Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick: Good evening, everyone, and welcome to The Lord of Spirits podcast. I am Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick in Emmaus, Pennsylvania, and with me, from almost the Gulf Coast is Fr. Stephen De Young from Lafayette, Louisiana. If you’re listening to us live, you can call into this program at 855-AF-RADIO; that’s 855-237-2346. We’re going to get to your calls in the second part of today’s show.

One of the historical movements that has shaped Christian culture in the West profoundly is the Protestant Reformation. One of its products was the focus on this question: How am I saved? Even though this question is sort of the perennial Protestant question, it has actually affected Orthodox and Roman Catholic Christians as well. Now, it’s not an unorthodox thing to ask, to be sure, but the way that it gets asked and the way that it has become embedded in the individualistic culture of the modern West has brought us to what I believe are some misleading conclusions about what salvation is. So tonight we’re going to be talking about theosis, and I think you’ll see what I mean about this problem as we go. For our Orthodox listeners, I hope that we’ll be giving you a fuller picture of what theosis means, and for our non-Orthodox listeners—well, enjoy the ride!

To start us off this evening, let’s discuss how salvation gets talked about, both by all kinds of Christians and also by Orthodox Christians in the English-speaking world. I mean, do we Orthodox really have a problem in the way that we’re talking about it? And especially for those who maybe may not know this word, theosis, what is sort of the quick definition of what that means? Why don’t you give the elevator speech—although you’re not really known for your elevator speeches, Fr. Stephen!

Fr. Stephen De Young: No, no.

Fr. Andrew: But you could give us the elevator speech on what theosis is. Someone says, “What is that word you keep using?”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and I think part of the problem we have in this area is that we don’t go much beyond the elevator speech.

Fr. Andrew: Right!

Fr. Stephen: There’s sort of an Orthodox meme about theosis, which is: We’ll talk about theosis. We usually reference St. Peter’s comment that we become partakers of the divine nature, sometimes called divinization. Someone will quote St. Athanasius saying that God became man so that men might become gods. Everybody gets scared and thinks we’re Mormons… [Laughter]

But part of the issue, I think, is that that hasn’t really been integrated into a lot of the way we think. We sort of tack that on as an adjunct, and then when we, even as Orthodox Christians, start talking about salvation and soteriology (which is the fancy word for talking about salvation), we sort of lapsed into a kind of amalgam of Protestant and Roman Catholic views of salvation, usually slightly the opposite of whoever we’re talking to about it, if it’s a Protestant or a Roman Catholic.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s an apologetical point. You know, it’s interesting to me… I mean, certainly there is a difference between the way that English-speaking Orthodox Christians talk about salvation and the way that Roman Catholic or Protestant Christians talk about salvation. We’re not saying that it’s kind of all the same, but there is kind of an issue with at least the way that English-speaking Orthodox Christians tend to talk about salvation, even when we talk about theosis. Part of what we’re going to try to accomplish this evening is to integrate that into what we’ve been discussing for our last several episodes and hopefully to show its connections to all parts of Orthodox tradition, which is what this whole show is all about.

So the elevator speech version of theosis is that—it comes from the Greek word theos, which means God. The elevator speech version is so that we become like God, and that’s what salvation is, that we become like God. There’s that line from St. Peter, becoming partakers of the divine nature. The reason why I think that the way that we tend to talk about it is problematic is this. As I said, in the Protestant Reformation, there was this focus on this question, “How am I saved? How do I get saved? How do I be saved?” Certainly, Protestant and Catholic answers to that question are different. But if you think about the question itself, the question itself focuses in on an individual human person, realizes he has some kind of problem, and that that problem needs to be fixed.

We won’t get super deep into this, because this show is not about apologetics—this show is simply about trying to talk about the Orthodox tradition—but at least for the sake of comparison we should note that most Protestant and Catholic understandings of what salvation is about is ultimately about satisfying God’s divine justice. How you satisfy God’s justice varies between Protestant and Catholic presentations, and certainly there are multiple Protestant presentations, and there’s even some variations sometime within Roman Catholicism. But basically that’s the problem: that there is a justice problem, and someone has committed a crime, so that needs to be dealt with.

Now, I’m simplifying, so if you’re a Catholic or a Protestant, please don’t think I’m trying to summarize every single thing that you believe about this. I’m not. I know there’s way more to it, okay? But nonetheless, that’s still kind of the problem: that God’s divine justice needs to be satisfied. So then there’s the focus on: Where do I stand? And which side of the line am I on?

For the Orthodox Christian in the English-speaking world, the way that it gets talked about—and again, we’re not necessarily talking about official theology; we’re certainly not talking about what you hear in the Church services; we’re talking about what you maybe hear in homilies or the way that people talk about it on the internet, so it’s that kind of discussion-level question—is that we sort of sometimes will agree that there’s this “problem,” that I need to get on the other side of that justice line, satisfy God, and, oh, by the way, what happens when I do is that I become like God: so theosis is kind of somewhere downstream of salvation in some sense. Or we’ll say that, yes, theosis is salvation, and it’s a kind of personal improvement, a personal experience. That, to me, is the problem, that it’s become individualized. Sometimes you’ll hear people will say we’re damned alone, but we’re saved together. So they’ll kind of make this sort of nod to ecclesiology, that salvation happens, but it’s kind of a group of us doing it together.

But the thing that I have come to believe is that that is not enough. It’s not entirely wrong, but it’s not enough, and it doesn’t do justice—no pun intended—to Orthodox tradition. What do you think? Am I getting the analysis of the problem right, here, Father, from your point of view?

Fr. Stephen: I think so, and I think in large part it stems from the fact that I think for too long we’ve sort of looked at it as an approach or a metaphor, where, well, the West takes approaches that use courtroom metaphors and banking metaphors and these other kinds of metaphors, and the East tends to use more ontological metaphors—it talks more about healing and transformation—and these are different perspectives, and these are different. So when someone says—when one of our Orthodox Fathers and forefathers says that theosis is the Orthodox view of salvation, we all sort of nod our heads and say, “Ah, yes, that’s more our perspective; we see it more that way.” And that’s not what’s being said by our Fathers and forefathers. They’re making a claim about what the apostles taught us, that they were taught by Christ, that salvation is; and that it is not…

And not to spoil, but to tease, we’re going to see that this represents a fundamentally different way to read, for example, St. Paul, who talks about salvation a great deal, that this isn’t just a different perspective; this is a completely different way of understanding him, looking at the different words and terms he uses and how he describes it, that I think a lot of times we, even as Orthodox Christians, have glossed over, because we’ve been sucked into sort of internecine Western debates about soteriology and “whose side are you on?”

Fr. Andrew: Right, and there’s also just sort of a cultural problem. Culturally, we’re individualists. So when I conceive of Christianity, I conceive of “What is my problem, and what do I need to do to solve it?” That’s the way that we tend to think about it. As a result, looking at salvation as a kind of religious version of a self-help program or of a workout program… I’m not saying that people are trying to reduce it or that they’re functioning in bad faith; they’re not—I mean, maybe some are, but I don’t think most are. But the problem is that it is fundamentally individualistic, that even if you read salvation as being theosis—deification, divinization, whatever translation you want to give to that word—it’s still often conceived of in an individual way, like: Work on your theosis.

Fr. Stephen: This is my spiritual program to become more virtuous and more peaceful and more successful.

Fr. Andrew: Right. What does it mean to become more like God? And often then the answer is given in moral terms or maybe, if you get really advanced, then you can have what we might think of as supernatural powers, because look at what some of the saints are capable of. It’s a kind of enhancement. I think that may be one of the best ways to understand kind of what the problem is. Again, we’re not saying that Orthodoxy has gotten this wrong! What we’re saying is that a lot of Orthodox people don’t quite understand the fullness of the Orthodox tradition of what salvation is, of what theosis is. So we’re going to try to deal with that, and we’re not going to claim to get it all from this, but we’re going to talk about this particularly from the angle that we discuss things and, God willing, give a much fuller picture. I hope that it’s going to be a more hopeful picture, actually, something that’s more doable in a lot of ways. I think it is, so…

Fr. Stephen: And what’s opposed to… We’ve been saying what it isn’t. What’s opposed to that kind of individual view, and what we’re going to be saying and what we’re going to be seeing tonight that the Scriptures are saying is that this is about the purpose for which the world was created. This is about the purpose for which human beings were created, and the destiny of humanity. So it’s something much bigger than just “Am I going to be able to keep my patience better when I’m stuck in traffic tomorrow?”

Fr. Andrew: And it’s not just that something broke and it needs to be fixed.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, this isn’t Plan B, like God had a Plan A, people sinned, so now here’s Plan B. This is Plan A! And it runs, as we’re going to see tonight, from Genesis to Revelation, literally in the Scriptures.

Fr. Andrew: So let’s start that there. I think that, especially for you who maybe haven’t heard of theosis before and you’re wondering, “What is this? Is this even Christian, talking about people being divinized or deified?” because, again, Fr. Stephen is a biblical scholar and because, as a former pastor myself, I strongly have emphasized and will always for my whole life emphasize that the main element of Orthodox tradition that Orthodox Christians need to know is the Bible, we’re going to focus especially on the Bible. We are going to talk about some stuff from the Church Fathers as well, but we’re going to especially focus on the Bible. So we’re going to begin by showing how theosis is right there in the Bible, and you don’t even have to wait until you get to the New Testament. [Laughter] It’s in the Old Testament. It’s right there at the beginning. So let’s start especially with the promises to Abraham.

God talks to Abraham and says, “This is what I’m going to give you. This is what your destiny is.” So let’s talk about that. Take us on in, Fr. Stephen. Everybody, get out your Bibles. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Well, hopefully, folks have, and if they haven’t, hopefully they’ll go back and listen to the last couple episodes also. The last episode we talked about the fall of the demonic and hostile powers, all five(ish) of them, and other than that fifth-ish one, all of those are described within Genesis 1-11, the first eleven chapters of the first book of the Bible. So this happens, culminating in the tower of Babel. Then the beginning of the response to that comes in Genesis 12 with Abraham. This is really the beginning of that response. We talked about how, at the tower of Babel event, that God had distanced himself from humanity. Humanity had tried to control God and manipulate him, and God in response had stepped back and sort of put lesser spiritual powers in charge to govern the nations.

So now when he comes to Abraham and appears to Abraham, and Abraham sees him and talks to him, by the way, he makes these promises to Abraham over against what’s happened. And these promises are reiterated three times during the story of Abraham, using similar language. The first of those is in Genesis 15:5.

And he (that being God) brought him (being Abram) outside, and said, “Look toward heaven, and number the stars if you are able to number them.” Then he said to him, “So shall your offspring be.”

Fr. Andrew: Right, and probably most people when they hear that, they think: Okay, God is saying, “Abram, you’re going to have a lot of descendants. Look how many stars there are! That’s going to be your descendants.” Right, okay.

Fr. Stephen: Right, which already—I mean, it’s going to become more clear as we go—but already notice he doesn’t say, “So many shall your offspring be.”

Fr. Andrew: Right.

Fr. Stephen: The word there that’s translated, “So shall your offspring be,” meaning: “Your offspring are going to be like them.” Now that can include quantity, but it’s not necessarily limited to quantity.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and it actually reminds me of John 3:16: “God so loved the world…” which a lot of people take as “God loved the world very much,” but it actually means “God loved the world in this way,” right? So it’s the same idea. “In this way, your offspring shall be. They’re going to be like the stars.” That’s a really suggestive thing. Let’s continue on; there’s more. There’s more references to stars. Seven chapters later, right?

Seven chapters later, Genesis 22:17—this is God speaking again: “I will surely bless you.” He’s speaking to Abram. “And I will surely you multiply your offspring as the stars of heaven and as the sand that is one the seashore, and your seed shall possess the gate of his enemies.” So this is similar… What else is going on there?

Fr. Stephen: Right. There’s a parallelism here that you don’t necessarily see in English translations, that’s there in the original Hebrew. God is saying to Abraham two things: he’s going to bless him, and he’s going to multiply him. Those are two things he’s going to do, and then he says his offspring are going to be as the stars of heaven and as the sand of the seashore. His offspring being as the stars of heaven corresponds to God blessing him; his offspring being as the sand on the seashore corresponds to God multiplying him.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, okay, so is this sort of set up grammatically in Hebrew so that this is obvious?

Fr. Stephen: Yes, there’s a parallelism there in the structure of the phrase. So they’re going to be many—the quantity is going to be like the sand of the seashore—and then the quality, the way in which they’re going to be, is “as the stars of heaven.” And this adds this additional element of his seed possessing the gate of his enemies. That’s an image. The gate of a city, if you have a walled city, the gate of that city is the center of power, both in terms of the defense of the city, obviously, but also in the social custom of the Ancient Near East and of Israel. That’s where the men of the city would go. That’s where cases would be judged, the equivalent of trials would be held. That’s where business contracts would be ratified. So this is the center of power. So this is talking about his seed basically taking the position: taking the position of power of his enemies, which is part of them becoming like the stars of heaven.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and that’s interesting that you mention that all those things happen at the gate. It’s this kind of liminal spot between civilization and what’s out there, the chaos, the wilderness, and so forth. There’s a lot about authority and power that are specifically about standing at that place, that border place. You think about if you, let’s say, hire a security guard for your home. You’re not going to have him in the basement; you’re going to have him at the door. You’re going to have him at that entrance. I think that that’s a really interesting thing as well, as we kind of build this.

Okay, so we’ve got one more line from Genesis that’s about God’s promises to Abraham, and is he “Abraham” by this point? I can’t remember which chapter that happens in.

Fr. Stephen: By [Genesis] 26, he’s Abraham.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, all right. So it goes Abram to Abraham. Maybe we could talk about that some other time… [Laughter]

In chapter 26, God makes again a very similar promise to Abraham. Chapter 26, verse 4, he says, “I will multiply your offspring as the stars of heaven and will give to your offspring all these lands, and in your offspring all the nations of the earth shall be blessed.” So you get… It’s interesting. In that one you get not only the sense of multiplication—lots of them—but again, they’re as the stars of heaven, and then, also building on the previous one, there’s this notion that they’re going to take the lands, that the lands are going to belong to his offspring. And then “and in your offspring, all the nations of the earth shall be blessed.” So you’ve got now an additional… I mean, this is the way I’m reading it, anyway, that there’s this additional sense that the whole earth now is going to partake of the blessing that is in these promises given to Abraham.

Fr. Stephen: Right, that the offspring of Abraham, the seed of Abraham becoming as the stars of heaven is going to have this beneficial effect for the nations, the nations who have just been scattered at Babel, the nations who had just been assigned to these other powers. This also gives us the relationship to the land, because this is a typical kind of prophetic promise that we find in the Old Testament, and this is important because this is a section that a lot of our Christian friends misinterpret in terms of the relationship of the land to the promises to Abraham.

When God gave promises and gave prophesies, all through the Old Testament—and even there are examples in the New Testament—there was a sign attached to that prophecy: there was some immediate fulfillment. There was something that happened immediately in the short term that they could see, and that served as the guarantee that the greater prophesy was going to come true.

Fr. Andrew: Kind of a down payment, so to speak.

Fr. Stephen: Right. If you want a real quick example, you can see this in Luke 2 with the shepherds. The angel comes to the shepherds and says, “Unto you is born this day in the city of David, a Savior who is Christ the Lord.” So the Messiah has been born. And then they say, “This will be a sign to you: if you go over here, you will find this baby lying in a food trough,” which you wouldn’t expect to find. So you go over there and you see the baby in the food trough: you’ll know that, yeah, that’s the Messiah, because that’s an odd thing you don’t expect to see.

Fr. Andrew: Right, not to mention angels talking to you. [Laughter] Also a little odd.

Fr. Stephen: Right. Well, so the strip of land in Palestine, Canaan, is not the promise to Abraham. It is the sign or the down payment. So at the end of Joshua, when at the end of Joshua they’re emphasizing that God had given all the land that he promised to Israel, that’s not the end of the Bible. It’s not like: Okay, promise fulfilled; we’re done.

Fr. Andrew: Done! Good job, God.

Fr. Stephen: But it’s establishing that, yes, God did this—and so we can be confident that the rest is going to happen. So for example when Hebrews says that Abraham was looking for a heavenly promised land, that’s not some kind of weird allegory. That’s: Abraham was actually looking for that, and the land was the sign that he would truly receive it.

Fr. Andrew: Huh. Yeah. Well, okay, it’s clear: the idea that Abraham is going to have a lot of descendants; that’s pretty straightforward. The idea that his descendants are going to receive the land of Canaan as a kind of down payment, that’s pretty straightforward. So let’s talk about what it means that they’re going to be as the stars. Unless you’re brand-new to this show, you probably kind of know where we’re going with this, but for those who are brand-new, and maybe for a little bit of review for everybody else, let’s talk about what it means to be “as the stars.” As we talked about in our second episode, where we discuss the angelic hierarchies, we mention specifically, for instance, that there’s one of the angelic ranks that are called the virtues, in English translation anyway, and that their task is to help God to govern the creation, that they’re kind of in everything.

If you have to sort of—and this is not all there is to it—if you need an image, you can ask yourself, “What makes the wind blow and the stars shine and the oceans move?” and whatever. Certainly, you could say there’s these gravitational forces and those kinds of things, but that doesn’t answer the question as to why—why creation even works the way that it does. Science can just sort of observe this stuff, but ancient peoples understood that there were these spiritual beings who were engaged in the maintenance, so to speak, the working, the functioning of creation, and that that includes the stars, includes the sun and the moon, includes everything.

And of course, that’s the reason, for instance, that ancient pagans would associate their gods with these particular elements of creation; it is because they understood that creation had spiritual beings helping to make it go. They didn’t come up with spiritual beings as an explanation for the things that they didn’t understand, which is kind of the modern, materialistic interpretation of ancient religion. But rather, they had had experience with these beings, and eventually, of course, some of them fall and they start to worship them, which is not good. But nonetheless, there is this sense that they have this association, and so when God is talking about the stars to Abraham, he doesn’t mean that your descendants are going to be like big blazing balls of gas; that’s not what he means. What exactly does he mean?

Fr. Stephen: Well, you have to remember, of course, that Abram himself comes from Ur of the Chaldees. He is a Chaldean; he is a Sumerian, technically, of what’s called the Ur III period. Abram had an understanding of the stars that’s commensurate with what you were just describing. We talked about the tower of Babel, and again how this is coming immediately afterwards. As you said, unless this is your first time listening, you’ve heard us refer to Deuteronomy 32:8, which talks about the tower of Babel event, when the Most High divided the nations. He numbered them according to the number of the sons of God, and we’ve talked about how that’s another name for the angelic beings. And then, in a corresponding passage in Deuteronomy 4:19, God talks about [how] the people of Israel are not to worship the sun, moon, and stars “to whom God has allotted all the nations under the earth.”

So the sons of God and the sun, moon, and stars are here sort of made equivalent as divine beings. This isn’t just something that’s an ancient Mesopotamian religion that God used as a metaphor for Abraham and then got lost to time. This is a view—the view—of the sun, moon, and stars and the divine beings that relate to them that existed at the time of the apostles and at the time of the writing of the New Testament. It was a constant throughout, and the fact that it existed at the time is attested to. I don’t think we should probably read this whole quote, but I can read part of it, from Philo.

Fr. Andrew: We’ve got a big quote here in our notes. We need to go to break in just a minute so we can start taking some of your calls. But, yeah, why don’t you read a little bit, Fr. Stephen, and maybe summarize what Philo of Alexandria’s talking about?

Fr. Stephen: Sure. This is Philo of Alexandria, who was a member of the Jewish community in Alexandria. It’s from a text from his called On the Special Laws, and in this he’s commenting on that Deuteronomy 4:19 passage. This is his explanation. He says:

Some persons have conceived that the sun and the moon and the other stars are independent gods, to whom they have attributed the causes of all things that exist. But Moses was well aware that the world was created and was like a very large city, having rulers and subjects in it. The rulers being all the bodies which are in heaven, such as planets and fixed stars, and the subjects being all the natures beneath the moon, hovering in the air and adjacent to the earth. But that the rulers aforesaid are not independent and absolute, but are the viceroys of one Supreme Being, the Father of all, in imitation of whom they administer with propriety and success the charge committed to their care, as he also presides over all created things in strict accordance with justice and with law.

I’ll skip to sort of the end of the quote. He talks about how these subsidiary gods (with a small-g), these spiritual beings who govern the sun, moon, and stars are worshiped by the pagans as if they were these independent gods themselves and had independent power. But what Philo says:

Rather, we must therefore look on all those bodies in the heaven, which the outward sense regards as gods, not as independent rulers, since they are assigned the work of lieutenants, being by their intrinsic nature responsible to a higher power, but by reason of their virtue not actually called to render an account of their doings. So that, transcending all visible essence by means of our reason, let us press forward to the honor of that everlasting and invisible Being who can be comprehended and appreciated by the mind alone, who is not only the God of all gods, whether appreciable only by the intellect or visible to the outward senses, but is also the Creator of them all.

So he says there they are these subsidiary beings who serve Yahweh the God of Israel, the one God of all, and we should rather, in seeing their governance of the universe, ascend beyond them to contemplate and honor and worship their Creator.

Fr. Andrew: Right. In other words, when God says to Abraham that his offspring are going to be “as the stars,” this is what he means, that they are going to be as these angelic beings who govern creation, including the stars; that they’re going to be like that: they’re going to function like that, they’re going to serve like that, and so this is embedded from the very, very beginning of what we could think of as being sort of the salvation story, when God speaks to Abraham and says, “Now, look: come out of this horrible civilization of Cain that you live in now, and go to a place I’m going to show you.” And this is the story that we’re now telling, that your offspring are going to be “as the stars.”

That’s where we’re going to wrap up the first part of our show this evening, and we’re going to go ahead and go to a break, and when we come back, please give us a ring. We’d love to talk to you, and we’re going to continue telling this story.

Fr. Andrew: Welcome back, and thank you for that voice-over, Steve. So this is the second part of our show, and it’s where we begin to take your calls. You can reach us at 855-AF-RADIO; that’s 855-237-2346. We would love to hear from you; we’d love to talk to you. We’re going to continue to talk about these promises to Abraham and what exactly they mean and especially as they start to play out in the New Testament.

All right, well, Fr. Stephen I see that you’ve got in our notes here that his promise to Abraham—that his offspring would be “as the stars,” that they’re going to be like the stars—gets reiterated a couple of different times, at least—maybe multiple times—in the New Testament. I’m actually seeing lots of times! You wouldn’t believe, people, how many times this gets reiterated in the New Testament.

But before we get into that too deeply, just to try to reconnect this back to all the things we’ve been talking about for this whole show, this is just to reiterate. Those of you who have been with us on this journey the whole time, you know probably what I’m about to say, but God’s divine council—his hosts, his armies of angelic beings who assist him in creation, who obey his will, who help to govern creation, who are not only messengers to us and help to protect us, but also that they are these vast cosmic intelligences who do the will of God and surround him and are always present with him—this is what the promises to Abraham are about, that Abraham’s offspring are going to be like that, that they’re going to function like the angels.

This is why, for instance, we’ve titled this particular episode “Sons of God, Equal to the Angels.” Now, that is a quote from Jesus Christ himself in Luke 20:36, and he says there that the sons of the resurrection—and that’s us, right? God willing—the sons of the resurrection are become sons of God and equal to the angels. That’s what’s going on here. Jesus himself is repeating, essentially, what the promises to Abraham are, and being very explicit about it. That’s really explicit: become equal to the angels. It’s funny. I mean, I don’t think I’ve ever heard people talk about salvation and then mention that verse. It’s almost like: “Oh, yes, that’s what happens kind of after salvation, maybe.” But clearly, in terms of these promises given to Abraham, becoming a son of the resurrection means becoming one of the sons of God—we talked about that; it’s a rank of angels—and as Jesus says, equal to the angels.

We’ve got a call coming in, and it’s not quite exactly on what we’ve been talking about, but I think it’s an important one, because we’ve gotten a lot of questions about the role of demons. So we have Cody, who is on the line from it looks like North Carolina, and he or she—forgive me; I’m not sure: we’ll find out in just a second!—is questioning about the role of demons in mental illness. So, Cody, are you there?

Cody: Yes, can you hear me?

Fr. Andrew: Yes, I hear you!

Cody: Okay, cool. Yes, so actually the guy that was calling in from the first podcast, Rafael, me and my wife are actually catechumens at the same church that he goes to.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, great! And you definitely sound like you come from North Carolina, by the way. I lived there for eleven years, and you are definitely from North Carolina! [Laughter]

Cody: I appreciate that! But anyways, my question is—I don’t really hear it discussed very much, at least I don’t—but demons, do they have any particular parts to play in mental health, like in schizophrenia or even something like clinical depression? I don’t hear it discussed very much, so I was wondering what you guys’ professional theological opinion would be on that.

Fr. Andrew: Well, that’s a great question, and I know it’s something on some people’s minds. I think one of the reasons for that is there’ve been many cases throughout history where people said, “Well, this person is insane. Therefore there is a demon.” Now in the modern world it’s kind of like: “Well, we’ve outgrown that idea, and we know that mental illness is just a chemical imbalance or that kind of thing.” I think the problem with that modern approach is that it assumes that there is a kind of spiritually neutral ground. The other problem is, of course, that mental illness—again, I’m not a psychologist, I’m not a psychiatrist, I’m not a doctor of any kind—but mental illness is a vast category that includes a whole lot of different kinds of things. It can be everything from clinical depression to schizophrenia—which itself, schizophrenia is a vast category that includes a whole lot of different things!

There’s all kinds of things that are classified as mental illness, and I think that to say that there is no spiritual influence involved when someone is mentally ill is irresponsible if we believe that there are spiritual beings around us. I think it would also be irresponsible to say, “Oh, I see a problem with this person; therefore they must be demon-possessed.” Right? We don’t know that. I’m not qualified to say whether someone is demon-possessed, even though I believe that demon possession is real. I’m not qualified to say what mental illness that you might see in a person, what that exactly is, even though I believe that mental illness is real. And I would also say that I don’t think that these things are necessarily mutually exclusive; they’re not. I feel depressed if I haven’t had enough protein today. Does that mean that my spiritual life is in no way involved? It absolutely is involved! It always is involved. We have spiritual beings around us.

My answer would be that it’s possible and kind of it depends. It depends a lot on the given, particular circumstance. I don’t know. Fr. Stephen, is there anything you wanted to add to that or correct or whatever?

Fr. Stephen: I think it’s important to say that mental illness and demonic possession are two different things.

Fr. Andrew: Okay.

Cody: Right.

Fr. Stephen: Demonic possession is a different phenomenon than mental illness.

Fr. Andrew: Although it might look like mental illness to people who don’t believe in demonic possession, right? Hello?

Cody: Hello? Oh, was that to me?

Fr. Andrew: Oh, I guess… Fr. Stephen, are you still there? Oh, I think we lost Fr. Stephen for just a second there.

Cody: Oh, man.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Right? Well, yeah, I don’t know what he was about to say. Fr. Stephen, do we have you back yet? All right, well, we’re going to try to get him back. But if I had to try to finish his sentence… [Laughter] Demon possession, of course, is where someone has surrendered to a demon, and they kind of take control of them, that there’s this kind of occupation going on there. Whereas someone who’s behaving—who has mental illness, they’re affected by something, and they may well be affected by demonic temptation, maybe because they’ve fallen prey to it over and over again, so, yeah—hopefully we’ll get Fr. Stephen back here, and we’ll hear the rest of his sentence, but maybe not. [Laughter]

Well, that’s how you know it’s live radio, everybody, because anything can happen! Definitely.

I think the thing that we have to try to avoid is this idea of saying that any weird thing we say, that any weird behavior we see in a person must be a demon or that it must be… Oh, they’re just mentally ill or whatever. Well, I hope that’s helpful. I just got a note here from Fr. Stephen that his power went out. But we’re going to try to reconnect with him, and hopefully we can do that. We have Bobby as our engineer this evening, so, Bobby, can you take us to a break, and we’re going to try to reconnect with Fr. Stephen?

Mr. Bobby Maddex: This is the general rule of the show: Don’t bring Bobby in—and you’re doing it.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I’m sorry!

Mr. Maddex: It’s fine. Okay, I’ll take you to break. Hang on.

Fr. Andrew: Thank you, Bobby!

Fr. Andrew: All right, we’re back. Fr. Stephen, are you there? All right, I’m not hearing him yet. So welcome back everybody, it’s Fr. Andrew from Ancient Faith Radio, Emmaus, Pennsylvania. Fr. Stephen, are you there?

Fr. Stephen: I am here.

Fr. Andrew: Yay! So what happened?

Fr. Stephen: Ah, there’s a storm here in Louisiana, as happens all too frequently, and my power went out. But we can continue.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, well, you’re connecting through your tablet, right?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, I apologize to Cody for dropping out in the middle of my response.

Fr. Andrew: It’s funny: the other day someone said to me—again, I don’t know; I can’t read demons and angels, I’m not an expert on this, we’re just talking about it and trying to live it as best as we can—but someone said to me, “You know, you guys talking about these things, you’re inviting problems.” [Laughter] God willing, we’ll be able to get to an episode where we don’t have a technical issue that we can’t possibly foretell coming in. But here we are, and that’s okay. So, hi, everybody out there in Ancient Faith Radio-land! It’s live radio!

So, Fr. Stephen, why don’t you finish out? Hopefully Cody is still listening. He’s not connected now, but why don’t you finish out what you were saying and correct whatever wrong thing I said to him! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Oh, no, I was not correcting you in this case!

Fr. Andrew: Oh, great! Oh, man.

Fr. Stephen: I was just saying that once we distinguish between demonic possession as a phenomenon on one hand and between mental illness on the other, then we can understand that it has the same relation to mental illness that they do to physical illness, that there’s [Inaudible] involved between a disease of the liver and a disease of the brain. It’s the same kind of issues and the same kind of way we should understand and deal with it.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. And I should probably note for our listeners that you are now connected over your data connection, through a mobile tower. Is that right?

Fr. Stephen: Ah, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah! So there we go. Just expect a little weirdness; that’s just the way it is. But we are going to continue to do this show. All right, Cody, I hope that’s helpful to you.

Let’s continue talking about these promises to Abraham that were given and what exactly they have to do with theosis. Fr. Stephen, why don’t you continue us on and talk about espeically… I mentioned that verse from Luke 20:36, where the Lord says that the sons of the resurrection become sons of God and equal to the angels. Let’s continue talking about this. So these promises get reiterated. What happens there?

Fr. Stephen: Right, well, we’re going to talk about a few different places where they get reiterated. Then we’re going to take sort of a deep dive into St. Paul, as I teased earlier, because it’s very important to how St. Paul sees the whole pattern of salvation. But in terms of a few places where elements of what we’ve been talking about get reiterated… For example, in Matthew 19:28, there’s a verse that gets glossed over a lot, where the disciples, soon to be apostles, ask Christ, “What about us? We’ve given up all these things to follow you. What promises will we receive in return?” And Christ promises them that they will sit on twelve thrones and judge the twelve tribes of Israel. And “judge” in this context is like the Old Testament concept of a judge; it’s not sort of “you’re going to hear cases” or it’s not just about the last judgment, but this is about sharing in Christ’s reign and his rule over the world.

Of course, the same thing gets reiterated in Revelation 20:4. It talks about the saints and the martyrs who come to life and rule and reign with Christ for the period between their deaths and his return, which is figuratively sort of represented there as a thousand years.

Then in terms of the element of camping in the gates—we’re going to, as another tease, talk about this a lot more in our Halloween special just next week, one week from today—

Fr. Andrew: There we go; there’s a promo.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] So, more of this then! But one of the things that we notice in St. John’s book of Revelation is that he encounters with the heavenly hosts and the angels who are worshiping and praising God, he encounters 24 elders, 24 human elders who are there, presbyters. There’s a lot of different ways of understanding that number—the 12 tribes of Israel and the 12 apostles are how we do it—but they are particularly elders, and of course, starting with Moses in the Old Testament, there were 72 elders of Israel. So 24 is one third.

Fr. Andrew: That’s interesting!

Fr. Stephen: And it’s just a few chapters later that, when we read about Satan being cast down from heaven, that with him he takes a third of the stars.

Fr. Andrew: There’s those stars again.

Fr. Stephen: So this isn’t about sort of an exact number of the angels who fell, or even an exact proportion, but it’s to give us this sense that: Oh look, a third of these elders are these humans who have been glorified; a third of the angelic beings fell—to give us this replacement idea, this camping in the gates of the enemy, taking their position of power and authority.

So those are just some examples before we get into the deeper dive, at least, on St. Paul.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, well, let’s get on the diving board and take the deep dive into St. Paul! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Take a couple bounces.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, thank God. And, everyone out there, please pray right now that Fr. Stephen’s data connection stays strong and also pray that his power comes back on. But as long as we’re able, we’re going to keep doing this, because this is what we’re supposed to be doing tonight.

Fr. Stephen: No one can say we’re not dedicated.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, exactly! I know I feel bad, here in my wonderful studio where everything is nice and the power is on, the lights are on. That’s okay.

Fr. Stephen: And I’m here rubbing two sticks together to try and send smoke signals.

Fr. Andrew: Woo-woo!

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] So a couple things with St. Paul. First of all, we tend to think about, as contemporary Western people, to think about St. Paul sort of the wrong way. We sort of picture him, because he was a teacher and because he was Jewish, we think of him as sort of like a modern rabbi, so we picture St. Paul sort of sitting and studying these musty scrolls of the Torah and these other ancient Jewish traditions, and he sits there and he reads them and he thinks about them and he sort of comes up with this theology, portions of which then end up in the Bible.

And that’s not only not how the Scriptures see St. Paul, that’s not even how St. Paul sees himself. The picture we get of St. Paul from the book of Acts and from St. Paul’s own writings… For example, what we normally call his conversion on the road to Damascus is kind of anachronistic to call it a conversion, because it’s not as if there was this religion, Judaism, and this other religion, Christianity, and St. Paul left one and went to the other in 35 AD. That didn’t happen. Rather, the way St. Paul describes it himself, he actually borrows language directly from the book of Jeremiah in Galatians when he describes it, as sort of a prophetic call, the way Isaiah had sort of this vision of God seated in the temple, or Ezekiel had this vision of the divine throne, or Jeremiah experienced this call.

So St. Paul saw himself as called to be a prophet, and that’s not the only time he sees and interacts with Christ. If you read the book of Acts closely, there’s actually three times in the book of Acts where Christ appears personally to St. Paul and they interact. In addition to that, we have St. Paul’s description of his sort of visionary experience of going up into the third heaven. So St. Paul is really more like the seers, the prophets, the mystics of the Old Testament than like a modern Jewish rabbi/theologian.

We could go into all kinds of detail about his personal prayer practices and all that, but for tonight, obviously this affects how he viewed salvation. This isn’t just a question of theology and how does it work and what’s a good metaphor. This is talking about his own personal experience of salvation, his own experience of Christ. That’s what he’s writing about.

Fr. Andrew: Right, so he’s having visions. He’s a mystic; he’s a seer. He’s like Moses. He’s like one of the prophets. You know, it’s interesting: one of the things that I’ve always thought was kind of cool: serving in the Antiochian Church, especially up here in the northeast, means that you’re going to bump into people of Middle Eastern background, including ones that are actually from the Middle East, so you’re going to hear people speaking Arabic. One of the things that’s interesting to me is that the Arabic word for “prophet”—forgive me, Arabic speakers, if I’m mispronouncing this—is I think al rasul. That same word is used to refer to apostles. So for instance, Boulos al-Rasul is the Apostle Paul. It’s interesting that in Arabic at least a kind of colloquial way of describing apostles and prophets is with the same word, interestingly enough, even though it’s not literally… It’s not the same word in Greek, and I don’t know if that’s the word that’s used in the Arabic Bible; I don’t have an Arabic speaker sitting here with me. But I thought that was kind of interesting, that apostles are looked at as being prophets of another kind, of another time.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, every one of them saw God, whether it was Christ in his earthly life—Christ is God.

Fr. Andrew: And they speak on behalf of God, just… I mean, that’s what prophets do. So, yeah. Okay, well, before we get too deep into Paul, we actually got a question that came over email from Fr. David Subu—forgive me, Fr. David, if I’m mispronouncing your last name. But he asked about something we talked about in the first part, and he said this: “Can you talk about “possessing the gates” and how it connects to the harrowing of Hades and so forth?”

Is he on the right track? It seems to me that he’s suggesting we talk about Abraham’s offspring “possessing the gates.” Does that apply to the gates of Hades as well?

Fr. Stephen: Ah, yes. I’m going to partially punt on this, just because I don’t want to steal our own thunder next week.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, all right. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: So, yes, this is going to be a major focus. The answer is yes. Yes, and to further tease, next week we’re going to be talking about how Christ conquers all of the enemies, and then shares that victory with humanity, and that’s what becoming a saint is all about. It’s going to tie up a lot of what we’re talking about here. But we need to kind of a little more groundwork here first, I think, before we…

Fr. Andrew: I know. This is the show where we keep saying, “Tune in next time!” [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah! It’s coming. Yes.

Fr. Andrew: It’s coming; don’t worry, everybody. So where shall we start out here? Shall we start out with this quote from Galatians 3?

Fr. Stephen: Well, right before we do that, I want to call back—before all of my electrical chicanery took place—the big sort of themes and terms we saw in terms of the promises to Abraham about the sons of God, the seed of Abraham, who are the heirs to the promise, to the inheritance, that he’s been promised. These are sort of the key terms related to theosis as it’s originally laid out, way back in Genesis and then is being pursued going forward. So now, when we have those terms in mind and know where they come from, when we read St. Paul talking about salvation, it’s important to see how he now is going to use those terms in relationship to Christ.

And we’re actually going to be focusing on… We’re going to be reading… We’re not going to go through the whole chapters, but we’re going to be talking about texts from Galatians 3-4 and Romans 8, and for any of our listeners who have an awareness of what we’re getting into: Protestantism, you’ll know that these are some of the basic chapters that are used to lay out sort of the Western and particularly Protestant view of salvation. And I think we’re going to see, once we have these terms in mind and this understanding of what theosis is in mind, that these texts actually mean something very different than we may have been brought up or heard that they teach, because in some cases we’ve been focusing on the wrong terms and the wrong words.

Fr. Andrew: Which then just continues the tradition of this podcast, where we try to blow everybody’s minds with things that have been staring you in the face. [Laughter] So here we are.

Fr. Stephen: But Galatians 3 is the place… [Inaudible]

Fr. Andrew: Oh, we kind of lost you a little bit there, Fr. Stephen. You still there?

Fr. Stephen: I was going to say, yeah, I think Galatians 3, that verse is a good place to start, if you want to read from that first text.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, Galatians 3:26-29.

For in Christ Jesus, you are all sons of God, through faith. For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to promise.

So there it is. There it is, the promise to Abraham, described as being—we’re sons of God. And how does it happen? Baptism. It comes through baptism, because we put on Christ. Of course, that line, “For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ,” that is sung at the Orthodox baptismal service.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and that text has been kind of atomized. We’ve pulled the pieces out and quoted them separately so much that we kind of lose the flow. We have “As many of you as have been baptized into Christ,” and you’ll hear people— [Inaudible] —sons of God, through faith. And that “as many as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ” is saying that that takes place through baptism and that, by being baptized, we are therefore Christ’s, and being sons of God we are therefore also Abraham’s seed and heirs to those promises to Abraham. So this is all tied together for St. Paul with baptism. So the receipt of those promises is not in the larger argument of Galatians, from circumcision to be Abraham’s offspring, but by being in Christ, which happens through baptism.

Fr. Andrew: Right. It’s just amazing when you start to look at all these things in this larger context and connect these parts of the Scripture to each other.

Moving forward, then, to Galatians 4, if we look at verses 5-7, we get this from St. Paul.

So that we might receive adoption as sons, and because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying: Abba, Father! So you are no longer a slave, but a son; and if a son, then an heir through God.

I think that often when people see this, of course, the idea of being adopted into God’s family makes sense, but if we recall that the “sons of God” are kind of this angelic rank, and we recall what does it mean to be part of this royal family, well, if you’re in a royal family, you have a job to do. You have something that you’re supposed to be doing, and by virtue of being close to the King and Father, you share in his authority and his glory and in his work, in his ministry. And this happens because God has sent his Spirit into our hearts, that we have become sons of God.

Sometimes, of course, it gets translated as “children” rather than “sons.” But it’s not that that’s sort of totally wrong, but it obscures this idea of the “sons of God,” this image from the Old Testament that then gets carried forward into the New Testament. I think it’s really important that we emphasize this idea of adoption. We’re adopted as sons.

I just wanted to mention—and hopefully we’ll have time to talk about this a little bit more—but I just wanted to mention this especially. I was reading today a paper from my friend, the late Fr. Matthew Baker. Fr. Matthew and I were in seminary together, and he was just a brilliant, brilliant, brilliant person, but also just a deeply Christian man. He died in an accident some years ago, but he wrote a paper called “Deification and Sonship According to St. Athanasius of Alexandria,” and I could just talk about this paper for hours. But one of the things that he mentions, of course, is that St. Athanasius talks about adoption a lot when he’s talking about theosis. The term that’s used for adoption—and this is actually an ancient Greek term; it’s not something that Athanasius came up with, but it long predates him—the term that’s used for adoption is—and I’m sure I’m going to mispronounce this; I don’t know—huiosethia. Did I get that right, huiothesia?

Fr. Stephen: Euh… yeah.

Fr. Andrew: Close enough! [Laughter] Huiosethia.

Fr. Stephen: Close enough for government work.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, okay. And it’s sort of huios which means “son,” and thesia, which means kind of a setting or placing upon, not that you can always take a Greek word apart and get the meaning of it, but in this case it kind of works.

Fr. Stephen: Being made a son.

Fr. Andrew: Being made a son, right, rather than being born one, is sort of the idea. You’re being made a son. Athanasius, that’s part of the key thing for him in terms of theosis, and he also connects it with this term, theopoiesis, which means God-making, being made a God. There’s that classic line from Athanasius: God became man so that we might become gods, or might be made gods. That all of this is tied together: that being adopted in Christ as sons of God, being made gods—this is all, all together, theosis, it’s all the same thing. It’s really something. This idea, we’re adopted as sons, that’s right there in Galatians 4:5.

Did you want to add anything else to that on this part from St. Paul, Father?

Fr. Stephen: No, I think we can go onto Romans 8.

Fr. Andrew: Great! Take us there.

Fr. Stephen: And we can go through some of these quotes now a little more quickly, because we’re going to see a lot of the same thing. There’s a lot of piling on. We can see how central this is to St. Paul’s thinking. Every time he talks about salvation, in Romans 8:14-17:

For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God, for you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry: Abba, Father! The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit, that we are children of God, and if children then heirs, heirs of God and fellow-heirs with Christ, provided that we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him.

You may have noticed, it switches from “sons” to “children” there. That’s because the Greek switches from “sons” to “children” there.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, there you go.

Fr. Stephen: Both the phrase “sons of God” and “children of God” occur in the Scriptures in the Greek. Unfortunately, because we want to be gender sensitive, a lot of modern translations translate both as “children of God,” so you can’t tell which the original says when you read in English. But “sons of God” of course has this important weight that we’ve been talking about, of referring to the angelic beings, whereas “children of God” refers to other elements of that.

But we have this element of adoption here. It’s connected to being heirs again of the promises, fellow-heirs with Christ, and also with, of course, glorification, another element of theosis: coming to share in Christ’s glory, the glory of the resurrected and reigning.

Fr. Andrew: Yep, so there it is again, over and over.

Fr. Stephen: Do you want to do the next one? We’ll just pile these on a little bit.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, right, right. So this is continuing in Romans 8. So Romans 8, starting with verse 19 and going through 23.

For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now, and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, grown inwardly, as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies.

So this connects us again to this idea that creation itself is participating in this, which, if we understand that these sons of God, these angelic beings, are governing creation and participating in the governing of creation, and that our job is to do the same thing, and if we’re in Christ, we begin to do that, then it makes sense that the creation would be bound up in human destiny. Creation can’t be what it’s supposed to be, in a sense, without our participation as sons of God.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and this isn’t humanity over against creation. The whole purpose of creation for St. Paul, the reason God created everything he created including us, was so that he could share his divine and eternal life with us humans, to bring forth the sons of God. That’s the purpose of everything and of all this. And this takes place at the redemption of our bodies, notice, our physicality. So this is not redemption from our bodies, from the world, but it’s in and with the world. So theosis has nothing to do with Gnosticism; this is the opposite of Gnosticism.

And also notice that language that St. Paul uses fairly frequently, of the firstfruits of the Spirit. Whereas we were talking about with a sign and a deposit, we have received the Spirit, which is the sign of the truth of the promise of the redemption of our bodies at the resurrection. It’s the sign and the beginning point.

Then, just real quickly, Romans 8:29, to pile one more on. This gets quoted a lot, especially by our Calvinist friends, because it talks about predestination, but let’s just for a second don’t get triggered by the word “predestined,” and listen to the rest of the verse.

That for those whom he foreknew, he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers.

What God… And the word there that’s translated “predestined” really means to set in order in advance. So following off of what we just read about creation, God created all these things and put them in place and set them all in order for the purpose that we would be conformed to the image of Christ, we would become like Christ—another element of theosis: become like God—so that Christ would be the firstborn—he is the begotten Son, the unique Son—and then we become the sons of God through him.

Fr. Andrew: Adoption, yeah, in Christ. Right. Well, we could probably talk about lots more stuff from St. Paul, but let’s go ahead and, because this kind of wraps up this part of our show for this evening, let’s go ahead and go to a break, and when we come back we have a call that we’re going to take, God willing, and we’ll continue to talk. So let’s go ahead and go to break.

Fr. Andrew: Welcome to the third half of the show, as we stumble along amidst storms and power outages, and Fr. Stephen on his data stream! [Laughter] All right, well before we continue—I’m sorry, I’m just laughing over here; what else can you do? Before we continue, we have a call, and this is Fr. Christopher who is calling, and he is calling about the scriptural understanding of demons. So, Fr. Christopher, are you there?

Fr. Christopher: I am here, Father. Good to hear your voice.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, it is good to hear yours, too! Welcome to The Lord of Spirits, Father.

Fr. Christopher: Well, thank you. Actually, it’s a little bit—quite a bit different than what I wanted to ask, but first if I could, I wanted to make a comment to both of you.

Fr. Andrew: A comment— And I should tell our audience, by the way, that Fr. Christopher and I are old friends.

Fr. Christopher: Old friends.

Fr. Andrew: And Fr. Christopher and I were in seminary together at St. Tikhon’s Seminary. So I’m ready for anything.

Fr. Christopher: And we were texting today! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: We were texting today!

Fr. Christopher: And Father knows I’m going to embarrass my wife, because she was a classmate of his, and she’s the brightest star in our family. And she made a comment about when she became Orthodox. She was a biblical studies major in college, and she said when she became Orthodox it just really opened her mind to the depths and the breadth of the Scripture. When we were listening to your episodes like last week, she said the same thing. She said, “I feel like it’s a very similar thing, listening to this podcast and this teaching. It’s just opening up my mind to the depth and the breadth of the Scripture.” So I just wanted to thank you, first and foremost, from all of us who are listening to this wonderful work that you’re doing. So thank you, Fathers, very much.

Fr. Andrew: Thank God.

Fr. Stephen: Thank you.

Fr. Andrew: So what’s your question, Fr. Christopher?

Fr. Christopher: My question would be—you know, we see in the authors that we love, like Tolkien, and some of the other Inklings, hints of the vision of the council of God. I guess my question is: When did we lose this teaching? When was this lost to us? Was it between them and where we are now? Did they kind of rediscover it through the love of mythology and Scripture? When did we lose this?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that’s a good question. Fr. Stephen, why don’t you go ahead and start us off with this one?

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Well, it depends on who the “we” is in the question.

Fr. Andrew: And in what way, maybe.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, I mean, part of it is that if “we” is the Orthodox Church, I don’t think it was lost, but I don’t know that recent generations have fully been able to appropriate it, because it’s contained in our liturgics; it’s contained in the writings of the Fathers, too many of which are still untranslated into English; it’s contained in texts, ancient Jewish texts that were preserved not by Jewish communities but by Orthodox Christian communities. If you get the two-volume Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, which is sort of the biggest repository of Second Temple literature out there, and you read the prefaces to the books, where the manuscripts come from, it’s Mar Saba, it’s St. Catherine’s, it’s Mt. Athos. There are a number of Second Temple Jewish texts that we only have preserved in Slavonic, because they were preserved at monastic settlements in the Slavic world.

So these have been preserved for us by the Church, and they were continually copied and recopied right up into the 15th and 16th centuries, and then the printing press came along. I don’t know so much that it’s lost as that we haven’t laid hold of it. We haven’t fully, as a generation, laid hold of our inheritance. In the West, it’s a lot more complicated. I think in the West other issues started to take precedence. There are Protestant Bible scholars and that kind of thing who are trying to reappropriate this in an Evangelical Protestant context. I think if they really follow it through, they’ll be drawn ineluctably into the Orthodox Church.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] It’s our secret weapon!

Fr. Stephen: So they are kind of rediscovering it over there, but it’s by going back as scholars to this literature and that kind of thing. As you said, I think Tolkien—I mean, Tolkien I know was reading the most newly translated Ancient Near Eastern texts and that kind of thing that he could lay hands on, some of which turned out to be forgeries and that kind of thing, but he didn’t know, or just badly mistranslated, but he didn’t know. And that’s why he was someone who you see this early on to pop up in, because he was deeply interested in it and kind of pursued it, even in the West.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and you know, I’ll say, if you’re interested in that particular angle of this, I have another podcast called Amon Sûl, in which I talk about J.R.R. Tolkien from an Orthodox Christian point of view, with various guests. Fr. Stephen came on that podcast for episode 24 of Amon Sûl, and we specifically talked about the kind of mythic understanding of Scripture and how that’s represented in Tolkien’s works. He gets a lot right, interestingly enough; even though he’s writing fiction, he gets a lot right.

But, you know, just to sort of address this specific question of losing this sense of the scriptural understanding of the divine council and so forth, I think as Fr. Stephen said, there’s a whole lot of the Fathers—and it’s my understanding it’s the majority of the Fathers—have never been translated into English. The vast majority of patristic writings are not in English. What we have is largely, the bulk of it anyways, comes from 19th century Protestants who were looking for stuff to kind of argue against Roman Catholics in many cases. So it becomes sort of submitted to those sets of questions, and that can kind of distort the way we read it.

This is going to be a perennial issue on this podcast, which is: Why have I never heard this before? Someone who’s maybe been raised Orthodox Christian or catechized well as an Orthodox Christian—they’ve never heard this stuff before. Again, it’s not because this stuff isn’t in Scripture, it’s not because it’s not in the liturgical services, it’s not because it’s not in the Church Fathers—it’s just that probably whoever taught you wasn’t aware of this understanding. Now, that doesn’t mean that you’re not really an Orthodox Christian or that you’re not capable of salvation, because the whole point is to be faithful to Christ with whatever it is you’ve received. Our task here is to help people be more faithful.

But, yeah, it’s interesting. I watched Fr. Stephen, for instance, give some talks about some of these things to a group of clergy who were just sitting there, dumb-founded, and, again, they were almost all saying, “Why have I never heard this before?” But the beautiful thing is that if you hear it and then you begin to connect the dots of the things that you do know already, it makes a lot of sense! I mean, that’s been my experience, over and over again. I hope a lot of people feel that way about this podcast. It’s like: Wait a minute! Now it all makes sense!

Fr. Stephen: It’s sort of like (our inheritance) one of those websites where they’re like “Do you have money that belongs to you in another state?” And you go on there and you find out: Hey, I’m owed $250 in West Virginia! Or there’s an estate from my uncle in California. That’s sort of the way it is with this vast wealth of an inheritance that we have from the Orthodox Church, that there is this vast wealth of inheritance, but we have to go and look for it in each generation. We have to go and find it an appropriate it and collect it for ourselves in every generation.

Fr. Andrew: Right. Catechism is—I’m still being catechized, and I’ve been Orthodox for over 20 years, and I’m a priest, and I teach this faith, but I’m still being catechized, and that’s okay, because Orthodox Christianity is not something that you have in a box that you carry around and you open it up and you show what a complete collection of Orthodoxy you have, if I may say so. [Laughter]

All right, well, we’re going to take one more call. I hope that’s helpful to you, Fr. Christopher. But we’re going to take one more call, and then we’re going to go ahead and wrap it up for tonight. We’ve unfortunately had some interruptions and stuff because of gremlins in Fr. Stephen’s power grid. But we have Kathy calling from Minnesota. Kathy, are you there?

Ms. Kathy De Young: Yes, I’m here.

Fr. Stephen: Oh, this is going to be good radio! [Laughter]

Mrs. De Young: I am Fr. Stephen’s mother.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, I was going to say I can see from the caller ID, it says, “De Young.” I’m like: Oh!? Must be one of his relatives! All right, Mrs. De Young—I feel like I have to call you Mrs. De Young.

Mrs. De Young: Yes, well, most of your fellow clergymen just call me Mom, but that’s okay. [Laughter] He’s scared to death, now, see? No, it’s not that. I would just like you two to possibly discuss the difference between the Protestant concept of sanctification and the Orthodox concept of theosis, because what I’m picking up—I mean, I grew up Protestant, so it was a process, and it was sanctification, and you grew into it. It doesn’t sound like that’s the same as theosis at all.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so I would say—just to give Fr. Stephen a moment or two to figure out what he’s going to say to his mother [Laughter] I’m sorry! You know, the first time Fr. Stephen and I were on live radio together, his sister called!

Mrs. De Young: Oh, yes, I know!

Fr. Andrew: I am feeling a little left out. Where are my Damicks at? Hello? Anyway, I know my dad listens, but he probably would never call.

Mrs. De Young: See, I always text Fr. Stephen after these sessions with questions, and he always says, “Why don’t you call in?” So.

Fr. Andrew: There it is. Right. Exactly. So here’s what I would say. In most Protestant… I grew up Protestant as well; I grew up as an Evangelical, and in most Protestant contexts, sanctification is something that kind of happens… You’ve got your salvation—you’ve got your ticket or whatever—and sanctification is kind of the improvement that happens after that. That can be understood as moral improvement especially, but from an Orthodox point of view we wouldn’t say that we don’t believe in sanctification. I mean, that’s a word that’s in Scripture; it just means becoming holy. But we would say that that is salvation, that becoming holy is salvation.

And if you especially understand that what becoming holy means is becoming one of the holy ones, one of the hosts of heaven, one of the divine council, then it is a much more active and complex understanding of what it is that we have been called to do. We’re not called to just fix our sin problem and then become better people after that—again, I know I’m simplifying—but what we are called to do is to become like the stars in heaven, that is to say, like the heavenly hosts. We are called to become as one of these, one of the divine council, one of the holy ones of God. So we would say that sanctification is a word that describes what that is; it’s something that we grow into, grow into the fullness of the stature of Christ. It’s not an instantaneous thing. It is at the same time something that we have by means of baptism but also that we are called to grow more into, because just because you’re baptized does not make you instantly, in the full sense, a member of the heavenly hosts in every way.

So it’s kind of all of that stuff together, and I think the value of what we’re discussing this evening is to say: Look, the destiny of mankind is to stand alongside the angels and to do what they do. So by virtue of being in the presence of God, we become more like him, and we become more like him not just sort of standing there and absorbing his holiness, but by participating in his works, just as, of course, the opposite happens: if you participate in the works of demons, then you become like demons. It’s kind of the anti-theosis, demonosis, for lack of a better term.

So that’s what I would say. I wouldn’t say that there’s a difference between theosis and sanctification. I would say that theosis is sanctification, but the sanctification most—not all, but most—Protestant models is a much reduced kind of image. I don’t know if that makes sense. Fr. Stephen, what would you say to your mother?

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Well, we read Romans 8:29. We didn’t read 30-31, where a lot of this, in terms of the Protestant view of salvation comes from, although sanctification is left out there. But there’s what’s called, usually in Protestant theology, the ordo salutis, which is the fancy Latin for the order of salvation. So there’s an idea that there are these different moments in our salvation that represent a sequence and that the main ones there usually are: there’s justification, which is held to be this one-time thing that happens at the beginning, when you “get saved,” and then there’s sanctification, which is this process that comes afterwards, and then glorification, which is what happens when you die and go to heaven, to really simplify things a lot!

So it’s a temporal order. It’s a series of moments or periods in our salvation. But when you read at the end of Romans 8, there’s actually nothing in the Greek to imply any kind of order or succession, that one happens after the other. They’re all in the same verb tense; they’re all in the aorist tense, which is just the simple past tense. These things all happened.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and even in the English, it just says, “He also, he also, he also,” not “He then, and then…” It’s “also.”

Fr. Stephen: Right, so if you see… If you understand justification as being made righteous, being put right, sanctification as being made holy, glorification as coming to share in the glory of Christ as we saw St. Paul already talking about—and we can throw in more… But these are all not sort of a temporal order, but these are all things that happen to us as part of us being conformed to the likeness of Christ, being conformed to his image as St. Paul said in Romans 8:29, at the beginning of all that, that that’s a goal. So these are all aspects of it, but they’re like facets of a gem, not these separate, independent things or processes. They’re all things that are true of those who become sons of God by the grace of God in Christ.

Fr. Andrew: So does that answer your question, Mrs. De Young?

Mrs. De Young: [Laughter] Yes, I mostly asked it for others who have been brought up with this Protestant concept and this idea of process and this step and then this step and then this step. I think it comes to mind—and my son likes to say, “Well, yeah, but…” and tell me a bunch of other stuff—

Fr. Andrew: He does, doesn’t he? [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: [Patient breathing]

Mrs. De Young: But the whole idea of, you know: I am saved, I am being saved, I will be saved—all those things are true at the same time. They’re true at the same time rather than being a process, a one-at-a-time step.

Fr. Andrew: Amen.

Fr. Stephen: Thank you, Mom. Enjoy the snow.

Mrs. De Young: [Laughter] You’re welcome!

Fr. Andrew: All right, well, just to wrap up—I mean, let’s each give kind of a concluding comment. But before we do that, I want to just give a plug. We have a special episode happening next week. Normally, we have shows on the second and fourth Thursdays of the month, but we have a special fifth Thursday bonus episode happening next week, and it is our Halloween episode, and it is called “The Real Demons of Halloween.” It’s our assertion that Halloween involves demons, and that that’s not a problem for us. So we’re not going to give away what we’re all going to be talking about next week, but I just want to give that plug. Please find that event on Facebook, share it with your friends, invite them, and so forth.

But so for my final comment, I just wanted to read a little passage from that paper that I mentioned earlier, from Fr. Matthew Baker of blessed memory. The paper is called “Deification and Sonship According to St. Athanasius of Alexandria.” You can Google that up and you’ll find it; it’s all online, actually. So he’s talking about St. Athanasius, obviously, and he has this. This is in one of his paragraphs; he says this.

In his letter to the Egyptian bishops in 356, Athanasius will count huiothesia (again, that means adoption, or son-making) as amongst the four “instructions and gifts of grace” given us by Christ, together with prayer, power against demons, and “that exceeding great and singular grace,” “knowledge of the Father and the Word himself, and the gift of the Holy Ghost (Ad Episcopos Aegypti, I.1). According to Athanasius, the Spirit of adoption and of freedom gives the Christian fearlessness to confess the truth.

I just love that paragraph in his paper and how especially he connects that notion of our being adopted as sons of God with power against demons. I mean, this is an angelic ministry, right? A fight against demons. Knowledge of the Father and of Christ himself, the gift of the Holy Spirit. And also that fearlessness to confess the truth. I mean, if you become one of the divine council, if you become one of the heavenly hosts, then you can confess the truth, because you have nothing to be afraid of, nothing at all. You stand with God; you stand with his angels, and you’re becoming like him, and you’re taking your place alongside them and alongside all the saints, alongside all the saints.

So that’s just what I wanted to highlight at the end. Fr. Stephen, your final comments?

Fr. Stephen: I think it’s important… The reason that this is important—what we talked about tonight is important—is that I think for too long we’ve thought too small about salvation and about God and about his plan. This life isn’t about “I did some bad stuff, but I’ll do what I need to do to get to heaven anyway and get out of this crummy world.” It’s not about God really wanting to save us but he has this justice problem he has to get over. This is about the God who created the universe, the eternal God who created everything, created everything so that he could become one of us and so that he could share his eternal, divine life with us forever.

And we have the opportunity not [only] to do that when we die if we do the right things here on earth, but we have been given the gift to be able to start to experience that right now, right now, starting with our baptism. And until we realize that, we’re going to think too small and we’re going to get bogged down in a lot of mundane things in life and the world. But as long as we keep this great destiny we’ve been given and we’ve been created by God for in our minds, we’ll have a different perspective about the world and living in it, about the people around us, how we view them and their struggles, and we’ll come to know better the God whom we worship and whom we’re becoming every day more like.

So that’s my closing comment, and hopefully next week I will not be talking to you on a red Solo cup connected to a string.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] May it be blessed! Pray, pray, pray for us, everybody, please. Please pray for us. I believe that this is important work. Thank you very much for that, Fr. Stephen. That is our show for today. Thank you for listening. If you didn’t get a chance to call in during the live broadcast, we would still love to hear from you, either via email at lordofspirits@ancientfaith.com, or you can message us at our Lord of Spirits podcast Facebook page. We read everything but can’t respond to everything, and we do save what you send for possible use in future episodes.

Fr. Stephen: And join us for our live broadcasts on the second and fourth Thursdays of the month and on October 29 at 7:00 p.m. Eastern, 4:00 p.m. Pacific. And don’t forget to like our Lord of Spirits podcast Facebook page while you’re at it. Leave a recommendation, join the Facebook group, and then invite your friends.

Fr. Andrew: And if you leave a review on Apple Podcasts, Facebook, or wherever you get your podcasts, that raises the visibility of this show and gets more people connected.

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

Fr. Andrew: Thank you and God bless you.