more on this, see our episodes about bodies and also see our episode about relics. We did all that stuff.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so that is why that body, of the saint, is associated with a worship space. So Elisha—his body doesn’t stop being that. That’s why when they throw a corpse into his tomb, it rises from the dead. And so Christians understood this innately from the beginning, and just started doing it. And this became, to pagans, outsiders—this is what Christians did. This is what Christians do. Now, right now, if I went to the average person in the US, Christian or not, and I said, “Here’s what Christians do: they parade around with and pray at and offer sacrifices at the bodies of a bunch of dead people,” the average American, Christian or not, would look at me like I was insane. They’d be like: “What!? I think I saw some Catholics doing some stuff like that in Mexico, but what are you talking about?” [Laughter] Like, they would not have that in mind at all. But what we find in the fourth century, when we look at what pagans said Christianity was all about…

Fr. Andrew: Right, so we’ve got a couple of quotes here, and these are amazing. So one is from Julian the Apostate, so he’s not just some random pagan; he’s an ex-Christian, bringing…

Fr. Stephen: Yes, the nephew of Constantine.

Fr. Andrew: And wasn’t he a classmate with…?

Fr. Stephen: St. Gregory the Theologian and St. Basil.

Fr. Andrew: St. Gregory and St. Basil, yeah. So he becomes the emperor of Rome and trying to bring back paganism, and he hates Christianity, and so he’s going to say the worst possible things about it, but he’s not going to say stuff that people don’t acknowledge as being true, because they can see themselves what Christians are doing. And this is what Julian the Apostate said about what Christianity is about.

The carrying of the corpses of the dead through the great assembly of people: in the midst of dense crowds, staining the eyesight of all with ill-omened sights of the dead. What day so touched with death could be lucky? How, after being present at such ceremonies, could anyone approach the gods and their temples?

So he’s ridiculing Christians and saying, “Look at what they do! They carry the bones of people around. Ohh, yuck!”

Fr. Stephen: “It’s a bad omen…”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, “it’s so gross!”

Fr. Stephen: “It corrupts you…” And notice, Protestant friends, this is an actual pagan. He doesn’t say, “Oh, all that saint stuff, praying to saints? That’s just what we pagans do; that’s the same thing.”

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah, he’s saying this is really bad.

Fr. Stephen: He doesn’t think it’s the same thing at all, and he should know!

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] He would totally know, because he’s been Christian; he was raised Christian, and then became pagan and favors paganism. Okay, so we’ve got another one from Eunapius of Sardis, again from the fourth century. He’s pagan, complaining about Christians:

For they collected the bones and skulls of criminals who had been put to death for numerous crimes, made them out to be gods, and thought that they became better by defiling themselves at their graves! “Martyrs,” the dead men were called, and ministers of a sort, and ambassadors with the gods, to carry men’s prayers.

So once again… Now, of course, you see other elements in here, right? Like of course he’s saying these are criminals. Why are they venerating criminals?

Fr. Stephen: They were executed as criminals by the Roman government…

Fr. Andrew: “Made them out to be gods”: so his understanding about Christianity is that it’s about theosis; “thought that they became better by defiling themselves at their graves”: he sees Christians making pilgrimage to the graves of martyrs. He calls them “martyrs”: “ ‘Martyrs,’ the dead men were called, and ministers”: he sees them as priests, that the Christians are talking about them as priests; “and ambassadors with the gods, to carry men’s prayers”: that people were addressing requests to these “criminals”—

Fr. Stephen: And they’re carrying them to God.

Fr. Andrew: And they’re carrying them to God. So this is a pagan making fun of Christianity in the fourth century, and he basically is talking about the veneration of the relics and the memories of martyrs and the understanding that martyrs will pass on the prayers of Christians to God, which, I mean, we could just point out that we see that in the book of Revelation; that’s actually happening there.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and it’s practically happening in the early Church in this way, and is the common… This is what Christianity is about for Eunapius. And Eunapius is not only a pagan, but he’s a neo-Platonist, so he wrote the sort of biographies of famous philosophers, basically following neo-Platonism, and it’s actually one of the best sources on the lives of these philosophers, so his text was actually preserved in the Church, but he’s constantly issuing anti-Christian attacks like this. He hated Christianity, and so St. Photios the Great, in the ninth century, said that he also had possession, in addition to the original, of another version of his writings that had all the anti-Christian stuff edited out, because by that point everybody was a Christian, and they weren’t big fans. [Laughter]

But notice, folks who want to say that, “Oh, well, you know, the fourth-century Church, all those saints and the Council of Nicaea and all that, they’re just taking neo-Platonism and Greek philosophy and distorting Christianity with it,” okay, this is a fourth-century neo-Platonist and pagan: he doesn’t think that we’re doing the same thing, and he should know.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, if anyone would know.

Fr. Stephen: He thinks it’s radically different.

Fr. Andrew: And it’s interesting, again, part of what offends these pagans so much is this kind of an inversion of pagan virtue, because it’s humility and martyrdom that are elevated in Christianity, whereas for pagans, that—no, no, no! Paganism does not work that way!

Fr. Stephen: Why would you want to become like that person?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah! Like, he’s executed like a criminal—hello? Total low-life.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yeah. So this is—yeah. They can’t comprehend it. And not to mention, they’re not big fans of “the body” in general.

Fr. Andrew: Right!

Fr. Stephen: It’s all about escaping the body. Remember St. Paul in Athens getting laughed at when he talked about the resurrection. This is ridiculous to them. So how much more triply ridiculous would it be to parade around and honor some bones? [Laughter] This makes zero sense to them.

And so part of… So then why, if this was the impression on the ground at the time—why do people today draw what seems to them to be easy connections between the veneration of the saints and polytheism, or between early Christian theology and neo-Platonism? If it was completely not obvious at the time, why does it seem so obvious? And part of it is because we’ve kind of got Protestant-brain, even if we’re not Protestants, and so we think of Christianity as a set of beliefs.

We think of Christianity as a set of things that you hold to be true, sort of logical propositions that you hold to be true. And so these comparisons are made by, well, what is the veneration of saints? Well, it’s a system of beliefs, and so we line up what those beliefs would be. We then line up, well, what do pagan polytheists believe? As if pagan religion had anything to do with “beliefs” and believing and faith. There were no sola fide pagans, I assure you of that. [Laughter] And then we try to line up those beliefs and compare and contrast, and they kind of look similar when we draw them out. Same thing with neo-Platonism.

But that’s not how neo-Platonism or paganism or Christianity worked in the ancient world. They were not systems of belief. They were ways of life that were made up of practices.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and you can even see this in texts of the Ecumenical Councils. Certainly they have statements of dogma, but within all of that as well is a huge amount of texts that are aimed at the ways things are done. It’s not just—they’re not just sort of regulatory— I know that sometimes we call them disciplinary or whatever, which is fine; I mean, I think that’s an okay language, but we have to understand that this is so central—that the ways things are done is so central that the canonical penalties that attach to them are things like being deposed from the priesthood or excommunication. That’s what’s really attached; it’s not just “here’s some things that we say and everybody has to agree to this.” And indeed, what is a heretic, according to an Ecumenical Council? It’s not just someone who thinks certain things.

Fr. Stephen: Has a bad idea. Is wrong. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s a teacher of those things. In other words, you’re teaching people to do and to say this other way. It’s not thought-crime. There’s no thought-crime in an Ecumenical Council.

Fr. Stephen: The original meaning of the word “heresy” is a sect.

Fr. Andrew: Right! It’s an actual group.

Fr. Stephen: As in “sectarian.” Yes, you’re creating a different group with a different way of life. Because this also isn’t—it’s not just that it’s not beliefs; it’s not individual beliefs. We, post-Protestant Reformation, in the modern world, think of ourselves primarily as individuals. We’re not talking about individuals; we’re talking about the way of life of a community. The Christians in a city lived their life in a particular way as a community. That’s what the pagans saw. That’s what in those quotes they’re critiquing. They’re not critiquing what individuals believe; they’re critiquing what the Christians as a community do, how they conduct their life, how they worship, what they practice together, their way of life. And so a heretic is someone, like your arch-heretic like Arius or someone, is someone who draws a following off after themselves and establishes another way of life, another community. That’s the problem. Just being in the Church and being wrong about things—guess what? That’s everybody.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] That’s right! We’re all wrong in one way or another.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Right? None of us has perfect theology. Most of us haven’t even worked out—most of us don’t even have an opinion on most areas of theology. I could find one obscure enough that you haven’t even heard of, and you might be able to come up with it, but that’s got nothing to do with what Christianity is. That’s sometimes how we teach it; that’s sometimes how we do catechesis, even in the Orthodox Church, is: “I’m going to teach you a bunch of things you should believe instead of the things you used to believe,” but that’s not what Christianity is. That’s not what it—and that’s definitely not what it was in the ancient world.

And so that’s why we get these kind of false results and see these false similarities, because the veneration of the saints is not a set of, like, belief propositions; it’s something that was practiced by the earliest Christians and was observable therefore by these outsiders.

And this really gets to—this in particular gets to the core of what it means to believe in the resurrection of the dead, because we tend to treat that as: “Well, we believe that someday Jesus will return and everybody will be alive again in their body.”

Fr. Andrew: Which is not wrong, but…

Fr. Stephen: Right, that is a true statement, but— And hopefully you hold to that, because that’s not even clear with a lot of people, unfortunately now in modern Christianity. A lot of people just talk about going to heaven forever and stuff, which is not it. But belief in the resurrection goes a lot further than that, because there’s this element of resurrection that we see in Christ’s resurrection. This gets brought out in Romans, it gets brought out in the epistle of St. James—of vindication. It’s brought out in a lot of our Orthodox hymnography. Christ died, condemned as a criminal, and when he rose from the dead, that was the vindication of him, of his claims to be the Messiah, of his claims about who he was; vindication against the slander that was leveled against him by others that ended in his death. And this is true, as you can see in those quotes, also of the martyrs, also of the righteous.

Fr. Andrew: Right, they get treated just like Christ.

Fr. Stephen: The righteous are persecuted. The righteous suffer in this world. The righteous are falsely accused. The righteous, in the case of the martyrs, were condemned to death as criminals. And their resurrection is the vindication that, no, that’s not who they are, because when Christ appears, they appear with him. They are still alive, and they are reigning in glory with him. All of this is entailed. And Christ says as much when he critiques the Sadducees about the resurrection of the dead. He doesn’t say, “You’re wrong. On the last day, everyone is going to be raised from the dead bodily.” He says, “God says, ‘I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.’ He said that to Moses.” He says, “God is not the God of the dead, but of the living.”

So Christ’s answer to what it means to believe in the resurrection of the dead means that you believe that those righteous are not dead but are alive. And what are they doing? [Laughter] That they are with God, that they are the pillars. So this idea of theosis, of the saints co-reigning, of them serving as priests, “ministers” and “ambassadors” as our pagan friend said, them serving as priests and co-rulers with Christ—if you don’t have that, you don’t really have belief in the resurrection of the dead, not in the sense that the Scriptures mean it. I mean, Christ disambiguates that by Lazarus’s grave. He says to Martha, “Do you believe in the resurrection?” She says, “I believe that they will be raised up on the last day,” and Christ doesn’t say, “Right, good.” [Laughter] He says, “I am the resurrection and the life, and he who believes in me will never die.” Not, “You’ll die and eventually you’ll come back to life.”

Fr. Andrew: So Lazarus is not really… Lazarus, inasmuch as he is in Christ, is not dead.

Fr. Stephen: Right. That’s what he’s telling her.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and so I mean… One of the conclusions to that is that what sanctifies a church temple—relics—is therefore a testimony to the resurrection of the dead, because we’re… The church temple, our own sort of local instantiation of the tabernacle, becomes what it is because you have the presence of someone whose body has become the body of God, the body of Christ.

Fr. Stephen: Right. The space they occupy is holy space because they occupy it, in the same way that Moses had to take his shoes off next to the burning bush.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Wow. So wrap up this episode, we’ve been talking about the tabernacle—where does it come from; what is it patterned off of—it’s patterned off of the tent of God on the holy mountain, paradise, where he dwells with the sons of God, those who are with him. And we extended that out now in the third half, where we talked about how that applies now to the Church within the New Testament, within the period that we’re now in. One of the things that Fr. Stephen mentioned here at the end was that Christianity was not defined in the ancient world as being simply a list of beliefs. There are beliefs, for sure; there are beliefs, but I think that, as modern people, we tend to think of belief—and here I am, I’m saying, “think of belief,” so I’m expressing the language with this modern way of thinking! We are modern people. We tend to think of belief as the thing that makes you really a Christian, or that makes you really whatever it is you are, like if you believe it truly.

And so one of the experiences that I’ve had in ministry in the Church is that a lot of times people have a crisis or a struggle within themselves: “Do I believe hard enough? Do I trust hard enough? Can I really forgive that person?” And by that they mean “become convinced in my mind not to… that what they did doesn’t matter,” or something like that. And so it becomes this kind of mental thing, which, I mean, is understandable, because that’s what defines so much of our modern world. I get it; I understand why people feel that way, why they think that way.

But in Christianity traditionally, and in Orthodox Christianity, the question is not “Do I believe hard enough or do I think the right things or do I have the right opinions?” but “Am I faithful? Am I practicing this faith?” It’s based on what you do. There is Christian doctrine; there is Christian worldview, but it’s based on what you do—it’s not the other way around. We tend in our time to think, “I need to be convinced of something and therefore I will act on the basis of that,” but Christianity actually goes the other way. It goes the other way, that what we believe is based on what we do.

Now, often in the modern world we need to explain things, to help people engage in faithfulness. The whole point of catechesis is to teach people how to be faithful, to show them how to be faithful, but it’s not about trying to convince them that certain things are truth, so that then they can make the decision to be faithful. If you come to the Church to be baptized, you are convinced already, so the question of catechesis is how do you be faithful. And, connected to this, then, of course, is a very famous line: James 2:18, where St. James is talking about this relationship between faith and works, and if we understand faith really as faithfulness, then this makes more sense. He says this:

But someone will say, “You have faith, and I have works.” Show me your faith apart from your works, and I will show you my faith by my works.

In other words, he’s saying that faithfulness, real faith, is about what you do. It’s about what you do. That there is no— That there cannot be— They don’t exist apart. They’re not separated.

So how does this relate to what we’ve said about sacred space—the tabernacle, the church as related to the tabernacle? You know, an ancient Israelite knows what he’s supposed to do in regard to the tabernacle. It’s all very clearly laid out for him in the Scriptures. It’s been taught to him; he knows what he’s supposed to do. God has said it to him; God told him that through Moses. We as Christians have received the teaching for what we are supposed to do. We know what we need to do to be faithful. We need to be engaged in the worship of God in our local instantiation of the tabernacle, that is to say, our parish church. But it’s not just in that place; it’s also as it extends into our homes as well, with prayer at home, with all of these things going on so that the home itself becomes an extension of the church, that the church is expressed in the home.

Sometimes people will say things like, “Well, you know, I can worship God on my own,” or that kind of thing. It’s like: Well, what you’re saying is somewhat true. It’s not that you cannot talk to God in any place—you can talk to God in any place—but we also know that he said: “Do this as my remembrance,” and he showed us how to do the Eucharist. He did not say, “Here’s one option for how you could maybe worship me, you know, if you’re feeling traditional.” [Laughter] It doesn’t say that. He says, “Do this.” There’s a lot of very clear commandments, and it says in Scripture, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments”; not “if you love me, you can pick which commandments of mine you’d like, and besides those, that’ll be fine.” He says, “If you love me, keep my commandments.” That’s stated many times in Scripture in various ways, many, many times.

And so in ancient Israel, they’re traveling with the tabernacle, they’re setting it up, they’re camping around it; it’s the very center of their life. If some ancient Israelite said, “You know what? I don’t need to go to the tabernacle; I don’t need to offer the sacrifices. I don’t need to do these things. Even if I’ve sinned, I don’t have to do that stuff, because, you know, I can worship God in my own way.” No, you cannot! Does that mean he cannot pray in his own tent? Of course he can pray in his own tent, of course! But he’s also been given very specific commandments from God as to the tabernacle and how to relate to it, just as we have been given specific commandments by God with regards to the Church—how to relate to it, what we’re supposed to do. This is what the Tradition of the Church is about. It’s about these acts of faithfulness.

So I think one of the great values in understanding what the tabernacle is about and how our Church is now the tabernacle, is that it gives us something very clear to look at and to say: This is what I need to do. This is what it means to be a faithful Christian, not just my Christian identity—how I think of myself as a Christian—but a faithful Christian, because an unfaithful Christian is not a Christian, not really. It’s those who are faithful who are truly in Christ. And faithfulness is something that we can see clearly and latch onto and understand that we’re doing it without a lot of psychological guessing games. We don’t need to do that. Just: Are you doing the things? Here’s what the things are. [Laughter] And even if you don’t—even if you don’t, as Fr. Stephen said, have the correct opinion about every piece of theology—because, I mean, we don’t; we all don’t—that’s not what makes you faithful. Now, if you latch onto an incorrect opinion and really pursue it and step away from the Church as a result of that, that is what heresy is and that’s why it’s a problem. But the point is to be faithful, and this is why even small children can be faithful. This is why people without theological degrees can be faithful. This is why faithfulness is possible for every single human person.

So this to me is a profound lens through which to understand the Christian life, and something that even people without a lot of theological education, even people without interest in listening to weird Bible podcasts like this one can still connect with and still do the things, even if they are theologically ignorant or whatever it might be. So, Fr. Stephen?

Fr. Stephen: So, as we talked about with the whole issue between the tabernacle and the Temple, there’s a strong theme throughout the Scriptures—not just in the Old Testament, because St. Peter continues it in the New Testament—that the people of God, those who were seeking to be faithful to God, to follow Christ, can’t do that by settling in in this world or any of its cultures or any of its places at any time. We’ve mostly lost sight of that in the modern world. Other than our persecuted brothers and sisters in Christ who are living under situations of persecution, those of us—probably most of the people listening to this, since we broadcast in English—are living in places that are not that. We are living in places where we’ve been allowed to and allowed ourselves to become very comfortable and very settled.

And we make a lot of excuses for this. We’ll say, “Well, I’m in a culture that’s a Christian culture, or at least historically was deeply influenced by Christianity.” Well, you know, ancient Israel was a Yahwist culture; ancient Judah was a Yahwist culture. Judea when Christ came and lived and was killed, and St. John the Forerunner came and lived and was killed, was a culture that was worshiping Yahweh the God of Israel. That doesn’t give you the license to settle down. That doesn’t mean that the culture, the society, the people and their will is on the right track, just because they profess or identify themselves as being of the true religion in some sense.

And we see this most of all in the fact that there’s—at least at present, and things can change very quickly, but at least at present, there’s not a lot of risk of us becoming martyrs. Very low. And in fact we spend a lot of our time and a lot of our effort in these societies trying to prevent ourselves from suffering any kind of even vague persecution as Christians for Christianity, for our Christian faith. Here’s the problem. I’ve said this once before in sort of a final thought—but if Christianity isn’t revolutionary, then it’s nothing. Anything that we call Christianity that fits very neatly into this world, at any point in time, at any place, is not real Christianity. If there’s a political party in your country that you fit into very neatly, there’s a problem with your ideology. If there’s a cultural movement that you fit into very neatly, there’s a problem with your ideology. If you’re able to go about your daily life, your work life, your school life, and you go about it in the same way that your atheist or other religion co-workers do, there’s a problem with how you’re living your work life or your school life.

Now, this isn’t to say that our goal as Christians is to go around and offend people. That’s easy. Talk is cheap, so we can go around and say rude things and judgmental things and go around and condemn people and get them to hate us, and then pat ourselves on the back and say, “Ah, see? I’m being persecuted for the sake of Christ. I’m doing it right.” That’s not what I’m getting at, because that’s not what the martyrs did, that’s not what Christ did, that’s not what the prophets did. What they did was they lived a way of life, that way of life that is now real Christianity. They lived a way of life that was so radically out of step with what the world values, what it sees as good, what it sees as productive, what those in power wanted them to live; so radically out of step that those powers in the world wanted them dead, wanted them destroyed, wanted them stopped. This happened with the Prophet Elijah, this happened with the Prophet Elisha, this happened with the Prophet Jeremiah—pretty much everyone we talked about in this episode, this happened with.

And so this isn’t something that begins by us imagining a perfect Christian society, because, just like the Temple, we aren’t given a blueprint for that in the Scriptures. We really aren’t. That’s not what the Torah is, by the way. We’re not given a blueprint for “this is what society is, so I’m going to go out and try and force it to be that.” What we’re given a blueprint for is what each of our lives should look like. So it starts with each of us. It starts with me for me. It starts with me calling myself to repentance; me finding the places where I’m very comfortable, where I see things pretty much the same way non-Christians do, looking at the same thing; the places where I’ve been formed by my time and place and culture and not by Christ; and finding those and repenting of them myself, and repenting not by changing my mind, changing my opinion, but by, as we’ve been saying, by changing how I live: changing how I talk, changing how I act toward others, changing how I present myself—changing all of those things about myself and bringing them into line with Christ and who he is and how he lives.

And the promise that we have in Scripture is that if we get serious about that and we start doing that, that’s when people will really start to hate us, and not just people out in the world, not just, oh, the angry atheist on the internet. No, that’s when other people in the Christian Church are going to start hating us. That’s when everyone is going to start hating us, because Christ has promised that because that’s how the prophets were treated before us. That’s how he was treated, and a servant is not greater than his master.

And so this is the mark of real Christianity when we’re actually living it. Real Christianity, when we’re actually living it, means living in a way that is not designed to give offense to anyone but that anyone who is in and of the world is going to find deeply offensive. Living our life in a way where we don’t judge anyone, but just the way we live, those people who are not following Christ feel judged by it. That’s the mark of a real Christian; that’s what marked out, when we read the lives of the saints and the martyrs—that’s what we see.

And so when we remember them, when we talked about them tonight, when we talk about what this kind of holiness means and what God wants us to learn from having his meeting-place in a tent and not in a permanent building, it means that we need to live in a way that this world is not our home—we don’t fit in—not because we’re trying not to fit in, but because we’re following Christ so intently that we don’t notice how far out of step we are with those who aren’t.

Fr. Andrew: Well, that is our show for today. Thank you very much, everyone, for listening. If you didn’t get a chance to call in during a previous live broadcast—this one was not live—we would still love to hear from you either via email at lordofspirits@ancientfaith.com; you can message us at our Lord of Spirits podcast Facebook page. I read everything; Fr. Stephen skims some things, but we can’t respond to everything. We do respond once in a while, but we do save a lot of it for possible use in future episodes.

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

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because in March we’re not going to be doing our episodes live, and the reason is—

Fr. Stephen: All Memorex!

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s going to all be Memorex in March 2022, and that’s because of liturgical reasons. The first time, it’ll be the first week of Lent; we have to be in church. And the second time it’s going to be the eve of the Great Feast of the Annunciation on the calendar that both Fr. Stephen and I follow. So we will still have episodes on those nights, but they are going to be pre-recorded. So if you are on Facebook, though, you can like our page, join our discussion group, leave reviews, ratings everywhere, but, most importantly, please, share this show with a friend whom you know is going to love it.

Fr. Stephen: But don’t be on Facebook if you don’t have to. 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 very much, good night, and God bless you, and may you have a very good Lent.