Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick: Christ is risen! He truly is risen! Good evening, giant-killers and dragon-slayers. You are listening to The Lord of Spirits podcast. I am Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick in Emmaus, Pennsylvania, and my co-host, Fr. Stephen De Young, is with me from Lafayette, Louisiana. And if you are listening to us live, you can call in at 855-AF-RADIO; that’s 855-237-2346. And Matushka Trudi is taking your calls tonight, and we’re going to get to those in the second part of our show.

So what happens when we die? It’s one of the most frequently asked questions, not just by Christians, but by pretty much everyone. The idea that the human person simply sort of winks out existence at the moment of death is kind of unthinkable. The answer to this question is actually pretty clear within the Orthodox Christian tradition, as expressed in the holy Scriptures and elsewhere, yet nonetheless, confusion remains, and you can hear people say all kinds of stuff about it. Probably the most common thing that people say about the soul after death is the idea that we either go to heaven or hell, and that’s kind of it. So, Fr. Stephen, is there any merit to that model?

Fr. Stephen De Young: No.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] None at all. Right.

Fr. Stephen: Yep. So, yeah, tonight we’re going to answer the musical question: Where do bad folks go when they die? They don’t go to heaven where the angels fly; they go to a lake of fire and fry, and you see them again on the fourth of July.

Fr. Andrew: Wow. Nice.

Fr. Stephen: That’s not the whole answer, so stay tuned for the rest of the show. I didn’t solve the whole problem.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, right.

Fr. Stephen: So, yeah, we’re going to, as has our wont lately… because we tend to sort of touch on things on this show. We take one trajectory through a topic, and then later on we come through from another trajectory.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, another angle.

Fr. Stephen: We’ve already talked about some of the things we’re going to talk about tonight from another angle when we talked about the underworld, gave sort of the “gazetteer to the underworld,” many moons ago. It seems like a long time ago.

Fr. Andrew: It was about a year, actually. Was it about a year?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. I don’t know. We’re on COVID time, so it’s like dog years. [Laughter]

We have to start sort of by talking about the state of affairs before Christ, if we’re going to talk about what happens when people die. So this is— I guess our first half is: What used to happen to people when they die? Both what did they think was going to happen and then what did happen, and how that was understood. So we have to go back and do a little bit of review. We’re not going to do too much. For us, that could still be an hour’s worth, but we’re not going to do an hour’s worth. [Laughter] A little review of the whole concept of Sheol or Hades or the grave or the underworld, as it was understood by Ancient Near Eastern civilizations, sort of including Israel and the Greeks.

Fr. Andrew: Although I am going to throw in a little bit of Norse, because I can’t help myself.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, as is your wont. [Laughter] And so if folks remember, when we talked about Sheol and the way the grave, the realm of Mot, the god of death—the way that was talked about in the Ancient Near East, Sheol was pretty much a horror-show; it’s pretty much a slasher movie. Everybody down there is bad; there’s lots of demons down there. It’s not that the demons are in charge of you and they’re your work supervisors and they’re poking you with pitchforks; it’s more like you get tossed in with the wild animals, and, you know, wild animals do what they do.

Fr. Andrew: It’s funny to me that that image of the underworld is kind of like Industrial Revolution underworld, where the demons are in charge of stuff. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, middle management. But, yeah, it’s manual labor, and then you segue—

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, you’re expected to work.

Fr. Stephen: You’re segued into C.S. Lewis and the cubicle farm of hell. [Laughter] But, yeah, so the rephaim whom we’ve talked about who are giants, who are spirits in the underworld, they get talked about as being in the underworld by Isaiah and some of the psalms, including a psalm we’re going to talk more about later. We have a whole ritual in Ugaritic that was performed in Ugarit when the king died, and the whole goal the sacrifices that were offered and everything was to try to get him safely past the rephaim—safely past his ancestors, who were going to shred him as he was trying to get to the underworld. So, yeah, it’s bad stuff. Insert Hellraiser I or II—III was silly, the ones after that, even the one with Lance Hendrickson, not worth watching, but I or II.

Fr. Andrew: So this is sort of the Semitic version, right?

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: So not only is Israel, but also other Semitic cultures nearby.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and, as we’ve said before, Greece is really—even though people tend to look at Greece as the first sort of Western civilization, in reality they’re sort of the last Ancient Near Eastern civilization, in sort of all the ways that count. All the traditions you find sort of grow out of Ancient Near Eastern traditions that they inherit from Babylon and Egypt and their neighbors. So you get Hades, but Hades is a little different, as we’ve talked about before, in that it’s a little more emo.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Right! You’ve got the… I mean, the best you’ve got is the Elysian Fields, which is still pretty lame.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, it’s just less lame…

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, but most everybody down there is just sort of gloomy and going to be forgotten.

Fr. Stephen: Waiting around.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah! Like, once they’re forgotten, they’re gone. You do get some— I mean, this is where you get some pretty clear sort of regions of Hades. You’ve got Tartarus, where the Titans are imprisoned. You’ve got people like Sisyphus, pushing his rock up the hill over and over again. But it’s not great. I mean, the nicest that you get out of it is really Hades himself down there, when he’s got his captured bride, to put it mildly—that’s about as nice as it gets, which is not great.

Fr. Stephen: And he’s pretty mopey. [Laughter] He’s pretty mid-‘80s Robert Smith down there, too.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, he did not get the nice realm.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. So the whole place is kind of like if anybody ever went to The Castle in Tampa, Florida, in the late ‘90s… [Laughter] Like, Joy Division “Love Will Tear Us Apart Again” in heavy rotation. It’s just kind of… sad and depressing.

Fr. Andrew: They play The Cure a lot over the loudspeakers? [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: And when… Even when you read, someone goes and encounters and wants to talk to one of the shades in Hades, like when Ulysses summons up Achilles’ shade, it’s just like: “Here’s some depressing poetry I wrote, down here by myself.” [Laughter]

But the key thing here is that that’s where everybody goes.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there’s no way around it.

Fr. Stephen: It might be a slightly nicer or slightly more horrible part of it, but that’s where everybody goes when they die. There’s no idea that human life ends at death, and this goes well back into prehistory. The burials we find—go back into the places that we’ve talked about—in the Neolithic Era, we find burials and the burials have grave clothes and grave goods and stuff. So it’s very clear that they didn’t think that the existence of this person was over.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. I actually— Just last night, I watched the Netflix film, The Dig. Have you seen that?

Fr. Stephen: No, I don’t think so.

Fr. Andrew: It’s about the Sutton Hoo excavation in 1939, which is an Anglo-Saxon ship burial. There’s really nice treasure in there, which, again, to underline the point—why would you put really nice treasure down with dead bodies if you didn’t think that did anything?

Fr. Stephen: They were going to use it for something.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, like, what a stupid thing to do! Like: “Let’s bury some of our best stuff down here”—unless you believed that there was an afterlife that this person was connecting to when you were— Whatever your beliefs about that were, you’re sending that along, either as a bribe for the ferryman, or you can use this stuff in the afterlife, but in any event, yeah. Oh, it’s a good film, actually. I recommend it, actually. Ralph Fiennes plays the lead character in that.

Fr. Stephen: I think it’s pronounced “Rafe.”

Fr. Andrew: It probably is, but, you know…

Fr. Stephen: You’ve got to be appropriately British.

Fr. Andrew: I don’t speak Ipswich, which is where he’s from.

Fr. Stephen: Despite recent comments from his most recent book, made by Friend of the Show Bart Ehrman, everybody in the ancient world believed in an afterlife, of some sort, of varying sorts—usually not great. On the outside, if you were the king or the emperor or something so you were basically considered to be a god already, you might get to go and hang out with the other gods.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, but that’s not where most— That’s like a one-in-a-million chance.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, yeah, that’s not most people. It’s going to be the king, but, you know, everybody else, not so much. And even that’s not 100%. I mean, the reason for the elaborate burials and rituals in Egypt was because it wasn’t a guaranteed thing that a pharaoh would even make it, even though he was seen to be divine.

Fr. Andrew: I was going to say, since I got to bring up Sutton Hoo, which is an Anglo-Saxon burial, I’d like to give a little note on the word “hell” for everybody. This doesn’t count as etymology; this is more straight philology, actually.

Fr. Stephen: [Sad trombone]

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah, so I don’t have a jingle—I don’t have a philology jingle, so, Chris Hoyle, if you’re listening… I’m just throwing that out there.

So the word “hell,” I sometimes— This is my little soap-box about this. You’ll sometimes get people who will say, “You have to say Hades; you can’t say hell. These are not the same concept.” And the problem with that is that Christian tradition does not make a distinction between those two things, that there’s something called hell and something called Hades. Now, if you want to identify hell as being Tartarus, then, yes, I suppose you can say that hell is a region of Hades. But within— So “hell” is a Germanic word, and “hell” gets used in the earliest translations of the Bible and other Christian literature into English to simply translate the word “Hades.” It just refers to the underworld, and it has a pre-Christian usage, as far as we know. All the literature that we have about Germanic pagan religion is filtered through Christians. But it just means the underworld, and just like “Hades” and “Sheol,” it refers to not just the underworld, but also the god that controls it. Of course, the fun thing in Norse religion is that the god who controls the underworld is actually a goddess, so I like to sometimes say that the devil is female in Norse religion.

At least in terms of that basic historical use of these terms, “hell,” “Hades,” “Sheol,” are essentially synonyms, but, like you said, there’s different sort of concepts within these cultures of what the underworld is like. Now, within modern English now, a lot of people have this idea of hell where you’ve got demons poking people in the butt and making them do hard labor, like you said, so as a result a lot of people do prefer the word “Hades” because it’s sort of an underworld word that a lot of people don’t know what meaning to fill that word up with. [Laughter]

So I get that; I totally get that, but in terms of saying, “Hell and Hades are two different things in Christian theology,” that’s just simply not true. You might say that we’ve attached the world “hell” to a mistaken understanding of it, but even then, as we go tonight, you’re going to hear a lot more about the underworld, before and after Christ, and all that kind of stuff.

Anyways, I just wanted to mention that “hell” does show up in Norse mythology. It’s mentioned, for instance, in the Grímnismál, which is sort of the poetic edda, and in that hell actually exists beneath one of the three roots of Yggdrasil, the world tree, so it’s down there underneath the roots of a tree. People do go there and come back. There’s this notion that Baldur will come back after having gone there, after Ragnarok.

It’s not a great place to be. This is the thing that they all have in common, is that you don’t want to go there. It’s just not great. Even the good parts are not that great. So there’s our little note on the word “hell.”

Fr. Stephen: Yes, and I tend to emphasize the part you said there at the end, that when people hear the word “hell” now, what they think of is not what an Anglo-Saxon thought of. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: No, indeed no! Exactly.

Fr. Stephen: Because it’s taken on all of this, and that’s why I, for example, people may have noticed, prefer to use “Hades” or “Sheol,” just to break that free, because they call her hell, but that’s not her name. It’s not her name.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I’m cool with all the terms, but I’m a constant, endless teacher, so I’m like: “Well, but this is what it means in this context.” But, yes, it’s true. I mean, that’s actually my preference these days, is I just refer to it simply as “the underworld,” which, you know, have a seedy, Chicago-gangster thing going on there. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, I was going to say, it’s probably like: “The Shadow knows what lurks in the hearts of men.”

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] So, that being said…

Fr. Stephen: Within all of this horror-show/moody atmospheric theatricality, depending on your bet for the underworld, we mentioned that this is pretty much what you get in the Old Testament, too, in terms of descriptions of Sheol, the grave, the underworld. It’s both that it’s not-great, that it’s full of demons, that you don’t want to go there but that everybody does; but it’s also important that, within the Hebrew Bible, there is a hope attached to that, somewhat uniquely. There is the idea that that may not be just the end of the story; that may not just be the way of all flesh. In a lot of ways, like the Epic of Gilgamesh is this sort of epic struggle with death, of Gilgamesh to find some way for Enkidu, and then himself, not to die. And the answer at the end is: there isn’t one.

Fr. Andrew: It’s inevitable.

Fr. Stephen: Even for our giant nephilim friend, Gilgamesh, it’s inevitable. But that’s not necessarily the case in significant portions of the Old Testament. There are lots of places we could go, and I’m sure we will get comments on the episode like: “Why didn’t you talk about this passage?”

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I know! It’s a new genre of comment that we get. “You talked for three hours and didn’t mention this one thing that’s related?” It’s true. We did. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yes, we have sympathy for our dutiful engineer at Ancient Faith in the studio and don’t want to keep her until midnight while we go through every single possible… [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: But it’s a book idea! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah! But what we’re going to focus on is a particular set of psalms, and I say “set of psalms” not because it’s one of the psalm collections. So the book of Psalms itself, whether we’re talking about the Greek book of Psalms or the Hebrew book of Psalms, is a collection of psalms, obviously. They’re written by different people at different times. Within the book of Psalms, there are five books that are collected there, and they’re labeled in a lot of English Bibles. People don’t pay much attention to it, because basically it’s completely mysterious. We have no idea when those five separate books were each collected, when they were all collected together as the book of Psalms as we have it now; we have no idea really what connects the various psalms in the different collections. There’s lots of dissertations and journal articles written about it, so it’s kind of a constant mill for generating that kind of stuff for people who are interested in Hebrew poetry, but the fact that it keeps generating all that stuff is due to the fact that, number one, it’s mysterious, and, number two, nobody really knows, because if anybody every figured it out, you’d reach homeostasis in the journal world, which would upset everybody.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Which— we can’t have that!

Fr. Stephen: Someone would come along and try to upset the apple-cart. I just mixed metaphors in a crazy way! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: It’s okay; it’s all right.

Fr. Stephen: These psalms are a group of psalms because they’re all attributed to the same group of people. That group of people is identified as the “sons of Korah,” and this is “sons” as in descendants, not “sons” as in first-generation literal sons. So this was one of the clans within the Levites that had a kind of dark history that we’ve talked about before on this show, so this is another thing that we’re going to try to review at a somewhat shorter length.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, but if you want the whole story, go to Numbers 16, and you can read the whole Korah episode.

Fr. Stephen: Or whichever episode it was where we talked about it, because I don’t remember these things. [Laughter] So what happened was Korah and his clan attempted to seize the high priesthood for himself, although he did it by making a very egalitarian-sounding argument: “Moses, why have you and Aaron— Why are you lording it over us? Aren’t we all priests? Aren’t we all…?”

Fr. Andrew: The priesthood of all Levites?

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yeah, so that went badly for him and most of his immediate clan members in that the ground opened and swallowed them up. So Korah went down alive into Hades, and the now third-hand joke that we told that last time was that Korah pulled a reverse-Elijah: instead of going alive into heaven, he went alive into Sheol. But there were certain members of his family and his clan who hadn’t joined in the rebellion, who are identified there in Numbers 16, who survived. It is the descendants of those members of Korah’s family in that clan who wrote these psalms. So these are psalms written by Levites, so these are psalms that were intended for some kind of worship context that we don’t know for sure, but there is within them, if you read them, a recurring theme of being rescued from death, being rescued from Sheol, being rescued from Hades if you’re in the Greek. So these psalms—the Hebrew numbers that you’ll find in most English Bibles are 42, 44-49, 84, 85, 87, and 88, and if you want the Greek numbers, subtract one from each of those.

Fr. Andrew: Which is the general rule, but not perfect, when you’re comparing the Greek to the [Masoretic] psalms.

Fr. Stephen: No, for the middle part of the psalms. All these come from the middle part of the psalms.

Fr. Andrew: Yes. Yeah, I mean, you can think, having seen the head of their clan and a bunch of their relatives get sucked down into the underworld, that that would be kind of on their mind and would be a tradition within the family. That’s, like you said, why you can see that theme.

Fr. Stephen: We talked about the idea of personal history, like experiential history. They’re still the sons of Korah. Their clan still bears the name of this person. So that’s a reality for them. This event is part of their personal history in the way that it wasn’t for a Benjamite. Even though the Benjamite would have obviously heard that story in the Torah, it was not in that personal sense. They weren’t carrying that name around.

So we chose—I don’t remember how we did this; did we cast lots? something like that; I don’t know—to take a closer look at Psalm 88 (or 87 in Greek) as an example of this, rather than trying to work through all of them.

Fr. Andrew: I’m going to read it, and I’ll just tell everybody: this is the translation from Holy Transfiguration Monastery here in the US, which is very, very commonly used in a lot of Orthodox churches using English, and this translation is from the Greek version. I’m going to read it once through and then we’re going to comment on some specific items as we go. So it’s Psalm 88 (or 87 in the Greek numbering).

O Lord God of my salvation, by day have I cried and by night before thee.
Let my prayer come before thee; bow down thine ear unto my supplication.
For filled with evils is my soul and my life unto Hades hath drawn nigh.
I am counted with them that go down into the pit. I am become as a man without help,
free among the dead, like the bodies of the slain asleep in the grave whom thou rememberest no more and they are cut off from thy hand.
They have laid me in the lowest pit, in darkness, and in the shadow of death.
Against me is thine anger made strong, and all thy billows hast thou brought upon me.

Thou hast removed my friends afar from me; thou hast made me an abomination amongst themselves. I have been delivered up and have not come forth.
Mine eyes are grown weak from poverty. I have cried unto thee, O Lord, the whole day long; I have stretched out my hands unto thee.
Nay, for the dead wilt thou work wonders? Or shall physicians raise them up that they may give thanks unto thee?

Nay, shall any in the grave tell of thy mercy and of thy truth in that destruction?
Nay, shall thy wonders be known in that darkness, thy righteousness in that land that is forgotten?

But as for me, unto thee, O Lord, have I cried; in the morning shall my prayer come before thee.
Wherefore, O Lord, dost thou cast off my soul and turnest thy face away from me?
A poor man am I, in troubles from my youth. Yea, having been exalted, I was humbled and brought to distress.
Thy furies have passed upon me, and thy terrors have sorely troubled me.
They came around about me like water; all the day long they compassed me about together.
Thou hast removed afar from me friend and neighbor and my own acquaintances because of my misery.

It’s kind of a bummer of a psalm. Like, there’s no point at which it gets better! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, there’s no happy ending. It’s one of my favorites.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Of course, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: It’s the new Battlestar Galactica of psalms. [Laughter] So as people probably noticed on the way through, the psalmist, whichever son of Korah it was who wrote this, is reflecting the situation of someone who is dead, someone who is—

Fr. Andrew: In the pit.

Fr. Stephen: Someone who is in Hades: in the pit, in the grave. The bodies of the slain sleep in the grave.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, this isn’t someone just saying, “I’m really bummed, and it’s like I’m in the grave.” This is from the point of view, as you said, of someone who is there.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, sort of like Jonah’s prayer, as we’ve talked about before. This is somebody whom God has forgotten, who’s cut off from the hand of God and from the life that comes from his hand, in the lowest pits, and isolated, separated from everyone.

There are a few places, when we get to about the middle of the psalm, where there are some things that are kind of hidden in the English translation. One of those is we get a couple of sort of rhetorical questions, the first one being, in this English translation, “Nay, for the dead wilt thou work wonders?” or “Wilt thou work wonders for the dead?” is a bit more common English phrasing. And the dead there is sort of the typical word for the dead; it’s from the root mot: it’s just dead people in the Hebrew. But then in the English, because it’s going through the Greek, there’s this phrase: “Or shall physicians raise them up, that they may give thanks unto thee?”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. [Sigh] We looked this up. [Laughter] We checked. We did a little word study, because what is it in Hebrew? It doesn’t say “physicians”; it says the rephaim.

Fr. Stephen: “Will the rephaim rise and praise thee?”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s not “will something raise someone else up” in the Hebrew; it’s: “Will the rephaim rise up and praise thee?”—in other words, the dead giants.

Fr. Stephen: Obviously the answer being no. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: No, right. So we looked this up. We actually looked at the Greek version of this psalm, and the word that’s used there that they translate is iatroi, which means “doctors, physicians.” So “physicians” is a good translation from the Greek, but we puzzled for a moment or two, and then you found the answer as to why whoever translated this Greek text of the psalm, why they would use the Greek word for “doctor” to translate “rephaim.” And you—

Fr. Stephen: They mistook rephaim for rovfim, is basically the short version. And rovfim would mean “healers,” basically, as opposed to rephaim. But first of all, to make that misread, you have to add a letter that isn’t there. But then also, in order to translate it from the Greek into English and have it make sense, they had to add a bunch of words, because the Greek is more literally something like: “Will physicians rise and give thanks to thee?”

Fr. Andrew: Which… [Laughter] If you’ve got this picture of the underworld…

Fr. Stephen: Dead doctors! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Oh, and here’s doctors! Which is… doesn’t… So right, even in the Greek translation, it doesn’t totally make sense.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so they took “rise” and changed it to “raise them up.” They made it a transitive verb and added a pronoun in order to make it make sense.

Fr. Andrew: This’ll probably make some people mad, but it’s well-known there are a handful of mistakes in the Greek Old Testament.

Fr. Stephen: Well, you even have to talk about which Greek…

Fr. Andrew: Right, there’s several.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, there’s a lot. Yes, there’s a lot of textual differences.

Fr. Andrew: And some of them seem to be based on some— that they’re looking at a Hebrew that’s different from the other Hebrew versions we have, and others that they are— you can see that they made a mistake, that they misunderstood a word or just didn’t know what the word meant, so they just kind of guessed, because that’s the way translation works!

Fr. Stephen: Yes, and so let me be completely on the nose about it. All of the Greek translations into English that you’re reading are not translations of the Greek, as if there’s a “the Greek” stored somewhere; they’re translations of Codex Sinaiticus. They’re translations of a Greek manuscript of the Old Testament from the fourth century AD. So there’s a lot of other Greek that’s out there and Greek versions. So what we’re really saying is that somewhere either when Codex Sinaiticus was being done, or before that, somebody made a boo-boo. And since Codex Sinaiticus has at least three hands of corrections in the book, even the monks on Mount Sinai clearly thought there were mistakes in it because they kept correcting them. So no one has ever said that it’s a perfect manuscript. But anyway, now that we’ve made all those disclaimers that won’t stop anyone from getting mad at us anyway…

Fr. Andrew: But the dead doctors rising up in the underworld—hey, whatever! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: But it refers to the rephaim. But the idea here is obvious behind that question. It’s that praise and worship of God is not possible in Sheol, in Hades. So this person is calling out to God, that he wants to give praise and worship to God, but needs to be set free in order to do that. That’s why immediately after those questions—and here’s the English translation we’re working with—“Nay, shall any in the grave tell of thy mercy and of thy truth in that destruction?” And the Hebrew of “destruction” there is abaddon, which fans of the book of Revelation might be familiar with. Remember, abaddon or apollyon in Greek, destruction.

And then toward the end, the way it’s translated in English: “Thy furies have passed upon me, and thy terrors have sorely troubled me, and they came round about me like water.” These are those demon non-friends in the underworld. “Coming around like water” is not like: “Oh, good, I have something to drink” or “Finally, a bath!” [Laughter] This is like floodwaters; this is like water as the force of chaos, these demonic beings that are being called furies and terrors here.

So all of this, even though this doesn’t have, as some of the other psalms of Korah have, a sort of dénouement, where that rescue or salvation from death and Hades is made explicit, it’s definitely pointing to it; it’s calling out for it. It’s calling out for it to Yahweh the God of Israel. And the way that this text, this particular text, Psalm 88 (or 87), ends up getting interpreted is in terms of Christ. So you’ll see references to Christ being the one who is free among the dead, which is a line from this psalm.

One important part of the very early proclamation of Christ’s resurrection that we see in the early sermons in the book of Acts, is we get this quotation that’s made of Psalm 16:10, which is not a psalm of the sons of Korah but is a psalm of David, but it is: “You will not abandon my soul to Sheol or let your holy ones see corruption.” Then it’s pointed out: “I tell you, to this day, David remains in his tomb!”

Fr. Andrew: So, yeah, this isn’t a reference to David.

Fr. Stephen: Right, this is a reference to Christ. But it was not seen as being limited to Christ. It was not seen as being limited to Christ. Christ’s resurrection was seen as being linked to the resurrection, minimally, of all human beings. He’s the firstfruits from the dead. That language is used. I want to pause on this for a moment because one of the sort of bugaboos out there, of course, is that as soon as Christ’s resurrection happens, we load up all the Judaism, throw it in the dumpster, and start over and make a new religion. [Laughter] Then things just sort of evolve, and then at a certain point all this Greek philosophy just shows up and gets shoved into Christianity somewhere and everything ends up weird.

But if, right here, based on psalms, based on Hebrew poetry, we have the idea—the apostles receive the idea, as they express it, in these early sermons—that Christ’s salvation from Hades affects all of humanity, liberates all of humanity in some sense from death and from Hades. That means that they have some sense of the solidarity of Christ and the rest of humanity.

Fr. Andrew: Homoousios, as it were. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yes. What Christ does and what Christ is and what happens to Christ is effectual for all of humanity. So you get an idea in Greek used to express that solidarity, like homoousios, or saying that Christ took upon himself “our human nature,” which he shares with us. Those are Greek terms; they’re not Hebrew terms, and they’re not especially biblical terms, but they’re used to explain things in Greek, because people spoke Greek at the time—to explain in Greek concepts that are already there, again, going all the way back into this Hebrew poetry from centuries before, before Christ.

On top of that, now that we’ve got Christ being homoousios with us because he shares our human nature, they also take these traditions and weld them into traditions that we talked about in a past episode, about Yahweh the God of Israel invading Hades—remember: “Lift up your heads, O you gates”—to rescue people, and they meld them together, which means what? Which means Christ is Yahweh the God of Israel and Christ shares our human nature.

Fr. Andrew: Right, so the Incarnation is literally built into the Old Testament in very clear Christology. It’s not just some later reflection, like: “Oh, he must’ve been God!” [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Right, but the question comes: How do we explain this and make it clear in Greek?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because that’s the language that everybody’s using.

Fr. Stephen: So you may have Greek vocabulary to draw on, just like we do this show in English. Technically, no English word that we’ve spoken during this spoken, ever, appears in the Bible, because the Bible was not written in English.

Fr. Andrew: Wait, what? [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Sorry, King James-only folks.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, man! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: So there are no biblical English words.

Fr. Andrew: Look, it got into English as quick as it could, okay?

Fr. Stephen: We have to do our best to reflect those things, but we’re trying to use words in another language to reflect realities that are being conveyed through the source language.

We jumped ahead a little and talked about Christ and fulfillment, but we’re going to slide back a little again now. We see this idea—and people can go on their own and read the other psalms from the sons of Korah, and they’ll see similar themes and ideas playing out. So we have this tradition, but this tradition as we see it reflected in the psalms, for example, in the Hebrew Bible, is not sort of completely articulated and developed. It doesn’t say— In Psalm 88 (87) here, it doesn’t say, “And I know that that time will come when your Messiah will arrive…” That’s not all there. There’s a sort of hope and this prayer that’s extended. But that’s not to say that it just sort of stayed vague and nebulous until the time of the apostles and the writing of the New Testament.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there’s commentary on this, there’s reflection on it, there’s other takes within various kinds of literature. As we do, right? As we do—we don’t just say, “Oh, we’ve got this text.” Even the most sola scriptura Protestant says things about the Bible and comes up with ways of understanding it, so of course that’s going to happen in the ancient world as well.

Fr. Stephen: Right, compares what one part says to what another part says, to see how they work together. [Laughter] We all do that, and they did that in the ancient world, too. So one example of sort of a greater articulation of this from before the time of Christ—we’re going to go back to the book of Enoch’s four caves and revisit this kind of quickly. We already talked about this in our geography of the underworld episode a little bit, too. But this gives a good idea from the third century BC, so we’re at least a couple hundred, probably more like 150 years before the birth of Christ—how they saw it.

So when Enoch is going on sort of his grand tour-de-cosmos and seeing everything, he sees in Hades these four caves with four groups of people living in them. The first group is the righteous, the second group is the wicked—you probably predicted those two.

Fr. Andrew: The good, the bad, the ugly—wait. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: No. Well… No, we can’t really make that work.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, sorry. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: So you’ve got the righteous and the wicked, then the martyrs. And the martyrs are sort of led by Abel. Enoch sees Abel kind of outside the cave, crying out to God for justice. And that passage is very parallel. We don’t have it in Greek, so we can’t tell exactly how parallel, but very well-paralleled to “the souls of the martyrs crying out for justice” in St. John’s Revelation. But so Abel is there, sort of representing; he’s the first one. And then the fourth group is the ignorant, so this is mostly Gentiles who didn’t know any better.

Fr. Andrew: Never heard, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: And so each of these groups has their own cave. They’re all in Hades, though, but the righteous and the martyrs have access to this spring of water.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and as a sort of echo of that— or I should say reference, really, almost, this shows up in the gospels, where you’ve got the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, where the rich man is burning, and he says to Abraham, “Send Lazarus over, because you’ve got water access over there. Can you please send me some, send me some water?” And I know when I called it the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, I know some people are like: “Oh wait! That’s not a parable!”

And, just for fun, I decided to look—to look up at least one patristic reference to this, and so I pulled the trusty old St. Theophylact of Ohrid off of my shelf, who has these wonderful commentaries on the gospels and some other texts from the New Testament, and he is rightly called sort of the Cliff’s Notes version of St. John Chrysostom. He almost always just follows whatever Chrysostom says and just restates it in brief. And he very explicitly calls it a parable in his commentary on that, and calls it a story and so forth. So it’s okay, people; it is a parable. The fact that it doesn’t say at the beginning, “The Lord spoke this parable,” doesn’t mean it’s not. And we shouldn’t take it— When we look at it, we shouldn’t say, “This is what the underworld is like, exactly.” This is an image that Christ is using to tell us something.

Fr. Stephen: And if you read it in Greek, it actually begins the exact same way as the parable of the good Samaritan. The parable of the good Samaritan starts out: A certain man, some guy, going down to Jericho. And the parable of the rich man and Lazarus starts out: A certain rich man feasted sumptuously every day. [Laughter] So it’s just— I mean, it’s the typical beginning of a parable. That shouldn’t be controversial, but people—

Fr. Andrew: Once upon a time! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Like that whole different verbs for “love” thing—yes, I brought it up again! Ah-ha-ha! [Laughter] So these four groups, Enoch is told, have four different destinies. They’re still at this point— When Enoch sees them, they’re still all in Hades, but Hades isn’t the end of the line for many of them. What he’s told is that the righteous are going to go to paradise, and Enoch later sees paradise, and it’s empty at that point. So the righteous are going to go to paradise. The wicked are going to be thrown into the abyss, or Tartarus, with the angels who sinned, the Watchers, at some point in the future. So they’re not going to get to stay in Hades; they’re going to go somewhere worse. [Laughter] The righteous are going to go somewhere better. The martyrs are going to be taken into the heavens with God; they’re going to basically join the divine council, as sort of the reward for their martyrdom. And the ignorant are just going to stay in Hades. So the book of Enoch, unless you’re Ethiopian, is not in the Bible, and this is not, like, the teaching of the Orthodox Church that there are these four caves and that there are these four different destinies.

Fr. Andrew: Right, we’re just saying this is the understanding that’s represented in this text.

Fr. Stephen: Right, before the New Testament comes and the reality comes in Christ, this is sort of how people were thinking about it. This is how the Jewish people in Christ’s day were thinking about it. And so you can even see where some bits of this end up in certain— Like for example in Western Christian traditions, there are these limbo traditions that are never sort of fully official but are always sort of around. And you can see how, jumping ahead to Dante, why he would think that Vergil, who was one of the ignorant pagans but virtuous, might be in kind of a limbo rather than, like a Tartarus-abyss situation. It’s sort of a continuation of this kind of idea.

So these threads do kind of play out in later Christian texts, but this isn’t authoritative “This is how it was before.” But at the same time we do see that there is this idea that—and it’s pretty explicit in Enoch—when the Messiah comes, he’s going to begin this shift. So the righteous being brought out of Hades and into paradise is something the Messiah’s going to do. The martyrs having their justice is something the Messiah’s going to do. These are things that the Messiah is going to do when he comes.

And so this is— You can see right away where the sort of harrowing of Hades tradition then comes from in terms of understanding Christ as fulfilling this, in terms of the righteous being brought to paradise from Hades, that fulfillment, that second exodus, that second Pascha—because, remember, “Pascha” means Passover—this exodus. And so this gets… One mistake, shall we say, that people make is that they look at and say, for example, “Okay, so Enoch is expecting the Messiah to do this, so he’s thinking the Messiah’s just going to come once. The Messiah’s going to do that. He’s going to show up, he’s going to judge everybody, he’s going to do all this sentencing, and that’s end of days; that’s game over.” But not only is that not reflected in 2 Enoch, something very different is reflected. The reason it’s not reflected in the book of Enoch is that it’s not really reflected in the prophetic corpus that’s in the Hebrew Bible, that’s in the Christian Old Testament, because all of those have what you could call a two-stage eschatology. Both of them have it—yeah, in some sense, the Messiah coming twice.

Fr. Andrew: Right, so there’s— And I think this is a really important concept, that biblically—and correct me if I’m getting this wrong—biblically you have essentially three ages. You’ve got the first age, which is the covenant, the initial covenant, with Abraham. I mean, I guess you could call—

Fr. Stephen: I mean, there’s a couple more, but…

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, okay. I mean, I guess you could call what happens before that another age or whatever, but within the kind of messianic matrix, so to speak, there’s kind of three. There’s this initial covenant that’s prior to the coming of the Messiah, with this hope. Then you’ve got the messianic age when he comes and releases people from Hades and so forth. And then there’s an age in the future, from our point of view, an age in the future that is the life of the world to come, sort of the final age. So there’s three stages, and so there’s two-stage eschatology meaning there’s an initial big change that happens. And we now live after that, or in it. And then there’s another big change that’s going to happen which is going to wrap everything up. Right?

Fr. Stephen: Basically, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: Basically.

Fr. Stephen: You have a couple too few ages in the past.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, okay.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] So, yeah, the breakdown being that there’s before the expulsion from paradise.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, right.

Fr. Stephen: So when we’re talking about an age like this, we’re talking about… It’s not just, like, an arbitrary time period. It’s sort of a status quo for the cosmos. It’s sort of a shape of reality of the cosmos and of how it relates to God and God relates to it. So there’s the age before the expulsion from paradise, that sort of protological age. Then there’s from the expulsion from paradise to the flood. And then, minimally, there’s from the flood to the coming of the Messiah, and then the coming of the Messiah starts the messianic age. There’s the messianic age, and then there is a final shift, the end of days, and then there’s an age without end. Then there’s some debate, depending on what sect and school of Judaism we’re talking about in the Second Temple period, whether the covenant at Sinai inaugurated a new age or not. And this is a rabbit-trail we could spend the rest of the night on.

Fr. Andrew: Right! But that’s what we’re here for tonight! But, as interesting as it is…

Fr. Stephen: I will just drop this and refuse to elaborate. [Laughter] Moses was not all that important to a lot of Jews in the Second Temple period. And we’ll move on. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: All right.

Fr. Stephen: If you weren’t a Pharisee… But, yes, there’s this idea that, from the future, from the time that the book of Enoch was written, or that the Old Testament is written, the next age—even if you think Moses inaugurated a new age, the earliest parts of the Old Testament date back to the time of Moses, so. All of that’s written… The next age is going to begin when the Messiah comes, but when the Messiah comes, he’s going to inaugurate the messianic age, and that age, the messianic age, is not an age without end. It is the final age before the end, and then when the end comes, then there’s that age without end. So there’s always this two-stage, and judgment is always associated with that last stage; that final judgment is the end of days before the age without end. It’s where justice is finally established in the world; there’s a new heavens and a new earth; that everything changes. But this messianic age that— We’ve talked about this in different psalms—this is the age when the Messiah rules in the midst of his enemies. “The Lord said to my Lord, ‘Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool.’ ” There’s the spirit.

Fr. Andrew: And I was going to say, we shouldn’t confuse the “end of days” with “these latter times,” because we often make reference to “these latter days” or “these latter times.” That’s the age we’re in now; that’s the messianic age; whereas the end of days is the endpoint of this, and then what comes after that.

Fr. Stephen: Right. So the reason they call, they say— The apostles say, “These are the last days”—is because we’re now in the final age before the end. There’s nothing else that needs to happen. This age idea is also important, though, for another question. We get a question a lot where people ask some variation of: “Well, how are things different now that we have the Holy Spirit?” or “How are things different now that the demons have been unseated?” or “How are things different now?” And that’s kind of hard to explain, because if you look at each age as having separate laws of spiritual physics… So we can’t understand what Adam and Eve’s life and existence was like in paradise. And they couldn’t understand what ours is like. And so we can’t fully understand what things were like before Christ accomplished what he accomplished, any more than they could understand what they were going to be like after he accomplished what he accomplished.

Fr. Andrew: The big difference, of course, is that we do have historical record. And what we do know from the historical— which is not the same thing as being there. But what we do have from the historical record shows a world very, very different from ours, very, very different from ours.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and the people who are there on the overlap are the apostles. And so you can read in the pages of the New Testament how they felt everything had changed, like the universe had changed when Christ rose from the dead, according to St. Peter and St. Paul and St. James.

Fr. Andrew: A literal game-changer: it changed the rules of how everything works!

Fr. Stephen: Yes, the cosmos is now different because this happened. So, yeah, there is this massive shift. We see in the ancient Church movements of chiliasm, the modern Church different pre-millennialist groups. What they’ve done is they’ve taken that two-stage eschatology from the Old Testament and pushed it forward to today. So they still have this idea that Christ is still going to come two more times: once to rule in the midst of his enemies for a thousand years and then the end of days after that, meaning— And this is why the Fathers condemned chiliasm so harshly, because they said, “If you do that, you’re saying that Christ didn’t accomplish, through his death and resurrection, what Christianity says he accomplished, because you’re saying the messianic age hasn’t started yet, so Christ then didn’t accomplish anything, the Holy Spirit hasn’t been given.” That’s how they took it in the ancient Church with chiliasm.

And chiliasm and pre-millenialism are not identical. I’m not saying they’re identical. There’s all kind of different— There’s 83 varieties of pre-millennialism, dispensational and otherwise. But there’s a common mistake there, of holding to essentially an Old Testament eschatology in the New Testament, of not seeing that Christ already came once, and so now the second and last is the one that’s ahead of us.

As we said, we’re now living in the messianic age and awaiting this end of days, the final judgment. And as we’ve talked about, justice is everything being in the right place, everything functioning properly, and so it’s the final judgment not because this is when the verdict is read and there’s no getting out of it; it’s the final judgment because this is when, once and for all, the whole cosmos is going to be put in order, is going to be just. And so, at that time, there are going to be the devil and demons; at that time, there are going to be humans who are unrepentently wicked. If the whole creation is reestablished in justice, when everything is turned right, then what does that mean for them? Do they exist? What is outside of everything? That’s what we’re going to be talking about for the rest of the night.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly.

Fr. Stephen: But as one last note—again, not that I’m trying to take shots at friend of the show Bart Ehrman, but you will read a lot of New Testament scholarship saying that the apostles thought that Jesus was going to come back right away, and then he didn’t and so then they had to come up with, like, theology and Church institutions and stuff.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, this is a really common thing to say.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. And the problem with that is this idea of a messianic age is so clear in the Old Testament. It’s so clear that at the beginning of the second century you already have chiliasts; you already have people projecting out a messianic age into the future. 25 years is not an age. Ages last thousands of years, like the flood to the time of Christ. So the fact that they saw it as an age means that, no, they didn’t necessarily think it was going to happen in 20 to 25 years. They thought and they taught that it could at any time, because there’s nothing else that had to happen before Christ returned. It could happen at any time, but that doesn’t mean they thought it would happen within 20, 25, 30, 40, 50, 100 years. And every allusion to it in the Old and New Testaments and in the earliest Church Fathers of the second century that we have all talk about it being a long time, being an age.

Fr. Andrew: Yep. All right, well, we’re going to take a quick break, and we’ll be back with some of your calls. We’ll be right back.

Fr. Andrew: Hey, welcome back! We’re still down in the underworld, and we’ve got a couple of callers! I bet you didn’t know they had phone service in the underworld, but they do! And you remember that show where we—

Fr. Stephen: Of course they do. This is where all the companies have their customer service.

Fr. Andrew: Ohh! [Laughter] You remember that show we did where everyone was named Ben? Well, we’ve got two callers both named Michael. So we’re going to take Michael Number One. Michael Number One, are you there?

Michael Number One: Yes. Can you hear me?

Fr. Andrew: Yes, we hear you! Welcome, Michael, to The Lord of Spirits. Christ is risen!

Michael Number One: Truly he is risen! It’s good to talk to you again, Fathers. I had a question that I wanted to set up by referring to the episode you did, the “Bodies and the Bodiless,” and you said a prayer, a prayer for one who has suffered long and who is at the point of death. And right in the middle of that prayer there was something that, ever since I heard it, was kind of a puzzler for me. It’s that part that says:

...that the body therefore be dissolved from the elements from which it was fashioned, but that the soul be translated to that place where it will remain until the general resurrection.

So when I hear this general resurrection, and I just heard the first half of your show, I’m wondering: Is the general resurrection that final judgment? And does one experience the passage of time when they pass away, like we do in this world, like we do with chronos-time? Or when we die, is it like kairos-time, the eternal time of God, where the past, present, and future are all the same?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. So, I mean, some of the answer to that is basically: Keep listening to this half of the show.

Michael Number One: [Laughter] I was afraid you’d say that Father!

Fr. Andrew: I mean, well, you know, we love it when we have a good lay-up. [Laughter] But, I mean, just to give you a little something to go home with… One thing I think is important to understand is that— And we didn’t make this explicit—I don’t know, correct me, Father, if I’m getting this wrong. The Scripture actually references two resurrections. There’s what’s called the first resurrection, which is one that involves the saints, and of course this begins with the harrowing of Hades, where the souls of the righteous are resurrected. And then there’s the second resurrection, which is the general resurrection of all of the dead, where material bodies are going to be raised.

So part of what you heard in that prayer is a reference to that second resurrection that everyone’s going to participate in, both the righteous and the wicked. All will be raised, no matter what, and the reason why that’s going to happen is because Christ has redeemed human nature, and since we all share in human nature, death is being defeated for all of us, no matter what—which is not the same thing as being saved, but we will all rise from the dead. So that’s part of what’s going on there, and we’re going to talk a little bit about— We’re going to talk more about the soul and what happens with the soul at death. I’m just going to ask you to hang on and keep listening for that. I don’t know: Father, did I leave something out, or something needed to be corrected or whatever?

Fr. Stephen: Well, just in terms of the idea of the first resurrection and the second resurrection, we’ve talked before I know about how—and every time I say this I’m cribbing this from St. John of Damascus—there’s a footnote for everybody.

Fr. Andrew: Nothing wrong with that! St. John of Damascus is pretty much the schoolmaster.

Fr. Stephen: There’s two kinds of death. There’s spiritual death and there’s physical death. Physical death is the separation of the soul from the body; spiritual death is the separation of the soul from God, who is the source of life. So when we talk about souls being brought from Hades into the presence of God, to Christ, or from this world to Christ, for people who die now, bodily, that’s called the first resurrection, because the soul coming to Christ, coming to God, is made alive, is the resurrection of the soul; it is the resurrection of— It is the spiritual resurrection of the person.

And we’ve talked before also I know about how we tend to get those two kinds of death backwards. We tend to think that the separation of the soul from the body, the physical death, is actual, real death because it’s material, and real stuff is material stuff; and then spiritual death is some kind of metaphor, some kind of wishy-washy metaphor thing, because everything spiritual is wishy-washy and uwu. [Laughter] But from the perspective of Scripture, the Fathers, and teaching of the Orthodox Church, it’s actually the opposite of that: spiritual death is real death, because, as Christ says, this is life: to know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent. That’s what it means to be alive. So that’s real death, and physical death is sort of an analogy or an image of what that real death is.

So the reason why, for example, Revelation 20, where that first resurrection language is used for the souls of the departed, St. John says, “Blessed are those who have a part in the first resurrection,” to be envied; these are— is because they’re experiencing the real resurrection already, and the physical resurrection is just sort of that playing out, in the same way that, when Adam and Eve partook of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, they spiritually died immediately; they separated themselves from God. And then that played out over time until they died physically. In the same way, now it’s reversed. That spiritual death—that spiritual resurrection happens first, and then the bodily resurrection plays out on the last day.

Fr. Andrew: So there you go, Michael. Does that make sense?

Michael Number One: It does. Thank you, Fathers both, very much. I’m looking forward to hearing the rest of the show. Great show.

Fr. Andrew: Awesome. Thank you very much for calling. Okay, we’ve got another Michael on the line. So Michael, are you there? Christ is risen!

Michael II: Truly he is risen!

Fr. Andrew: Welcome. What’s on your mind, Michael?

Michael II: So I had a question… Well, before I ask my question, I just wanted to extend a thanks to you and Fr. Stephen. Podcasts like this one, Whole Counsel of God, they’ve been very helpful for myself, my family, my friends in coming into the Church, so I just wanted to say thank you for that before I ask my question.

Fr. Andrew: Thank God. Thank God.

Michael II: So my question is regarding a point that was made in your April 15 episode, on “How to (and How to Not) Read the Bible.” Yeah, there was a point—I think it was towards the end of the first half—where it was mentioned that the Bible doesn’t make scientific or historical claims. My question regarding this is the accounts of the resurrection, like the bodily resurrection in the gospels and the epistles: I’ve always understood this to mean that the resurrection physically happened. It wasn’t just a metaphorical idea or a theory or an idea or an abstract concept; it was a thing that happened physically and in every part of reality. Christ fills up all realities. So I was just wondering: the gospels and the epistles, are they not making a historical claim with regards to the resurrection and any other claim that they make for events that actually happened in history? I was just hoping you could expand on this.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, well, Fr. Stephen, I’m just going to push this over to you, because this is a point that you were especially trying to make in a very fine, precise way about the Bible and historical claims.

Fr. Stephen: Right, yeah. And the issue is with that language of “making claims.” The question is… When someone makes a statement, any statement, they’re making that statement within a certain set of beliefs and values and understandings of the world that conditions and sort of explains that statement. If you have someone, then, say, centuries and centuries later, in a different context, in a different culture, in a different language, and they try to evaluate that statement—they just take that exact statement from ancient times and they want to evaluate it—you can’t evaluate it within your now modern presuppositions and understandings and this sort of thing.

For example, if, in the context that I’m using the term “scientific claim,” if you’re going to say that the accounts of Christ’s resurrection were making a scientific claim, you would mean that in terms of modern science, that you were making a claim as to how the resuscitation of Jesus’ physical body took place; that you’re making a claim to, well, uh, right? And you say, “Well, that would be ridiculous and that’s not what people mean.” [Laughter] But I would point you to our friend Ken Ham, who does make those kinds of strange scientific arguments, like: “Well, before the flood there was a firmament and so that raised the barometric pressure and that would make snakes not venomous.” [Laughter] That’s an argument he makes.

Fr. Andrew: Amazing.

Fr. Stephen: Because he’s saying, “Well, okay, look: the Bible is making these claims, scientific claims.” And so he tries to use modern science to make them justifiable claims because he’s treating them as modern scientific claims, but they’re not modern scientific claims, because the people who wrote them weren’t sort of breathing the atmosphere of modern science. It wasn’t how they thought about things; that wasn’t what they were trying to convey.

I meant the same thing in terms of historical claims. So, yes, absolutely, they are saying, “These are things that happened.” They’re not saying these aren’t things that happened or these things might not have happened; they’re saying these are things that happened—but they’re not doing what a modern historian does, or claims to be doing or tries to do, when he writes history in that they’re not claiming to give an objective account, some kind of objective account that’s accessible to anyone. So the equivalent of the Ken Ham on this side— I’ll go ahead and mention a couple names. When I was a kid, it was Josh McDowell with Evidence That Demands a Verdict; Mike Licona does this now—where they’re trying to do modern history and act like they can construct a modern historical argument that can prove that Jesus rose from the dead, and that’s a dead end. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. I think the problem for us as modern people is we’re so used to thinking in those terms that proving those claims equals “this is true,” that that’s what truth is. But that’s not the way that the Bible presents those things. It’s not in those terms. That’s not the sort of forensic kinds of terms. So there’s multiple ways of saying that something is true, and making a historical or scientific claim is not the only way to say that, if that makes sense.

Fr. Stephen: For us today as modern people who’ve embraced modernism and had it drilled into us if we haven’t embraced it, we think for something to be true it has to be scientifically provable or there has to be this overwhelming historical evidence or what have you.

Fr. Andrew: Studies have shown! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And so your village atheist, because he’s peak modernist, will come and throw that stuff at you. With history, it’s especially silly, because they’ll say, “What evidence do you have that Jesus even existed?” And you go: “What evidence do you have that Alexander the Great even existed?”

Fr. Andrew: Yep.

Fr. Stephen: “What evidence do you have that, you know, Julius Caesar ever existed?” Because history doesn’t work that way. Starting in the 18th and 19th centuries, northern Europeans decided they wanted history to work this way, and they invented the social sciences to try to make them work that way, like sociology and anthropology and stuff, to make them “sciences,” but they don’t work that way.

When I said that the Bible isn’t making historical claims, I didn’t mean that the Bible isn’t saying that those things really happened: the Bible is saying that those things really happened, but they’re not writing modern history. They’re not trying to present you evidence of… to prove to you that this is a thing that really happened. And approaching them that way, trying to go to an atheist and trying to use the gospel accounts, like some of our Evangelical friends do, with the best intentions. They’ve become modernists themselves trying to prove to other modernists that Christianity is true, and it just doesn’t work, because the way you frame your inquiry will frame the results you get. So if you approach things from the perspective of scientific materialism, you’re not going to find anything spiritual by using that method. You’re just going to get scientific materialist conclusions.

Michael II: Yeah, so it sounds like what you’re saying, if I’m hearing you correctly, is that their presuppositions are going to determine—that’s going to be the lens through which they view everything. I actually have a copy of Evidence That Demands a Verdict sitting, like, three feet from me…

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] There you go!

Fr. Stephen: I once— This is a true story. See, I grew up in Southern California. I grew up right next to the headquarters of Campus Crusade, so I was at the epicenter of this stuff. And I once argued with Josh McDowell in person and got him to admit that the stuff in that book is not evidence and it does not demand a verdict.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Wow!

Fr. Stephen: I was pugnacious as a child.

Fr. Andrew: Is that helpful to you, Michael?

Michael II: Yeah. I just have one small thing. There’s a chart in that book, which I’m sure you know about.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah.

Michael II: It measures the number of manuscripts, and he says there’s— He compares the amount of manuscripts of the New Testament with the manuscripts for other historical documents, like Caesar’s Gallic Wars and all that, and he says there’s 24,633 manuscripts for this, which means it’s the most credible document of antiquity, but it sounds like what you’re saying is that even if he used that argument on some kind of Humian or something, like “I don’t believe in miracles and resurrection, so I don’t care about how many manuscripts you have,” is that kind of what you’re saying?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, that’s going to be Hume’s response, but also that just proves it’s the most popular.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, it doesn’t mean that what’s in it is true; it just means that lots of people copied it.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, the Jerry Springer show got the highest primetime ratings on television for a long time. That doesn’t mean it contained any great truth.

Fr. Andrew: The usefulness of that data is the ridiculous thing that some people say: “Well, you know, it’s been translated and copied so many times, we have no idea what any of it really was.” Well, that’s just not— That’s just someone who’s never even looked at the data saying that.

Fr. Stephen: No, that is a good point. So that data is useful, and in fact I may have a book coming out soon that uses some data like that, but it’s to make that point. It’s to make the point that actually we have a much better idea of what the original text said than we do with any of those other books, but that’s different [from] saying that affects the truth claim, because you could say, “No, this is exactly what St. Mark wrote. I just still don’t believe it.” [Laughter] “I think he was wrong.” So friend of the show Bart Ehrman—he’s coming up a lot tonight—but, yeah, he will say that. He will act like we have no idea what the gospels originally said or who wrote them, as if it’s like: “30 years they were written down!? Nobody remembers what happened 30 years ago.” [Laughter] So, yeah, that’s good in countering that argument, but you’re not really making a modernist counter-argument; you’re just addressing him and saying, like: “What?”

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] All right, well, thank you very much for calling, Michael. We’re happy to hear that the show has been helpful for you.

Okay, we have one more caller that we’re going to take and then we’re going to move on. So, Samuel from Virginia, who I think is a multi-time caller—Samuel, welcome to Lord of Spirits. Christ is risen!

Samuel: Indeed he is risen, Fathers! And I have a question about that.

Fr. Andrew: All right, good! Welcome back.

Samuel: So in some of the earlier episodes it was mentioned that Ancient Near Eastern cultures thought of the realm of death as the bottom of the sea. So would there be any connection between walking on water and trampling death underfoot?

Fr. Andrew: What do you think, Father?

Fr. Stephen: Um… sort of. There are… You’ve got to read the particular accounts. St. Mark’s account is actually… There are deliberate verbal parallels to the Greek translation of Job, so he’s actually paralleling Christ walking on the water with a particular passage in Job in order to identify Christ as the God of Israel. But in St. Matthew’s gospel and St. Luke’s gospel, there’s more clear allusion to sort of Baal language, Baal being a storm god. And there’s even some Baal-Zeus stuff going on in the story of St. Paul’s shipwreck in Acts, but that’s a little further afield. So, yeah, insofar as there is a chthonic Baal, you can kind of get there, but the focus is less on the trampling and more on Christ’s power superseding that of the storm and of the sea. So kind of but not quite.

Fr. Andrew: Does that make sense, Samuel?

Samuel: Oh, yeah, that makes sense. Thank you.

Fr. Andrew: All right, well, thank you very much for calling. And we’re going to roll on now with our conversation about what happens when people die. So this next part, the second half, we’ve titled “Paradise, Hades—and You!” [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and hopefully the middle term will drop out of that for all of us.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Right, yes.

Fr. Stephen: Where we ended up in the first half was that we’re now in this messianic age. Usually when we talk about the messianic age, we talk about the present age, we’re talking about our life in this world, in the Church, Christ ruling in the midst of his enemies. The flipside of that in the spiritual realm is what is called the intermediate state, usually, by theological types. And it’s called the intermediate state because it’s not the final or ultimate state. This isn’t even anybody’s final form—

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Wow.

Fr. Stephen: —but it’s this in-between period. As Michael Number One said in his comment on that prayer that the soul is translated to that place where it awaits, that awaiting is what we’re talking about. And so we’re talking about the souls— what happens to the souls of those who die in this life during the messianic age. Before, we were talking about what happened before Christ; now we’re talking about during our current age. So we have these two terms that are used. One is “paradise,” and that of course—paradise is the loanword in the Greek of Genesis for—

Fr. Andrew: Persian?

Fr. Stephen: Persian, right. I know, I know, but Persians weren’t around when Moses was; people are going to get mad again.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Wait, what!?

Fr. Stephen: Anyway. The—

Fr. Andrew: Isn’t there a Guns N’ Roses reference we could be making here? No, sorry.

Fr. Stephen: I know, the grass is probably green. I don’t know if the girls are pretty, because there’s not supposed to be any in that, in paradise, necessarily.

Fr. Andrew: That’s true. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: But so it’s important that the word that’s used for this place or state of being—we’re going to get into more about how we should understand that. The fact that it’s paradise, the fact that it’s named for Eden, for the garden, is important, because, as we’ve talked about in past episodes, that entails a lot. This is this walled garden atop the mountain of God. This is the place where God dwells. This is where his tabernacle, his tent, is. And we talked about the rooms in the tent. Paradise is where the tree of life is, that first resurrection language that we were just talking about. And so all of that is brought along to communicate to us the status of the righteous or the faithful who are departed this life, who have left this life and this world.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so there’s this… not exactly identification but association with Eden? For the righteous who’ve left this world. I mean, it’s not… The word is used, “paradise,” but it’s not understood to be exactly Eden.

Fr. Stephen: Well, as we’ve talked about, paradise is wherever God is; where God is, that becomes the mountain of God, that becomes paradise, whether that’s the womb of the Theotokos, whether that’s Mount Sinai, Mount Zion…

Fr. Andrew: So it is being Eden then.

Fr. Stephen: Right. It is being Eden, and as we’ve talked about before, when we’re celebrating the Divine Liturgy, the church is Eden, is paradise.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Well, this actually reminds me. A few years ago, I had the opportunity to go on a pilgrimage to Mount Athos, and then when we left Mount Athos, we went to a women’s monastery at a place called Ormylia, and there was an elderly hieromonk there named Fr. Serapion, who was from Simonopetra Monastery. And he said something—and I love this. He said something I will always remember. He since has died of cancer actually, if I remember correctly. But he said, “If you live in repentance, then the kingdom of heaven has already come.” And I love that as a summary of this, that the kingdom of heaven is present where people are living in repentance. So even then, yeah— It’s just— I don’t know. I’m not going to say that that should be a t-shirt, but it at least should be a cross-stitch or something? I don’t know. It’s really an amazing saying.

Fr. Stephen: Something tasteful.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, something very, very tasteful, please.

Fr. Stephen: A lanyard, given to Mom for Mother’s Day.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I can hear Fr. Esteban in my head, complaining about what he called “Patrista-memes,” but there you are!

Fr. Stephen: St. John Chrysostom talks about this. He says, when worship is happening, that’s where Christ is; and where Christ is, there are all the angels, there are all the saints, there are all the departed.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly.

Fr. Stephen: So every time we gather, we gather not just with the people. That’s why I cense the whole church during matins even though there’s, like, two people there and they’re sitting in opposite corners at the back, because I’m not just censing the people you can see. The church is always full.

But also, even though I guess it’s a tradition that’s gone a long time, I really want to attack the tradition in certain parts of the Orthodox Church where, when a loved one dies, people stay home from church for a while, to mourn. That makes zero sense to me. The person you’re mourning is there in the Church. Why would you not want to be present with them and with Christ?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and it’s weird because usually they go everywhere else, but not the church! [Laughter] Anyway. Point taken.

Fr. Stephen: So that’s… You know… Not a fan of that tradition. So the flipside, unfortunately, is that there is this sort of remaining Hades. But Hades is not to be confused—and there’s some great coder language in our notes—not to be confused with that final condemnation after the end of days. It’s not Tartarus; it’s not the abyss. This is not the place where the demons are imprisoned. This is Hades; this is— By the four-cave analogy, this is where the ignorant and the wicked would go, but they’re not considered in the same way.

Fr. Andrew: Right. This is where some of these ideas start to merge in people’s heads, where we’ve got the model that we said at the beginning was basically garbage: “If you go to heaven or hell when you die, I know.” You can sometimes hear fundamentalist preachers say things like, “And he’s burning in hell right now!” And by that, what’s happened is they’ve conflated what you just said, Hades, this place of the wicked and the ignorant for the time being, with that final condemnation, with images of the lake of fire, all this kind of stuff—but it’s not. It’s not the same; whatever word you use, it’s not the same thing.

Fr. Stephen: There’s also being kind of a judgmental jerk.

Fr. Andrew: Right! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Also confusing these two. Even when we say there’s some kind of distinction in Hades as experience, I guess, or paradise as experience, between each other and even within Hades, maybe, that there’s some kind of distinctions in that experience. People kind of want to get that nailed down. “Well, wait, what do you mean? How is it not as bad? How is it worse? What do you mean, ‘experience’? Or what’s it like?” Even our friend, Michael Number One—he didn’t give his last name, so I don’t want to say it out loud—but Michael Number One asked how time— How do you experience time in that state? And the ultimate answer is that we don’t know. And it’s not just that we don’t know; it’s that we can’t know. It’s not possible for us to understand.

That’s why we get these images and ideas and impressions from the Scripture, because that’s the most we can understand about it, because you don’t know what it’s like to be a bat; you definitely don’t know what it’s like to be a dead bat, and you don’t know what it’s like to be a dead human. We don’t know what it’s like to not have a material body, because we’ve always had one. So all of these metaphors we have of both are material metaphors, because those are things we understand, like a tent or a garden or a mountain or fire or darkness, or whatever metaphor you want to use. These are all physical metaphors because that’s how we, our senses, our nous…

Fr. Andrew: It’s what we’ve got.

Fr. Stephen: That’s how we approach reality. So we can’t know exactly what it’s going to be like. And even if somebody—a saint, who has experienced physical dead—comes back, he or she can’t explain it to us because, again, we— until we also experience it, it would be like— A saint trying to explain to me what it’s like to be a departed saint would be like me trying to explain to my dog, Shelby, what it’s like to be a human.

Fr. Andrew: Right. I mean, on some level it’s the Plato’s cave problem, where you’ve got the person who goes out in the sunlight and then tries to come back and tell the people who’ve never seen sun what that’s about, but much more so because it’s not just a matter of what someone has experienced; it’s a matter of being a different kind of someone.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and having a whole different kind of experience.

Fr. Andrew: Senses that you don’t have now… I mean, it’s just… We don’t even… This is the mantis shrimp thing again.

Fr. Stephen: Right. So we have to be humble enough to accept our limitations as finite beings of a certain type. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing here now to be said, and we want to briefly kind of talk about— There is a strong and good tradition in the Orthodox Church that connects a period of 40 days after a person experiences physical death before their soul departs in another sense to the state of paradise or Hades. And even as I say that, it raises a thousand questions: “What do you mean, ‘departs in a different sense’? And why 40 days?” etc., etc.

So we have to kind of address what we mean when we even say— For example, what do we mean when we say that person is still present in some sense with their loved ones for 40 days? What does “present” mean? Because the way we normally use the word “present” means that something occupies some quantity of physical space in proximity to the physical space that I am occupying.

Fr. Andrew: Right. That body is near my body such that I can sense it with my physical senses.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so that person is present. My mug of coffee is present in front of me on the desk. The desk is present in front of me in the room. I am present in this room.

Fr. Andrew: Which, if that’s the only way that that can mean anything, when Jesus says, “I am with you always, even to the end of the age,” people have to kind of go: Really? Because there’s not a— “I don’t see him standing here in the room with me.” There’s not that kind of presence, so it’s analogous at—

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, “Where is he standing in the room?”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Which doesn’t make sense. But so there’s another way we talk about presence, though, but the way to get to it is we have to actually come at it backwards, because the opposite of presence is absence. It’s pretty clear that absence only exists phenomenologically, meaning absence only exists as an experience. I can make a mathematical argument that two objects are near each other. I could give you a mathematical measurement of the space and everything. But there is no way, mathematically or scientifically, to quantify all of the many millions of things that are not in this room with me. [Laughter] And I don’t have any experience with most of them, like I don’t walk into the room and be like: “Aha! There is no hippopotamus here!” [Laughter] I don’t experience the absence of hippopotami in my day-to-day life. There is an absence of hippopotami in my day-to-day life, but I don’t experience it.

When we experience absence, when we experience that something is gone or something or someone is absent, what we’re experiencing is the fact that we believe there is a place where that person or that thing is supposed to be, and that person or thing is not there.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, you notice them missing. You miss them.

Fr. Stephen: I reach for my pocket. The keys aren’t there. I panic briefly. I realize they’re in my other hand. But that’s the absence. They’re supposed to be there; that’s the place they’re supposed to be, and they’re not there. So when we talk about a person who is departed this life, the experience of absence is: They’re supposed to be here with me and they’re not. I’m supposed to be able to pick up the phone and call them, and I can’t. I want to talk to them and I can’t, and that’s not right. So that’s absence.

So then presence, to get to what presence means in this sense, we have to then flip to the opposite of that. Then we’re talking about an experience that we have, an experience we have that mitigates against that absence, that we don’t— That there’s this 40-day period during which we don’t experience the absence in the same acute way. So this is— Notice that we’re talking here— I’m not contradicting what I just said about us not being able to understand. We’re talking, when we talk about this tradition, from our perspective as the people who are still living in this world.

Fr. Andrew: Right. As you say, it’s phenomenological, that is, this is our experience of this, which is subjective. It doesn’t mean it’s not real, but it is subjective; it’s our experience.

Fr. Stephen: So our experience of the departed person. We’re not making a claim about what the departed person is experiencing.

Fr. Andrew: Because we don’t have that perspective.

Fr. Stephen: Because we don’t know. Or where the departed person is, for example, in terms of occupying physical space.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and as modern people we tend to default to trying to think in those terms, but we don’t actually have access to that. We don’t have a detached access to what’s going on “out there.” We only have what we have.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. So the 40 days and the memorials and the traditions that are prescribed during that 40 days, for that 40-day period, are primarily for us. That is not to say that the memorials don’t do any good for the departed person—they do—but specifically the 40-day period… Particularly, we do memorials on this day and then that day. Those are for us.

Fr. Andrew: It’s not that some spiritual scientist has tracked the movements of a soul for 40 days and figured out that they were wandering for 40 days and then—ffft!—they were gone, and that’s why we do memorials. That’s not what’s going on at all. So when people say that the memorials are for us, that’s true; they are also for the departed person, but not in the same way that they are for us.

Fr. Stephen: Right, because we would say that our prayers for the departed benefit the departed, regardless of on what day and at what time and in what context we say them. So the way of structuring our mourning and our memorials and our prayers for them, the structuring is for us, for the way that we experience time and the way we experience absence and loss. So the structure is for us; the content is for us and for them, but the structure is for us.

So, that covered, now let’s talk about what a soul is. Let’s move to easier topics.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I actually saw recently someone did a review of my latest book in which they accuse me of—and this is not in there, but they accuse me of treating the soul like it’s a physical object. I was like: That’s the opposite of what I believe! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: How dare you?

Fr. Andrew: How dare I, I know! Am I some kind of Origenist? [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yes, you are. I’m sure you thought it was spherical. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: I saw that in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, a spherical soul. [Laughter] Anyway…

Fr. Stephen: In much the same way that we’ve seen this sort of conceptual drift surrounding the word “hell” that we talked about at the beginning of the first half, there’s also been this kind of conceptual drift about a soul. So, for example, people will act like it’s crazy-talk if you say that anything but a human has a soul. They will talk about humans having an immortal soul and not realize that that’s not Christian at all. They will… When we picture a soul, people tend to picture, like if you picture someone’s soul they kind of picture a force ghost from the end of Return of the Jedi, before the Blu-Ray.

Fr. Andrew: Right, before they broke it.

Fr. Stephen: Before the Anakin or get out!

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Wow! No love for Hayden Christensen.

Fr. Stephen: Sorry, Hayden Christensen.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, no, I don’t blame you at all. Not even a little.

Fr. Stephen: So, yeah, they’ll picture a force, kind of translucent image of the person’s body: that’s their soul. And that’s pretty far afield from the way the word was used by pretty much everybody in the ancient world. For example, right off the jump in Genesis 1, on the fourth day of creation—or on the fifth day of creation, when God creates the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, it literally says he creates all the souls that swim in the sea and all the souls that fly in the air. And these were spheres whipping around through the water and the sky. These aren’t humans even; these are animals. So it’s very clear, all through the ancient world, whether we’re talking about the way “soul” is used in Semitic languages, the Ancient Near East, whether we’re talking about even Greek philosophy—possible exception Plato, because he gets a little weird with the reincarnation and stuff, but not even so much with him.

Basically, a soul is what makes a living thing alive. So the word nephesh in Hebrew literally means life.

Fr. Andrew: If you even think about the English word “animal,” I mean, it just comes from anima which means “soul” in Latin.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and we say that an object is inanimate if it’s not alive. “Inanimate” literally means “un-souled.”

Fr. Andrew: No soul, yeah. Oh, man, I should have played the etymology jingle! Oh well. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and technically, “animation” means you’re ensouling drawings.

Fr. Andrew: [Gasp] Oh man!

Fr. Stephen: So it’s probably a kind of idolatry.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Dun-dun-dun-dunn! If you’re looking for another reason to condemn Disney, everybody, there you go!

Fr. Stephen: There you go.

Fr. Andrew: Whoo!

Fr. Stephen: And this perspective carries on to the Church Fathers. You can look up St. Gregory Palamas talking about how animals have souls. Now, there are different types of souls. They’re not saying everything has a human soul. They’re saying that they have souls, but they’re souls of a different type than a human soul. So you have sort of with plants, which are alive, and animals, you have what you might call micro-souls.

Or the way Aristotle works it out is you have the most basic level of a soul, the vegetative part, which is what plants have, where they take in nutrients and they grow and they reproduce, and that’s sort of basic. All living things have that basic level; plants only have that basic level. Then animals have the addition of desires, epithymia, which we usually translate as “passions.” But animals have desires: they get hungry, they get thirsty, they need to sleep, they move about, and they seek to fulfill those desires. So that’s— Again, both animals and humans both have that, but animals sort of only have that. And then humans have a noetic soul; humans have a nous. That gets translated through Latin into English as man being the rational animal, but that kind of misses the point. Man is a noetic— Man has a nous. And that makes a human soul different [from] a plant soul or an animal soul.

So humans— If we take human souls as the baseline, other living things have sort of micro-souls, but then there’s also—and this is a concept that we’ve mostly lost in the modern world, although some folks are coming back to it, even atheists—the idea of what we might call macro-souls.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right, which is this idea that larger systems, like whole communities of people, for instance, have a soul, together, like the soul of—

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, because they have a life.

Fr. Andrew: Right, there’s this common life that is greater than the sum of the parts. I think the reason why this is a hard concept to grasp is because we tend to want to think of the soul as being an object rather than the life that exists within a person or a system or whatever. But it’s true. You think about— If you’ve ever moved from one place to another, the new place has a different way of being, and you can just feel it and experience it, and you participate in it. You participate in the way of being of that place, and it’s something that’s larger than just simply lining everybody up and just watching what they do.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and it can be functional or dysfunctional; it could be sinful or it could be holy.

Fr. Andrew: Right, which is why whole nations get condemned in Scripture, for instance.

Fr. Stephen: But even down to your parish community at your church, the way sin in the community is talked about in the New Testament doesn’t make sense if you’re just thinking about it as a group of individuals who gather together with a common purpose, in which the individual sin of another person has nothing to do with me.

Yeah, so a good way to think about it is to think about the fact that, in a human, in our human body, not only do we have completely unrelated organisms living, like our gut biome, but we don’t even have to go there. Every cell in our body is a living thing, is a living organism. The cell is alive, while it’s connected to our body, at least; it will die and get shed off, but it’s alive. But yet it makes up a greater whole. And so this also happens. When St. Paul talks about the Church community being the body of Christ and us being the members, the parts of the body, and each of us playing this role so that the body can thrive and function, and Christ is the head, and the body is animated by the Holy Spirit, which is the spirit of Christ, made alive by it—this isn’t just sort of woo-woo metaphor again. [Laughter] He’s pointing to something real. St. John can write his letters to the seven churches and talk about the Church like it’s an entity. It has this one guardian angel, and he can say, “You have forgotten your first love.” And modern Western individualism makes this brain-breakingly hard for us to understand.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, we try to come up with other words like “vibe.” [Laughter] Isn’t that a typical— Like: “That group has a particular vibe,” which is simply— I mean, it’s not the word that I would prefer. It’s not a theological word, but it’s pointing at this reality. We have a sense— Often this is apparent, I think, when people go into a large crowd experience or sometimes a very intimate experience with a particular group of people, and they’ll say there was a spirit there or the room had a certain feeling. That’s what’s being pointed to. And this is an experience we’ve all had, over and over again, but if you try to talk about it in some specific objective way, there’s kind of not much to point to there. I mean, someone might talk about, I don’t know, maybe pheromones or something, but there’s not a lot to kind of point at in any sort of empirical way, but nonetheless it’s an experience that we’ve all had, and it simply is part of what it means to be human.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and this is— Way back when we were talking about sacrifice in the ancient world, the reason there are spirits—this is how powers and principalities work: these are macro-souls; these are steps above us, in the same way that animals and plants are steps below us—that these complex systems in nature, in the heavens, etc., that these are being superintended by these spirits, by these noetic beings, by angels, and some of them turned to evil. This is sort of how that works. But we’re so individualized and alienated now that everything below us—animals, plants, whatever, the earth itself—don’t nobody believe in a world-soul any more—the earth itself is just below us, so it’s not life in the sense that means anything. Only our human rational life means anything; anything below us is just resources to be exploited and dealt with as may be. And we believe that nothing above us exists, frankly.

So all you have left are individuals, and that’s why nothing above us can exist, because we can’t think of ourselves as: “I’m a cell in a bigger organism. I’m a part, playing a part in a larger body. I’m the big toe of this larger body. I am part of a larger whole, and I am a subset of something.” We can’t even think about ourselves that way. “I am the unit. I am the individual. I am the one. Anything below me is less than one, and so unimportant, and there’s nothing more than one. When we gather together, it’s one plus one plus one plus one plus one plus one plus one. We don’t gather together and become one.” So, yeah, it’s made it even hard for us to think about, but if we’re going to talk about souls and the life of the soul, we’re talking about life. And so human life is one type of life, but there are levels of life below that, and there are levels of life above that within the creation, before we even get near to God; just within the creation there’s an above and below.

And so to come back around to where we started this half, this second half, what we’re talking about when we’re talking about the intermediate state is that the life we live in the body, the life we live in this world, continues after it is separated from our physical body. When you see someone who is alive, and then you see them die afterwards, what has changed? The body is still there, but the life has left. That life does not cease to exist, but that life becomes hidden from us, and this is the language that the New Testament uses, that our life is hidden in Christ.

When we talk about this period and then the last judgment, this isn’t “we’re in a holding cell and then we’re going to stand in front of the Judge and get condemned and get found innocent,” but it’s actually that we are— Our life is hidden but continues until that day when Christ comes to set everything in the creation right. But what that means is that this intermediate state for us, whether we want to label it as paradise or Hades and whatever gradations we want to talk about, it’s a continuation of the life we live in the body.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, we shouldn’t think of it as— I don’t think we mentioned this, but there’s experiments—or maybe you did—that were done where the people tried to figure out the weight of the soul by trying to measure someone’s weight at the moment that they die. That’s not what’s going on here. The soul is not a thing that leaves the body and goes somewhere up in the air or down below or whatever. It’s that the life of the body separates from it, but, again, like we talked about: presence, what exactly does that mean? The notion of it going down makes sense because, when you put a human body into the ground, there’s this idea that the life of the body sort of dissolves into the ground. But we’re not saying that that means human souls are underneath the earth’s crust somewhere. It’s that this is the image that we’ve got.

Likewise, the notion of the soul going up is not that we’re saying that they float up into the atmosphere; it’s that, because we have this image of Christ as being ascended and that the life is hidden in Christ, that idea of up makes some sense. But we’re not saying that it’s a location, because when Christ ascended, he didn’t fly up in the atmosphere and land somewhere in space. That’s not what’s going on! [Laughter] Again, when we talk about up and down and all that kind of stuff, it’s sort of spiritual geography, in a sense. It’s not a spot.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And so the key is that there’s that continuity. So if we’ve lived our life in the body, following Christ, drawing close to Christ, coming to know God in Christ, then that continues; that life continues after it is separated from our body. The flipside is, if we’ve lived our life in rebellion against God and hatred against God and rejecting him, then that life also continues when we leave the body. But, ultimately, we’re waiting for that day to come, that last day when Christ will restore perfect justice, which we’ll talk about more in the third half.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly! In the meantime, we pray, because that day has not come yet, but we pray for our departed; we pray for each other in preparation for that day. Okay, we’re going to go ahead and take our second and final break, and we will be right back!

Fr. Andrew: Welcome back! It’s the third half. It’s a show-and-a-half. We’re talking about what happens when people die. In the first part— Oh, go ahead!

Fr. Stephen: If I could give you one note on the Orthodox Intro...

Fr. Andrew: Oh, sure, yeah! I’m not going to edit it now, but okay.

Fr. Stephen: Well, what would’ve raised it to the level of perfection would be if, during your bit, after you introduce yourself, you did the “And we are—” dramatic pause, and then everyone says in unison: “—the Orthodox Intro Team!” You see what I’m saying? Next level.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] That would be pretty— Oh, yeah, no, I hear you! But it’s a level— Like, I wasn’t going for cheesy? Cheesy is not where I was aiming with that ad.

Fr. Stephen: You say “cheesy,” I say engaging with your audience.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Go, Planet! [Laughter] That’s actually almost a little too young for me. Captain Planet was not from my youth. That was from a little bit young from— Well, you and I are about the same age. I think that was a little bit younger. I think we might’ve been teenagers when that came out. I’ll have to go look.

Fr. Stephen: Despite the peak ‘80s mullet, that is true.

Fr. Andrew: Right. Right, exactly. All right, well, it is the third half. And now we’re— I mean, we’re actually following a fairly clear structure. So in the first one, we were talking about the underworld prior to the coming of the Christ; in the second part now death: what happens at death during this messianic age; and now we’re talking about life in the world to come. So this is what’s in the future, from our point of view.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. Sometimes when I do make sense, stop the clock on that.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: So, coming back to where we began, there’s this idea that most at least American Christians have in their head, that “well, you know, you live in this world and you die, and if you’re a good Christian you go to heaven, and if not you go to hell, and both of those last forever.” That is a sub-Christian eschatology; that’s not Christian, actually. That’s Gnostic.

Fr. Andrew: Dun-dun-dunn!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. So just about everybody’s a Gnostic. Good night, everybody.

Fr. Andrew: Don’t be Gnostic, everybody. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: So, yeah… And that’s bad. So there was a book that Harold Bloom wrote, a long time ago now, because I’m old—

Fr. Andrew: It is a long time ago now.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] —called The American Religion that was sort of a religious history of the United States. Harold Bloom was an avowed Gnostic. I think he’s dead now.

Fr. Andrew: He is, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: But he was a Yale Shakespeare professor and was an avowed Gnostic himself, but he did a sort of religious history of the United States and argued that American Christianity, with a couple of exceptions that he outlines, was pretty much all Gnosticism. And this was one piece of that, that there wasn’t really a firm belief in a bodily resurrection and that there was going to be a new heavens and a new earth and we were going to live on the earth in resurrected bodies; that was not a firm reality in most people’s heads. And then also, the way just in general American Christianity, of all stripes—and this comes out of the Puritan base—was very world-denying and very sort of anti-material enjoyment and pleasure and just the idea of worldliness meant sin. So it was like: even things that you can’t make a good biblical case are sins, like playing cards, were seen as just kind of tainted because they were things of the world. And then that sort of disdain for the material world is kind of innately Gnostic.

Fr. Andrew: I just say, I looked that up and that book came out in 1992. It has been a long time.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah.

Fr. Andrew: Man.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. I was young once… [Laughter] My heart was an open book. I decided to live and let live.

Fr. Andrew: “I was young and foolish then; I feel old and foolish now.” [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: One of the sneaky ways that Gnosticism falls into our Christianity like chocolate into our peanut butter— Except that makes it better, and Gnosticism makes Christianity worse.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I was going to say! I’m on board with chocolate-with-peanut-butter.

Fr. Stephen: It’s kind of an inverse Reese’s situation.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, okay, okay.

Fr. Stephen: —is through Platonism. We often forget, if we ever know, that Plato’s Timaeus was part of the Nag Hammadi library; the find in 1948 of all the Gnostic texts, included Timaeus, Plato’s account of the creation of the world. While there have been, especially in the West, a lot of attempts to fuse Platonism and Christianity—bad news for you—they don’t really dovetail, because there are basic ontological—meaning related to being: what is and what isn’t—presuppositions that Plato has that don’t really work with Christianity. So you end up getting something closer to a Gnosticism.

One of the places where this surfaces, germane to our topic tonight, is the whole idea of the beatific vision in the West.

Fr. Andrew: Oh man! Big throwdown now.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. Ah, deal with it. [Laughter] The whole idea of the beatific vision, the idea that the soul, once it is freed from the body, can behold the essence of God, can behold the divine essence, and that is its state for eternity— Even as I said that, you probably noticed a bunch of problems. So, first of all, the soul being freed from the body, whereas what the Scriptures teach and what Christianity teaches is that the soul separated from the body is unnatural and death is bad. [Laughter] And that our destiny is to be rejoined to our body; being separated from the body is not good or better. Number two, the idea that the soul can then behold the divine essence, can come to know the essence of God—

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, no.

Fr. Stephen: —as a thing, and be conformed to it by that seeing. And then, third, if that’s the eternal state of the soul, what happens to the bodily resurrection?

So Western theology in particular passes through this Platonist period from Augustine through Boethius, through late antiquity and into the medieval period, and folks who come along try to reckon with this problem. Thomas Aquinas tries to kind of deal with this issue in the third part of his Summa. Now, Thomas didn’t finish the Summa; he had a mystical experience that caused him to think it was garbage, and so he didn’t want to finish it. So the third part was compiled from his notes. So it may be that Thomas had some kind of solution to this problem, but if he did we’ll never know what it was. What we do find in his notes is that he affirms this whole beatific vision idea—the soul, freed from the body, can behold the divine essence—but then also affirms the bodily resurrection, because, I mean, he is a Christian, so he’s got to affirm that. But there’s no conceivable way that those two dovetail based on what’s on paper now. Like I said, he might have had something in mind that we’ll never know to try and reconcile those two, but it’s not there; it’s not there.

One of the pieces that’s problematic about this—thinking you could behold the divine essence is enough—but the idea that you’re then conformed to it is picking up on this basic idea in Plato that multiplicity is bad, that the good and the true and the beautiful and the perfect have to all be one and simple.

Fr. Andrew: Right. We have this— And I think that this is written deep into our culture. We see things that are multiple or complicated, or there’s lots of different ways to say, “Well, why can’t this just be one? We just need one way, one.” At its worst, this becomes totalitarianism, the way that it gets played out.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and people say it all the time. They say, “Hey, we may all be wrong, but we can’t all be right. Only one of us can be right.”

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Right, exactly. And this is the basis— For instance, I got asked the other day, when I pointed out within the Orthodox Church, for instance, there are multiple canons of Scripture—I mean, they’re mostly the same, but there’s—

Fr. Stephen: There are even variations to the Old Testament, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: And when you get to the early Church… Yeah, exactly. And they’re like, “Well, why hasn’t that been worked out by now?” I’m like: Because we’ve never seen it as a problem that has to be worked out. It’s okay. Multiplicity is okay. Not all diversity equals contradiction.

Fr. Stephen: And there’s all kinds of practical places where this plays itself out in the West, like the West’s seeming inability to regard marriage and monasticism, or marriage and virginity, as equal, as two equal paths to holiness and to God. You have an emergent tradition in Rome of virginity being the higher way of life, but some people don’t do it because they don’t have the special graces to do it, and so they’re sort of allowed to do it as some sort of concession, and then married people are allowed to be together as long as they’re trying to produce a child, etc., etc.: they can’t be co-equal. And then you get the Protestant Reformation which reacts in the exact opposite direction, where anybody who would pursue celibacy is some kind of weirdo, and marriage is it and everybody should be married. [Laughter] You can’t have— As we have in the East: these are two paths, for different kinds of people. There has to be a higher and a lower, there has to be a better and a worse, and whatever is lower or worse has to, in some sense, be kind of sinful and kind of bad, by virtue of not being the good, and this good can just be this one: there’s one right answer. And what’s the right way to do it? What’s the right answer? There can’t be multiple ways. There can’t be multiple ways to see this. There can’t be multiple ways to approach this.

But everything from our Christian tradition tells us the opposite. We have thousands of saints. All conform to the likeness of Christ, but all who are very different people, with different personalities, different genders, some of them are married, some of them are monastics, some of them are clergy, some of them are laity, some of them are martyrs, some of them died of old age, living at all different times and all different places, in all different cultures; some of them wrote, some of them were illiterate, some of them were theologians, some of them were very simple people, some of them were hymnographers, some of them couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket. And we see that and we don’t taxonomize them! [Laughter] Like: “Well, we’ve got the Theotokos up at the top, and then the next tier, and then the next tier. Each of these is a little worse…”

So that’s not how the Christian tradition works. Multiplicity is fine. And the whole idea that simplicity is better than multiplicity, that the number one is somehow more noble and beautiful than the number two or three, is just a weird Pythagorean religious presupposition that Plato had. There is no basis in reality for it! So we can just kind of jettison it. Like, we don’t owe Plato anything. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: And if you look at the Scriptures, this isn’t there. And, I mean, this is also the basis— There’s a number of ways this gets practically worked out. You mentioned marriage and monasticism, for instance, but even when people say, “Well, the Gospel should be simple—” Whenever you start talking any kind of theology or whatever, there are some people—not everybody, not most people, maybe—that will say things like, “Well, the Gospel should be simple,” because they’re used to a very simplified version, and so therefore anything beyond that is a complication that violates this principle of simplicity, even though when the apostles preached the Gospel, it’s not some two-sentence elevator speech; it never is. And even the short versions are predicated on usually a tradition that they share with the person they’re talking to, which often we don’t share.

Fr. Stephen: Let me be even more controversial.

Fr. Andrew: Okay!

Fr. Stephen: The solas of the Reformation—“this alone, that alone, this alone, that alone”—why? Why alone? Why can’t there be richness? [Laughter] Why does everything have to be one and simple and “no, just this”? And this is how it is. It’s all these Platonic— And let’s not forget: Plato, not actually a Christian.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] What!?

Fr. Stephen: And so the other big piece of this is the whole issue of matter, the body, that somehow being in the body makes the soul unable to see God and know God and behold him. But somehow being freed from it—you know, the body being the prison-house of the soul, according to Plato and John Calvin—that somehow that then frees the soul to do this, so that matter, the material body, the material world, by virtue of being material, is somehow negative. And this is sort of the Gnostic starting-point, and it comes from these Platonic presuppositions, that as soon as a god emanates or creates something other than himself, by virtue of it not being him—since he is the good and it is not him—it is therefore in some sense bad or evil, because the good can only be one. And that again is completely counter to Christianity, which teaches from literally the first page of the Bible that God called everything he created good.

Fr. Andrew: Mmm, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: And so for us as Christians, matter is the vehicle for God’s grace, for the divine energies, for God working in us. Our body is the vehicle through which our salvation is worked out. It’s not a detraction from coming to know God; it’s the way in which we as created human finite beings come to know God—is through our bodies, including our physical material bodies, because we’ve talked about body and the different senses.

This, of course—we’re coming back to the Incarnation again—this is where we see that most fully. When God works our salvation in Christ, he does it by taking in upon himself our human nature, including our human body, and he doesn’t get rid of it.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, no.

Fr. Stephen: At the Resurrection.

Fr. Andrew: Or at the Ascension.

Fr. Stephen: Because now he’s “free.” [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, he’s got a human body forever. This is a permanent union.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, so…

Fr. Andrew: All that said.

Fr. Stephen: All of this to say, that’s problematic. What we are looking forward to is the transfiguration, the transformation, the salvation of the world, the cosmos. It’s the Greek word, kosmos, that’s translated as “world.” So it doesn’t just mean earth; it means the universe, the whole creation. That’s what we’re waiting for; we’re waiting for the resurrection of the whole creation, which, according to St. Paul in Romans, groans awaiting it.

So when we talk about Christ at his glorious appearing, judging  the world, we mean, as we said before tonight, him putting it all back in order. The whole universe gets put back in order, gets put back to what it was created to be, all functioning as a whole, and that includes all the creatures. “Creature” means something created. That includes humans, that includes things lower, that includes things higher—the angelic beings. And so then creatures who refuse to be put back in order, who refuse to be justified, they’re excluded from that order, which means they’re excluded from creation; they’re excluded from the cosmos.

Once the world has been put back in order— We’ve talked about these two functions. This is the new creation, right? So we talked about the two functions. There’s putting things in order, and then the world is going to be transfigured, which means it’s going to be filled with the life of God, with the divine energies.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which is just essentially a repeat, but not just a repeat but a fulfillment of what was the pattern that was begun in Genesis: order created, and then it’s filled.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so the whole cosmos is transfigured and filled with the life of God and the divine energies. That includes all creatures, creatures below us, the creatures above us. And any creatures who refuse the life of God, to participate in the life of God, are excluded from the life of God; they’re excluded from it. But this is why— I forget where I said it. I think I said it in a blog post once. This is why you can say that the Holy Spirit is the atmosphere of the world to come.

Fr. Andrew: Hmm! That’s cool, a cool way to put it.

Fr. Stephen: Because the divine energies permeate everything.

So what does that mean? What does it mean for a creature, whether it be a demonic power or a human, to be excluded from the cosmos, to be excluded from creation, or to be excluded permanently from the life of God? Well, again, we’re talking about a different age; we’re talking about the life of the age to come. We don’t know—hopefully none of us ever will know what that means exactly, but again we’re given sort of metaphors and images and impressions by the Scripture to help us try to understand what that would mean. So we get the image of the lake of fire, that first—

Fr. Andrew: I was going to say, that’s probably the one that most people think of immediately: burning.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And that first appears in texts that we still have in the book of Enoch, but then gets picked up in Matthew and Revelation.

Fr. Andrew: And it explicitly says that this is made for the devil and his angels.

Fr. Stephen: Right. That’s whom it’s created for; it’s not created for people, but the people who choose to become like the devil and his angels end up there with them, at least potentially.

We get the image of outer darkness, or just darkness in general. We get these images of being shut outside, whether it’s being shut outside the wedding banquet or shut outside the kingdom, that there are gates or doors, and they are outside. What does it mean to be outside the gates of created reality? Again, we don’t know exactly.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah…

Fr. Stephen: We get this image of madness, which is what weeping and gnashing of teeth is about. That’s not an image of pain; that’s— You look at places where those Greek words are used in classical literature: it’s always describing someone who’s gone mad.

All of those can be sort of summed up as a kind of dehumanization, a diminution of human nature, becoming less human, which means less like Christ—because Christ is the perfection of our human nature—and more like the demons.

Fr. Andrew: I was going to say, so the image that some people have where this experience—God forbid that any of us have it—is us as we are now being inflicted with horrible pain and torture forever and ever is predicated upon a whole set of assumptions that simply are not there, the biggest one being that we will essentially be as we are now. But it’s not. Again, as you said, there’s this dehumanization, this subhumanization, because that’s what sin does to you. If Christ is the perfect Man, then, as you said, it’s heading in the opposite direction.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And so since we can’t really understand what that is, and we just get these images, why are we given these images and these metaphors? What function does that serve? Because we had the call about the claim language— Since we’re just given impressions and analogies in Scripture can’t be making a claim: “Here is precisely what is going to happen to people who do that—” It can’t be saying that because we’re not given that kind of detail. So why are we given these impressions? To understand that, we have to look at how it functions in the life of the Christian, because these images are given to Christians.

Fr. Andrew: Right, they’re not aimed at the world.

Fr. Stephen: Right, we don’t see the apostles going into a pagan Greek city and saying, “All y’all are goin’ to burn for eternity if ya don’t git right!” [Laughter] That’s not the Gospel as they proclaimed it; it’s the exact opposite. They come and tell them about Christ and what Christ has already done for them and now what he requires of them, and they say, “What must I do to be saved?”

And it’s not used in Scripture or in the Fathers to threaten people outside the Church.

Fr. Andrew: Right, this is a huge point in our modern world.

Fr. Stephen: I’ve thrown this out publicly, many times, for anyone to find me an example of a Church Father talking about Christians, like the ones he’s talking to when he preaches: “Y’all are goin’ to heaven, but them bad people out there, they’re all going to hell.” And I know it’s semi- maybe classist, I don’t know, that I do the Southern drawl whenever I talk these talking points… [Laughter] “But them out there, they’re all goin’ to hell”—because that’s not what you ever see. What you see is: “Hell is for Christians.” You see Church Fathers threatening the good church people, who are showing up to hear them preach, with hell.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and “hell” here being not a word for the underworld, “hell” now referring to the state of eternal condemnation.

Fr. Stephen: Eternal condemnation, yeah, with eternal condemnation, with being shut out of the kingdom, with outer darkness, with weeping and gnashing of teeth. If you look at where those images appear in Christ’s parables, he’s addressing them to the people he’s talking to: “This is your potential fate.”

Fr. Andrew: This is an important point. We’ve said several times one of my favorite sayings, “There’s no tale without a teller,” but there’s also no tale without a hearer, and the hearer is really important. Whom is Christ talking to? I mean, you’ve made this point a number of times in your Whole Counsel of God podcast, for instance, when Paul is speaking to pagans, he speaks in a certain way, and when he’s talking to Jews he speaks in another way, and that’s very deliberate, that you can’t isolate these things from that context and try to come up with some kind of independent system.

Fr. Stephen: Right, or treat them as some kind of objective truth claim or a logical proposition that you can take out of context and assess.

Fr. Andrew: There’s a point to this being addressed to Christians. And we actually have a couple of quotes from some modern saints that address this. As you said, this serves a function within the human Christian life. So what is the function? Well, the function is for me to struggle to repent.

So what does that look like? This is that classic saying from St. Silouan the Athonite, and this is the most famous thing he ever said: “Keep thy mind in hell and do not despair.” So when he says, “Keep your mind in hell,” he’s not saying, “Astrally project your nous into the underworld.” [Laughter] That’s not what he’s saying! He’s talking about: Remember that this possibility exists, and yet do not despair. In other words, move forward in hope; move forward in repentance and struggle. That the purpose of this image is to bring us to repentance; it’s not to lay out prophecies about the future or who’s going to heaven and hell. That’s not the point at all. There’s that.

And then the other one from a modern saint is from St. Paisios the Athonite.

Fr. Stephen: Oh, let me say first before you say that.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, go ahead.

Fr. Stephen: To sort of reiterate what you’re saying. This serves a function: This is a possibility for me, that I could suffer this, I could suffer eternal condemnation; and it’s a possibility for the people who are in the sphere of my personal responsibility, the people whom I have spiritual care for. The reason it’s a possibility for them is because I have spiritual responsibility for them, and so I need to be aware that it’s a possibility for me. It’s a possibility for the people in my parish whom I pastor, and therefore I have to keep that in mind as I pastor them and try to lead them away from it as a possibility. It’s a possibility for family members who are under my authority. But it is not a possibility that I extend to—and definitely not a certainty—to people I don’t like, people outside of that sphere of responsibility. So it is always tied to: “This is the possibility if I fail. This is the possibility if I don’t live up to my responsibilities, if I don’t repent, if I don’t seek after Christ, if I don’t pursue Christ.” And so it is not making any kind of objective claim to who, if anyone, will end up suffering this fate.

Fr. Andrew: Right.

Fr. Stephen: It could be billions of people or it could be zero; that’s irrelevant.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, we don’t know. And it’s funny— Well, let me back up. A number of Church Fathers I recall saying things like, “Always apply everything to yourself.”

Fr. Stephen: Right, and not to others.

Fr. Andrew: Right! And I only apply it to others if I am responsible for them because God gave me them—a parent and their children, a pastor and his flock—but in that case it’s not applied to others as others, like: “Here, I’m hurling this at you; you have to listen!” That’s not the point; that’s not the way authority works in Christ. But you always: “I’m the chief of sinners.” Do I actually believe that or can I at least function like that? That’s simply another way of saying what St. Silouan said: “Keep your mind in hell and do not despair,” is “I am the chief of sinners.” That’s the same; it is functionally exactly the same thing.

Fr. Stephen: And so this is— Before you give that quote, I want to—

Fr. Andrew: Go ahead.

Fr. Stephen: So the problem when people start debating universalism—and there are some folks who are… some still identify as Orthodox Christians; a couple now don’t any more—who profess to be universalists. The problem with all those discussions is that if we really have the discussion, we’re going to end up talking past each other, because universalism is arguing about how many people are going to end up in eternal condemnation, which is again making a type of claim that’s kind of irrelevant to the Christian life. The people who tend to respond to universalists to say, “No, lots and lots of people are going to experience eternal condemnation,” are again— It’s sort of like with young earth creationism: they’re adopting the same presuppositions in order to respond.

So how many people that ends up being, whether it’s zero or billions or somewhere in between, is irrelevant to the role which the possibility of eternal condemnation plays in our life. So even if universalism ends up being true—and wouldn’t it be great if it did?—even if it ends up being true, you can’t be a universalist and be a Christian.

Fr. Andrew: Right, yeah! Okay, I’ve head-faked it twice now, this great quote from St. Paisios the Athonite. [Laughter] He’s saying essentially this. He says, “Struggle with all your power to gain paradise, and do not listen to those who say that everyone will be saved. This is a trap of Satan so that we won’t struggle.” In other words, he says that to say categorically, “All will be saved,” is a trap of Satan so that we won’t struggle. In other words, he identifies very clearly what the position of that universalist claim is in Christian life. It’s so that you won’t struggle.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and you notice he doesn’t say there, “No, this isn’t true.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, he’s not claiming to know that.

Fr. Stephen: He doesn’t say that all won’t be saved. He says you can’t listen to that because then you won’t struggle and repent.

Fr. Andrew: Because St. Paisios, he had a lot of spiritual gifts, and one of his spiritual gifts was spiritual direction, to give help to souls in a very, very powerful, powerful way, and this is one of the things that he said to somebody. So, yeah, I mean, the only thing that we can truly say that we know about eternal condemnation is that the demons are going to experience it. But as far as human beings are concerned, for me it exists as a possibility because it spurs me to repentance. I’m not saying it’s the only thing that should spur me to repentance; there’s so many good reasons to repent that are not just about “I’m afraid of this,” but it is there, and it’s there for a purpose. It’s not there— And the purpose that it’s there for is repentance; it’s not there for us to lay down condemnation on others or to set up some kind of system for people who are going to heaven and hell, that kind of thing.

All right, well, to wrap up, I had a couple thoughts, and then of course Fr. Stephen will say his thoughts, and then we’ll be done. The first thing I just wanted to wrap up this question of universalism. Saying that we can’t preach it, it’s not some kind of noble lie, because that would be like saying we know it’s true but we’re going to pretend it’s not so that people repent. We don’t know that it’s— We don’t know. We simply do not know. It is not written in Scripture that all will be saved no matter what, so we cannot preach that.

But so why do we have these things? Why do we have not just this question about universalism, but all the rest of the stuff we’ve talked about in this episode? To me, it always comes back to what St. John writes in his gospel in chapter 20. He says:

Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples which are not written in this book, but these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that, by believing, you may have life in his name.

This is what— When I was in seminary, we used the fancy theological term, the “soteriological motive.” This is the soteriological motive. In other words, the point of all of this is so that we can be saved, not so that we can have knowledge about things. It’s so that we can be saved.

So then the question is: How does what we’ve talked about in this episode aim us towards that? Understanding what used to happen when people died before the harrowing of Hades, what now happens when they die during the messianic age, and what will happen after the resurrection when no one will die any more—how does this inform— For me one of the big questions always is: How does this inform our evangelism, because evangelism is precisely the work of bringing this salvation to other people, which is what we’re supposed to be doing.

So, number one, we talked about in the old covenant— This is relevant, because we understand the fat that Christ has saved us from. We talked about this, what the underworld is like and various different takes on that. Christ has saved us from that. And we enter into that through our baptism and of course especially the ritual participation in Pascha. So that’s an element of the way that we preach the Gospel.

Second, if we understand now we’re in the messianic age, one of the things we see then is what the saints are doing and why they’re not this sort of bonus add-on to Christianity; it’s rather a testament to the belief in the resurrection of the dead. They are a testament to that: This is the resurrection that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and all the saints are participating in. This is why we call the Lord the God of the living. And also we understand, if we understand this messianic age, we understand why things are not perfect yet and—here’s the repentance part—what we’re supposed to be doing in the meantime.

And then finally, thinking about that age to come, we understand that the possibility exists—again, we don’t know to what extent it will be realized, but the possibility exists for being outside the kingdom. So we—because we have seen this and heard this—we strive through repentance to be more and more conformed to it in this life as a preparation for the life that is to come.

So much of this is bound up in our hope of what it means to be in Christ, and so I think if we have a clearer understanding of the soul after death, what that means before Christ, now during the messianic age, and then after the resurrection, this is very, very relevant to our evangelism; it’s very, very relevant to our daily Christian life. So this is really core catechetical stuff, everybody. Fr. Stephen?

Fr. Stephen: So I want to also talk about and hopefully clarify a little the relationship of this possibility of eternal condemnation and repentance, because, as Fr. Andrew just said, this isn’t like a noble lie. We’re not saying, “Oh, yeah, really everybody’s saved, but we’ve got to tell people this so they’ll repent.” And part of the reason that breaks apart is we’re not really talking about fear. We’re not talking about eternal condemnation as this horrible punishment: God is threatening us with this horrible punishment, and so you’d better say you’re sorry and you’d better get in his good graces or he’s going to lower the boom on you when the last judgment comes, because if you’re paying attention during the show, we’ve talked about how that’s not how any of this works.

But we tend to think about repentance most of the time at a very shallow level, that level of kind of “oh, yeah, I was a jerk; I’m sorry; let’s just forget about it now.” Maybe we go a little deeper—hopefully we go deeper than that—and we start to get to “I need to do better; I need to be better; I need to work to do better and to be better; I need to work to follow Christ and to change to be more like him; I need to be better at the roles I play, the purpose I play in the bodies, in these larger—these macro-souls we talked about—the part I play in my family as a spouse, as potentially a parent, my role in the Church, my role, the places I need to do better at it.” But there is an even deeper level than that. I don’t claim to have plumbed the depths of repentance myself, or even gotten near the deepest levels, but there is a deeper level at which repentance really takes the form of self-knowledge, of knowing ourselves specifically in terms of knowing the depths of what we’re capable of, the depths of the evil that we’ve let come to live within us.

And one of those is really understanding the reality that we could, at any moment we chose, destroy everything. Every one of us has the power to wreak havoc and destroy our family, to do damage and destroy our parishes, to ruin our lives, to burn it all down. It wouldn’t even be difficult, if we decided to do it. That’s always there. Sometimes in our dark moments we even feel tempted to maybe do it. It’s never really far from us. We like to pretend it is because of course we all think that faking and pretending that we’re good people is the first step toward becoming good people, and it’s not; it’s the opposite.

So part of keeping our mind in hell, part of remembering that eternal condemnation is a possibility, is remembering how that eternal condemnation would come about. Eternal condemnation is not a possibility for me because I might make some mistakes or mess up. Oops. Eternal condemnation is a possibility for me because it’s within my power to be truly vile, to be truly evil, to hurt people, to mistreat people, to do damage to people in the world, to be cruel, to be heartless. That’s why eternal condemnation is a possibility to me. And if we’re not aware that we have that capability and that capacity, then we can’t every day consciously reject it. We can’t every day look at those actions that would bring us to that condemnation, those, dare I say, demonic tendencies that we’ve allowed ourselves to become infected with through the passions: we can’t look at them and ward them off and set them aside and say no to them, because we’re not willing to acknowledge that they’re there.

So I think having this idea of hell in English, Gehenna, whatever we want to call it, eternal condemnation, the lake of fire, it’s not important in terms of making us afraid or afraid of God or watch our step, but it’s important that we remember the way that we would get there and how close at hand that is, so that we can consciously say no, consciously reject it and choose Christ instead, consciously reject the hate that we have within us and choose love instead, consciously reject the anger within us and choose peace instead, consciously reject the greed, the lust, within us, and choose faithfulness instead. That, I think, is a deeper level of repentance that we need to work to achieve. And the reality of the possibility of eternal condemnation is one of the best roads that can help get us there. So those are my thoughts.

Fr. Andrew: Amen. Well, that is our show for tonight. Thank you very much, everyone, for listening. If you didn’t get through to us live, we would still love to hear from you. You can email us at lordofspirits@ancientfaith.com; you can message us at our Facebook page; or you can leave us a voicemail at speakpipe.com/lordofspirits.

Fr. Stephen: [And join us] for our live broadcasts on the second and fourth Thursdays of the month at 7:00 p.m. Eastern, 4:00 p.m. Pacific. And use the code “Lord of Spirits” at RAID: Shadow Legends. It might get you something: no promises!

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Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Thank you, good night, God bless you. Christ is risen! He truly is risen!