Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick: Hey, good evening to you all giant-killers, you dragon-slayers, all of you who are recovering from Christmas—unless you're on the old calendar! You've got not quite two weeks left to go, so hang in there, you guys! Christ is born! Merry Christmas! Glorify him!

Fr. Stephen De Young: I think they just needed extra time to buy gifts, because they forgot.

Fr. Andrew: I mean, that's a good— I mean, that's a good reason, unless you're on—

Fr. Stephen: Or, as a Dutchman, if it's because they can get everything on sale on the 26th.

Fr. Andrew: Hey!

Fr. Stephen: I have to say, props for that.

Fr. Andrew: It's that why you have all your gifts on St. Nicholas Day? Is that when the Dutch do the gifts?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, we do it back on Sinterklaas, December 6.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Well, it is The Lord of Spirits podcast. And my most-esteemed co-host, whom you just heard, Fr. Stephen De Young, is coming to you live from Lafayette, Louisiana, and I'm Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick in Emmaus, Pennsylvania, the forests of Penn! So if you are listening to us live, you can call us at 855-237-2346, and you can talk to us! We're going to get to your calls starting in the second half of the show, and our very own Matushka Trudi will be taking those calls.

Tonight we're going to be talking about patron saints, but first, a word from our sponsors. The Lord of Spirits podcast is brought to you by our listeners—hey, that's all of you!—and the Antiochian Men. The Antiochian Men, abbreviated A-Men, a men's ministry of the Diocese of Miami and the Southeast within the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America, will be hosting the first-ever Antiochian Men Conference and Retreat, March 7-9, 2024, at the Woodland Christian Camp and Retreat Center in Temple, Georgia, with the theme, "The Audacity of Manhood: Strength through Virtuous Work." The event will feature guest speakers, outdoor activities, sports workshops, campfire fellowship, and—more. Speakers include His Grace Bishop Nicholas, our very own Fr. Stephen De Young—

Fr. Stephen: That's me!

Fr. Andrew: —Fr. Hans Jacobse. That's you, man! You going to be there? Thinking about it?

Fr. Stephen: I guess, yeah!

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] And also, Fr. Jacob Andoun. This event will incorporate the best aspects of camping, conferences, and retreats into a first of its kind experience for Orthodox Christian men. Men ages 18 and older are welcome to register. Early bird registration is $149 per person, and that includes lodging for two nights and six meals. Man, that's about as cheap as it gets. I was just thinking about that.

Fr. Stephen: There's two Dutch priests involved.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Well, there you go. So to learn more and register, go to AntiochianMen.org, click on the banner at the top. Again, that's AntiochianMen.org.

Fr. Stephen: This may or may not become germane at the retreat, but when I was thinking about the outdoor activities and stuff, you know what there is not enough of any more in this world?

Fr. Andrew: So many things, but tell me, Fr. Stephen.

Fr. Stephen: Whittling.

Fr. Andrew: So will this be a competition? A whittling competition?

Fr. Stephen: I don't know! I don't know. This is— I'm just thinking about this. It seems to me that whittling is a good productive pastime that has fallen into obscurity in our modern world. Because we don't have pieces of wood around, right? People don't carry their pocket knives any more.

Fr. Andrew: You made our conference have a D&D tournament, so maybe you can have forced whittling at the Antiochian Men—

Fr. Stephen: I won't even have to force it!

Fr. Andrew: Just hand people a bunch of knives and pieces of wood, and let the magic begin.

Fr. Stephen: Yes! It's, it's wooden! You know, grab some wood. You can just find wood. If you have a handy pocket knife, there you go. You might have some trouble getting it on the plane to get out there, but, you know, other than that…

Fr. Andrew: There will be some available for— No, probably not.

Fr. Stephen: Probably not, but we can figure something out. It's not that far from Atlanta. You can go get a pocket knife.

Fr. Andrew: A big run on whittling knives.

Fr. Stephen: It doesn't have to be the Swiss Army variety or anything. You can go for straight ahead. Get one of those little kits with the fingernail and toenail clippers and a pocket knife.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] What would the Swiss Army have done without those things?

Fr. Stephen: I think it's the key to their victory in every single war they've stayed neutral in.

Fr. Andrew: So tonight, though, our topic is patron saints. We've been asked about this a lot, actually, and especially our Protestant friends might find the Orthodox practice of having patron saints for people, places, churches, groups, etc., kind of weird and, frankly, unbiblical. Is it, though? Is there a biblical basis for this element of Christian life? And what about those who say that this is just a white-washing of pagan polytheism—do you love the alliteration?—calling upon the various gods for different purposes? What do we do with the similarities between how pagans treat their gods and how Christians relate to patron saints? So, Fr. Stephen, are patron saints really just thinly veiled paganism?

Fr. Stephen: No.

Fr. Andrew: Thickly veiled, maybe?

Fr. Stephen: No.

Fr. Andrew: Not at all! No veiling involved.

Fr. Stephen: Not even unveiled paganism. It's no paganism. You move the curtain, there's no paganism there. [Laughter]

Yeah, tonight we're going to be going back to some of— What we're going to be talking about is going to be bringing together some of the things we talked about in the earliest episodes of the show, between Mexican radio broadcasts and power outages.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, man. Back in the day.

Fr. Stephen: And we're also going to be trying to sort of synthesize that in a coherent way that hopefully will answer some of the questions that we get consistently, all the time, related to this.

I don't want to spend too long on this—you know how I hate digressing—but even the way, like in the intro you just did, this sometimes gets framed— We have to think sometimes about how things are framed. Like, things needing to have a biblical basis: what does that mean?

Fr. Andrew: It means: "I found it in the Bible somewhere and on that basis I am going to do it."

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] And "I'm going to argue that this is referring to that," and of course anyone who disagrees with that is going to say, "No, it doesn't refer to that."

Fr. Andrew: Right! "Biblical" is just a word meaning "I do not agree with your doctrine."

Fr. Stephen: Yes. But this assumes a couple things about a text that aren't possible. Number one, that a text is not based on anything, that you could have a text as ultimate. You can't have a text as ultimate, because, first of all, the rules of grammar...

Fr. Andrew: The language itself has to be—

Fr. Stephen: Vocabulary, the language itself has to underlie the text, number one. And, number two, for example, this is a text reporting historical events, then those historical events underlie the text. The events didn't spring from the text; the text came from the events and give a perspective and an interpretation of the events.

Why am I bringing this up at all right now? This is not just me taking a shot at our Protestant friends about the coherency or lack thereof of sola scriptura but to say we have to approach this kind of thing, when we're looking at a historic practice of the Church, which we know without a doubt is a practice that went back to at least the end of the first, beginning of the second century, minimally. To assume that those kind of historic practices were "based on" the New Testament text is not a coherent way of thinking about it.

Fr. Andrew: Right, especially because those texts don't even claim to be that kind of book. They're not a manual, like a Boy Scout manual: "Here's how you—" Although even a Boy Scout manual, you still have to be part of a group that shows you how to be a Boy Scout.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and it doesn't cover every single topic that might come up in the life of a Boy Scout. It makes no claim to be that comprehensive. [Laughter] But, yeah, and the Scriptures aren't even a manual in that sense. So we would expect to find places where practices that existed at the time are reflected in the text, but based on the type of text that the Scriptures are, we wouldn't expect to find: "Well, okay, here's how sainthood works. Here's how someone becomes a saint. Here's how patron saints work. Here's how—" We wouldn't expect to find that in the Bible. It would be weird to find that in the Bible! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there's almost nothing that is "And here's how this works, and here's what all of this means." The closest you get is Leviticus telling you how to do sacrifices and that kind of thing.

Fr. Stephen: Right, because that is sort of functioning as a manual. The book of Leviticus is kind of a manual.

Fr. Andrew: Look it up. "Here's how you do this."

Fr. Stephen: Or how to be a Levite.

Fr. Andrew: And there's gaps! There's still gaps; there's still a lot of gaps.

Fr. Stephen: But the Scripture as a whole is another thing. There are all kinds of things, and this lies behind all kinds of bad arguments, like why doesn't the word "trinity" appear in the Bible? And all these other kinds of arguments, like: "Well, there are places we can see in the Bible it reflects a belief in the Trinity, or minimally something very much like it." But, yeah, it's not laid out anywhere because nothing is: that's not how the Bible works.

So this isn't either. What we have to do is we have to look at how the Bible talks about—uses the word that gets translated as "saint"—how that word is used, how the people to whom that is applied or discussed, how they're related to, and various other things to determine: Oh, okay, so this is the structure of what was believed and taught and experienced by the first hearers of this text. This is how they understood reality to function. This is how they encountered God, how they experienced God, how they worshiped God. That's going to be reflected in the text and the way the text speaks—the way the text speaks—but it's not going to be laid out in the text.

About to move on from this and segue into our topic per se, but the fact, again, that something is not laid out in the text also therefore does not mean it didn't exist.

Fr. Andrew: Right. Obviously, a lot of things exist in the ancient world that are not specifically put in the text. And we should probably also say that a lot of important things existed that are not laid out in the text.

Fr. Stephen: Right. So there was some concrete, detailed structure to temple worship and to tabernacle worship, and synagogue worship beyond what is laid out formally in Scripture. And the fact that that is never laid out— And early Christian worship, in the New Testament. The fact that that's never laid out in detail doesn't mean it didn't exist, that there was no pattern, and it doesn't mean that the pattern isn't important, because, again, it's not setting out a guide; it's not setting out a manual. So the fact that the particular way in which humans relate to departed saints in its every detail is not laid out anywhere in the Scriptures, or at least not in any one place especially, doesn't mean there was no such relationship: people just stopped thinking about their dead Christian loved ones. They did something at funerals. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Right, they just chucked the body in a ditch.

Fr. Stephen: They had them. Prayers were said. There was an understanding. And so we're looking through the Scriptures, through other means, to determine what the shape of that was, not looking saying, "Oh, well, we don't see that laid out in the Scriptures, so it doesn't matter or there wasn't one or we just assume, since it's not stated, it's not important or doesn't exist." Or at least we assume the Roman Catholics are wrong. I mean, we can safely assume that, right?

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] You had to take a shot at our Catholic friends as well, right?

Fr. Stephen: Well, that was— See, now, there's levels of sarcasm surrounding that comment, so whom's it really a shot at?

Fr. Andrew: I know. I'm just saying. One of our comments we got on Facebook was someone wrote that she is one of our Protestant friends "waiting for more shots."

Fr. Stephen: Okay, well.

Fr. Andrew: Right next to another— We actually have a listener from Malaysia, listening right now from Malaysia, where it's, like, 8:16 in the morning. We're the morning show in Malaysia!

Fr. Stephen: Wow.

Fr. Andrew: How about that!

Fr. Stephen: I feel like I should have a coffee mug and smile more.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Talk about the weather.

Fr. Stephen: So as I said in the midst of that rant, which may or may not be the last rant of the evening, we have to kind of start with— Okay, when we talk about a saint, what are we even talking about, because that gets used in a lot of different ways. People will just say somebody's a saint because they were a really good or a really nice person. It's sort of like calling them a mensch! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Or sometimes it's a way of saying that their spouse must be a real nightmare.

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, and we do have—

Fr. Stephen: My wife's sanctity is guaranteed by being married to me, yes. The ascetical—

Fr. Andrew: My wife's sanctity is also guaranteed! We have a listener from Lithuania, where it is 2:17 in the morning!

Fr. Stephen: Don't be a one-upper, Lithuania.

Fr. Andrew: Dedication, man! This is someone I know, actually.

Fr. Stephen: Okay.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, all the love.

Fr. Stephen: So this just gets used in these different ways. Or, you know, El Santo, possibly the greatest luchador of all time, at least the one who made the best movies.

Fr. Andrew: I was not expecting that.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Go look up some El Santo— They're amazing!

Fr. Andrew: Really?

Fr. Stephen: Oh, yeah. They're the Elvis movies of Mexico. Seriously.

Fr. Andrew: Nice.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and he's, of course, "the Saint." Or, if we want to really dig in the crates, Roger Moore, later on Val Kilmer, The Saint. It gets used in those ways. Some people just tack it in front of any old person from the Bible, or any old person from the early Church, like it's just a title like "Mister" or "Sir." [Laughter]

But the root—and the root isn't that well hidden in English, if you know any Latin at all—is of course a holy one. And if we're talking about Greek, we're talking about agios. If you get icons with Greek inscriptions, you will see this, sometimes in a calligraphy where it's a little tricky to make it out unless your Greek is pretty solid, but you will see that in front of the names of people in icons. That is translating kodeshim in Hebrew, various similar words in Aramaic, and you can see cognates if you know any Arabic, qdis is "holy." So this is holiness. I was about to say "sanctity," but "sanctity" is just from sanctus in Latin.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yes, exactly.

Fr. Stephen: Which means "holy." [Laughter] So this is a holy one. "Holy" here is a noun—or is an adjective. "Holy" here is an adjective, even when it's being used substantively, meaning you can take an adjective and you can use it substantively to say "a holy one, a good one, an evil one," but it's still an adjective; you just have an implied subject. "Holy" is not by itself a noun, and the importance of this is that when we're talking about whether this is applied to a human or, as we're about to talk about, an angelic being—or God is described as holy—it is an adjective. It doesn't mean that: Okay, this is a holy man, so he is a different species, he is a different thing than just a man.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, he's a man.

Fr. Stephen: It is a descriptor of that man or a descriptor of that angelic being or a descriptor of God: it's an adjective.

Another example of this, much debated in Orthodox circles and nowhere else, is at the end of the Lord's Prayer, where the adjective "evil" occurs—

Fr. Andrew: Or "the evil one."

Fr. Stephen: And is it "evil" or "the evil one"? "Is it being used substantively?" is essentially the question. That, of course, being the opposite.

Originally, where we see this word occur as a substantive noun—holy one or holy ones—in the Hebrew Bible, in the Old Testament, it's referring to angelic beings: to the holy ones who surround the divine throne, glorious is God amongst his holy ones. And because of that… [Laughter] So in English this gets translated in various ways. A lot of times what we're used to is in the Old Testament it'll get translated as "holy ones"; in the New Testament it'll get translated as "saints."

Fr. Andrew: Which makes no sense, because it's really—even though it's Hebrew in the Old Testament and Greek in the New—it's really the same idea.

Fr. Stephen: Right. So a lot of Orthodox liturgical translations and things have responded to this by always translating it "saints," which then confuses people. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which is why you then get the question: Wait, can we call angels "saint," like St. Michael? Because they think of "saint" as being something that is about holy humans. But we'll get— I don't want to steal too much of our own thunder here.

Fr. Stephen: But we also sing about God being "wondrous in his saints." It's like: Wait, what? If you read the original, and you know, it's "wondrous among his holy ones." So even amongst the arrayed angelic beings, God is wondrous, meaning far more wondrous than they is the idea there. In English, because we use "saints," it doesn't work out there.

And, brief mini-rant, my pet peeve is in the entrance prayers, where in the liturgy and in vespers, which were at one point translated as saying that God "resteth in his saints."

Fr. Andrew: Or I've also seen "in the holy place."

Fr. Stephen: Well, so, people got confused by "rests in the saints," like: What does that mean? And so they looked at it and decided, even though it's in the plural, to translate it as "rests in the holy place." Now, I don't know which holy place they're referring to. So there's a whole series of questions there about that translation, not just that they're translating a plural as a singular. But if you look at the prayers surrounding it, the prayers surrounding it talk about God and/or Christ—meaning the Father and/or Christ—being enthroned upon the cherubim. So it's literally God who resteth, like sitteth, on his holy ones. That's what it says. "In" can mean "on" in Greek, for those who don't know anything with Greek. It could be "on" or "in." That's what it means. So that's my mini-rant. Everybody translates that weirdly, and I don't know why. [Laughter]

So the idea here is that originally we're talking about angels, and it's translated "holy ones." You could do the opposite thing and translate it as "holy" or "holy ones" all the time. So when we say "Saint Paul," we're talking about Holy Paul.

Fr. Andrew: The holy Paul, yeah, which is literally— That would be a literal translation of the Greek o agios Pavlos.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, holy Paul, Paul the holy, Paul the holy one. Peter the holy one. I'm reminded of, in Idiocracy, "Saint God Memorial Hospital," but that's a whole other topic.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah...

Fr. Stephen: Originally it's angelic beings; it comes to be—spoilers for our second half—applied to humans, but it starts out as a term. Now, we have to parallel this with another very common term that's used for those same beings in the Hebrew Bible and in the Old Testament, and that is the term "gods," which we write with a lower-case g.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, lower-case g, everybody! Lower-case g. Hebrew, elohim; in Greek, theoi. Both are used, in the Old Testament and the New Testament Greek, theoi.

Fr. Stephen: So that is often very deliberately obscured in translations because it gives people the heebie-jeebies, because, as we've talked about on this show before, in the 16th and 17th centuries, we came up with this idea of monotheism and then decided that has to be what the Bible teaches, meaning there's only one God that exists, and so you get these odd translations to try to cover up where it says that. That, of course, then, once you get into the 18th and 19th centuries, got people— caused the opposite reaction of "Oh, here's what they're trying to hide, but it's actually… The Bible is actually polytheist."

Fr. Andrew: Man, we really are partying like it's 2020 here on the podcast. This is literally stuff from our very first episode.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. We're going somewhere with it, though! Retreads. And hopefully this time I'll maintain electricity, so this'll be a smoother presentation.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah, how many hurricanes come to Louisiana in December?

Fr. Stephen: None, but, hey: weather's doing interesting things right now.

Fr. Andrew: It is.

Fr. Stephen: Imagine how crazy it would be if global warming was real. [Laughter] Anyway. That comment probably just got everyone mad.

Fr. Andrew: It's called climate change! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Everyone was enraged by that comment. Send your letters to Fr. Andrew at Ancient Faith dot com. So, yes, this was taken as evidence well into the 20th century. "They want you to think that the Bible is monotheistic, but really it's polytheism!" And that, of course, especially if we're talking about the 19th century, we have this overriding presupposition of an evolutionary hypothesis that religion, like everything else, starts really simple and then gets more and more complex over time—I won't go off on another digression—but which is really dumb. [Laughter] It sort of has the idea that, you know, one day there's a primitive human with a stick who comes up with the idea, I guess, that he should ask the stick for favors. I don't know exactly how this would work in concrete terms.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, how do you invent the idea of a god?

Fr. Stephen: Of religion, when there is none? [Laughter] I don't even know how this works in theory. But basically— And that somehow monotheism is way more complex than polytheism.

Fr. Andrew: Somehow.

Fr. Stephen: And then if you go with the originators and perfecters of this kind of theory, that somehow 19th-century German Lutheranism is way more complex than, like, Greek paganism. I don't follow that either. But the argument is that that's the case, and so that what you see, particularly, they would say, in the Old Testament is a move from a primitive Israelite polytheism that eventually evolves into the modern concept of monotheism.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and so there must be remnants left over of their previous polytheistic stuff.

Fr. Stephen: So anything you can find that could be interpreted as polytheistic, like "gods" in the plural or anything even alluding to that, this is the early stuff. And then anything that sounds like modern monotheism, this is very late stuff.

Fr. Andrew: And the fun thing about this is that in order for this to sort of be consonant with the biblical texts that we have, you have to decide that in what is literally the most combed-over book in human history, that they somehow accidentally left in all of these references to their former polytheism, just their editing is really bad, like really bad. How many tens or hundreds of thousands or millions of people read it before or heard it read and said, "Wait a minute! That's a polytheism! Edit that off."

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, no one noticed...

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, no one noticed!

Fr. Stephen: Till recently.

Fr. Andrew: I mean, that's how you have to shake it out if you're going to try to make that argument based on text. We've talked about the archaeology stuff before.

Fr. Stephen: To be fair to them, they try to argue that there was some kind of text taboo, like: "This is the sacred text; you can't change it."

Fr. Andrew: Oh. Well...

Fr. Stephen: But part and parcel of their whole argument is that it was edited over time. [Laughter] So the person doing the last editing job could not also have had a text-change taboo at the same time, because he's changing the text. You can't do both at the same time. But it's a nicely self-fulfilling argument, because anything anybody points to: you point to a text that sounds polytheistic, and they say, "Well, that's just early." And you point to one that sounds more monotheistic, and they say, "Well, that's late." And it's like: "Well, how do you know that it evolved this way?" And they'll say, "Because the early texts are polytheistic, and the later texts are monotheistic." And you say, "How do you know that this is an early text?" "Because it's polytheistic." [Laughter] So it's a tight circularity, but you're still making this completely circular argument and this self-fulfilling prophecy.

Worse than that—worse than it just being a bad argument— I mean, you can make a bad argument that ends up being correct. I could argue for the truth badly. [Laughter] So just the fact that this is a horrible argument and a shoddy way of working with the text doesn't necessarily mean the conclusion is wrong. What proves the conclusion wrong is all the actual evidence we have.

Fr. Andrew: Yes. If this were a true model, you would expect that, as you go, later texts would have—

Fr. Stephen: Texts that we know are later, not that we're just saying, but that we know for sure.

Fr. Andrew: —would have fewer and fewer references to "gods," plural.

Fr. Stephen: Right, divine plurality in any sense: fewer and fewer as you go. So if we find texts, say, I don't know, in the Dead Sea Scrolls, that we know for a fact were written in the second or the third century BC, after at least the lion's share of the Hebrew Bible was done, they should reflect that later monotheistic consensus. But if you do the math—which we have them fancy computers who can do this now—you find that the texts, the non-biblical texts in the Dead Sea Scrolls, actually have more references to "gods" in the plural than the biblical texts.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, Second Temple Jewish texts use "gods," plural, approvingly way more often than the canonical Hebrew Bible.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And it's not just true of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Dead Sea Scrolls are an example. But you look at Philo: Philo uses "gods" in the plural and doesn't have a problem with it. Josephus, the same thing. What we find is that the exact opposite is the case, that by the time you get to the first century BC, the first century AD, Jewish communities and Jewish writers are completely comfortable talking about gods in the plural and using that term to refer to angelic beings, of both good and bad sorts. So the Melchizedek Scroll in the Dead Sea Scrolls talks about Melchizedek, who's this messiah-figure, coming with "all the righteous gods." He's not talking about the Olympians; he's talking about the angelic beings, the holy ones of God, the righteous ones, the holy ones of God.

This is totally, totally comfortable verbage for them, and it's worth noting that they're totally comfortable using this language and talking about angelic beings in this way despite the fact that they are literally surrounded by, infested with, and dominated by paganism.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so no one had a sense of "Oh, we can't say 'gods,' because that would confuse people."

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, "the pagans will get the wrong idea; our people will get the wrong idea." These same writers are constantly battling against, writing condemnations of the idolatry and paganism of their neighbors, the polytheism of their neighbors: against the Romans who were dominating them, against members of the Jewish community who had apostatized into Greek and then Roman paganism. The same people who are writing these condemnations don't have a problem with using this language.

And this is important because a big part of the problem surrounding saints and patron saints is squeamishness about language.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and also, relatedly, what we might think of as a crowded spiritual world.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. But I've said before on the show—here's another one of those shots. I don't think it's a shot! I think— I know some of our Protestant friends hear this as a shot, but I don't intend it as a shot; I intend it as more of an olive branch, that I think functionally a lot of objections to things like this, that come from our Protestant friends, are based mostly on heebie-jeebies. That they're based on "that language seems wrong, I'm uncomfortable with that language, I'm uncomfortable with that practice"—based on their upbringing, based on different things, but it's not based on: "Okay, here I have a rational argument to pit against the argument that you're about to make on Lord of Spirits about saints."

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and this is one of the reasons why we try to focus so much on what the Scripture says, because we know that we have many non-Orthodox Christians who are listening, and this is one of the things that we all respect. We all respect the Scriptures if we're Christians. That's most of what we're doing. That's why I say this is the weirdest Bible study ever.

Fr. Stephen: If you look at this and you hear what we're saying, and [you] say, "Okay, yeah, I understand the logic of that case, but I still have this squeamishness about it," that's okay.

Fr. Andrew: It's okay.

Fr. Stephen: It's okay, but we shouldn't make decisions about what we believe and how to be a Christian based on squeamishness. The squeamishness can be overcome; the heebie-jeebies can be overcome over time, if that's all it is, if that's what it ends up being all it is, but it's also very human and understandable to be a little squeamish. I have lots of people who come into the Church who, whether it's the Theotokos or saints or kissing icons, they're a little squeamish about it at first, but I don't think that makes you a bad person, and I'm not arguing that, but I also don't think, again, that that should be the main obstacle to embracing truth, or an obstacle to embracing truth.

As we're saying, for the biblical writers, this wasn't even a concern. The fact that this could be misread or misinterpreted in some pagan way was not something they were deeply worried about, not because they thought, "Oh, no one would ever get this wrong or twist this around." It was the exact opposite. It was because they knew: no matter what we write, no matter what we do, no matter what we say, people will, as St. Peter says about St. Paul's writings, twist them to their own destruction.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, and in case there were any question about whether that was going to happen or possible, I present to you: the internet, in which everything you say publicly will be turned around and twisted into destruction.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so this is just a reality. This is another one of those problems with having a text be the basis of something, is that texts require interpretation and can be used as tools or weapons in any variety of ways by people who want to do so. Again, we're pushing for what's behind the text. What we're establishing here is that behind the texts, whether we're talking about Second Temple Jewish texts or we're talking about the texts of the Hebrew Scriptures, there is this robust belief that, in addition to the God who created everything including creating the angelic powers and demonic powers, that there are an array of angelic and demonic powers: in the heavens, in the underworld, on the earth. And that these have particular roles and relationships with God and with human beings such that they're called holy ones—the good ones, at least, the ones that actually are holy—and they're referred to even as gods (in the lower case).

And so now we're going to bring back— Again, we're digging in the crates in the old episodes, but a great quote from Philo of Alexandria, first century BC Jewish writer, who summarizes this. He's commenting—in this quote he's commenting on Deuteronomy 4:19. So we're going to hear Deuteronomy 4:19 first and then what Philo says about it and the language he uses.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, so here's the Deuteronomy quote.

And beware, lest you raise your eyes to heaven, and when you see the sun and the moon and the stars, all the hosts of heaven, you be drawn away and bow down to them and serve them, things that the Lord your God has allotted to all the peoples under the whole heaven.

So that's the Deuteronomy quote, and here's what Philo has to say about this. And remember the basic rule, everybody: Commentary is always longer than the original text. So here's Philo.

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

Others, on the contrary, who have not discovered the supreme Governor who thus rules everything, have attributed the causes of the different things which exist in the world to these subordinate powers, as if they had brought them to pass by their own independent act. But the most sacred law-giver changes their ignorance into knowledge, speaking in the following manner: "Thou shalt not, when thou seest the sun and the moon and the stars and all the hosts of heaven, be led astray and fall down and worship them."

With great felicity and propriety has he here called the reception of these bodies an error, for they who see that the different seasons of the year owe their existence to the advancement and retreats of the sun, in which periods also the generation of animals and plants and fruit are perfected according to well-defined times, and who see also that the moon is the servant and successor of the sun, taking that care and superintendence of the world by night which the sun takes by day, and also that the other stars, in accordance with their sympathy with things on earth, labor continually and do ten thousand things which contribute to the duration of the existing state of things, have been led into an inextricable error, imagining that these bodies are the only gods.

And then dot, dot, dot, so we're skipping a little bit here.

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

And if anyone ever gives up the service due to the everlasting and uncreated God, transferring it to any more modern and created being, let him be set down as mad and as liable to the charge of the greatest impiety.

And that's from his Special Laws, 1.3.

One of the things I noted here is he both says you shouldn't think of the heavenly bodies as gods, and also they're gods but they're under the One, the Most High God.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, they're not the only gods. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Exactly, which, if you remember— And again this is hearkening back to our very earliest episodes. If you remember that "god," in its most basic sense in most ancient languages, means ruler, then you can understand how he can both say "they're not really gods" and "they're only subordinate gods," in other words they're not actually the ones in charge, but they've been put in charge of some things by the One who is in charge. That's what that means, and that's why there's even that phrase, "false gods" in Scripture: they're false rulers, not that they don't exist; they're just not really in charge.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and that's why we can say, back to back, "Thou alone art God, and among the gods there are none like unto thee." Like, what? [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, exactly, because it means "ruler." It means "ruler."

Fr. Stephen: And he's the only one, and then you said there's these other ones.

Fr. Andrew: And also, frankly, the word gets used in a number of ways, but its most basic sense is "ruler."

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. He makes Moses as a god to Pharaoh. And Philo here uses a variation on the phrase, but "God of gods" is not just an idiom. "God of gods" is also literal, that God, capital-G, the true God, is the God whom the gods, lowercase-g, worship. And that's part of the argument against paganism. "Why are you worshiping them? Shouldn't you be worshiping the One whom they worship?"

The picture here that Philo gives is of this sort of divine administration and this sort of vast divine economy that includes all of creation, and that there are these spirits that are responsible for collective movement. So he talks about the movements in the heavens, but also on earth: the passing of the seasons, animals; the harmony of the whole order, that this happens through this administration. I don't know when we've used the term "divine council," which, by the way, let's be clear: "divine council" is a comportment to squeamishness.

Fr. Andrew: The assembly of gods.

Fr. Stephen: We're actually talking about the assembly of the gods, but that'll flip some people out, so "divine council" sounds, you know, less triggering. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: But, I mean, "divine" just means "of gods, of God, God's," just another form, guys. The godly assembly.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. I don't know, but we talk about the divine council, I don't know how people picture that, because of course we get a picture of that in the call narratives of prophets, because as we've said on the show, the prophet according to Jeremiah is the one who has stood in the divine council. I think sometimes— And based on that, the primary image that everybody thinks of—and it's not a bad one, but I think sometimes the only image people think of is—"Oh, you have this throne where Christ is, and then you have all these angels and saints kind of standing around it all the time, like waiting for him to receive people or waiting for him to interact with them."

Fr. Andrew: Not wrong!

Fr. Stephen: Right, not wrong. That is a biblical image, but, remember, angelic beings are vast cosmic intelligences. They're actually doing things in the cosmos, in the created order.

Fr. Andrew: I mean, the royal court: there is a holding of court in which everybody is together in the throne room, but a lot of what goes on in that court is the king saying, "You go do this, you go do this, you go do this..."

Fr. Stephen: Right, or they're often there to report back to the king.

Fr. Andrew: On what they've been doing.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And of course, again, this is an image. This is an image. God is not in one particular place, sitting on a literal, material throne somewhere with people at a certain actual physical distance from that throne. This is all an image: imagery and analogical language to express reality to humans. We also have to have this image that Philo is giving us, of the angelic beings who are moving the heavenly bodies in the cosmos and involved with life on earth and nature and things flourishing and all of these things, the music of the spheres, as it were, if you're a fan of Aristotelian physics. All of this is happening.

When we read St. Luke's gospel here just a couple days ago, an angel appears to the shepherds, and then the stars sing to them. That's literally what it says.

Fr. Andrew: It's because that's what "heavenly hosts" means, everybody.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, so we have to try and keep both of these kind of images around. This isn't that, you know: "Clarence the angel, you're in charge of Sirius Major, so you just kind of keep an eye on it. Report back to me if a comet's going to hit a planet or something." [Laughter] When we say that angelic powers are in charge of these things, we don't mean it in that kind of external way. This is going to be important for where we're going in this episode.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because they're not— They don't have material bodies, so it's not like they're stationed at a spot.

Fr. Stephen: Like watching or something.

Fr. Andrew: I mean, in iconography it gets depicted this way because how else do you depict a being that has no material body? [Laughter] You have to draw something, but don't literalize that, everybody.

Fr. Stephen: But we have to be serious—and this is included in Philo—about the fact that, in a way, the stars, these things in the heavens are their bodies.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, in a way.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, in a sense. They are what is animating them, and that is why you see in iconography the sun, the moon depicted as angelic beings. So the spirit that we're talking about is what is animating and moving and ordering these things. This is what we mean by them having this position in the administration or being in charge of this thing. We don't want to externalize the analogy too much.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it's not like a bureaucracy.

Fr. Stephen: Right, where there's a department. Astral Bodies Department, Planetary Bodies Department.

Fr. Andrew: It's funny, when C.S. Lewis wants to depict hell, he depicts it as a bureaucracy. He's like: "Okay, I'm on board with that."

Fr. Stephen: It's interesting as you go through time, the depictions of hell. So, yeah, it's not— It isn't this bureaucractic thing. There's not a department of— "Hey, Bob, you're in charge of the pandas. What's going on? They're not mating. Can you do—?" [Laughter] This isn't how to think about it.

It's also not a democracy, and this is part of what Philo is telling us. It isn't that all these folks get together and vote, and God is like: "Well, I guess I've got to go with you guys on this one." [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it's not that kind of council. It's a royal council, not a parliament.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, there is a King. There is a Monarch. A monarchy. And he's not just the first principle of everything. And so they are administering his justice and order. It's because of that that this isn't polytheism.

Fr. Andrew: We had someone comment saying that he was a former Mormon and that polytheism makes him feel extra squeamish, which— I hear you. I hear you! [Laughter] But this is not polytheism, because, number one, you don't worship— Like, this is Commandment Zero in the Bible. And it gets repeated so much: Don't worship those other beings.

Fr. Stephen: Right. Philo just said that. But it's also not polytheism, because they're not independent actors. They aren't independent actors.

Fr. Andrew: I mean, it's worth noting: Let's look at some real polytheism, like the Greek gods. Some of them are children of other gods or whatever. Again, that's not what's represented in the Christian tradition. Angels and demons are not anyone's offspring, anyone's. But also, one of the things you see in most other, most pagan traditions is that the gods don't seem to be created, with the exception of ones that are somebody's offspring; they're just sort of there. Sometimes you get creations, but ultimately it's a group of them that are all kind of there—

Fr. Stephen: Usually offspring and then there's a "turtles all the way down" sort of thing happening.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and there's no one who is ultimately and absolutely in charge forever. Paganism doesn't attempt—

Fr. Stephen: A succession.

Fr. Andrew: Paganism has a most-high god, but he's not omnipotent. Omnipotence is not really a thing in paganism. That is in the Scriptures.

Fr. Stephen: Right. So just to use— I mean, people use the Greek mythology probably best. Yeah, Zeus is the king of the gods, but, you know, he's always causing trouble and then his wife goes behind his back to get all kinds of revenge—

Fr. Andrew: All the time!

Fr. Stephen: —and frustrate him and mess with him, and the gods who are his kids are always fighting with each other and playing him off against the other...

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, this is a very different picture than the one we just read in Philo.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and Philo is deliberately differentiating the Jewish view from that, and the differentiation is not that "Oh, we believe there's just one God that exists and that's it"; it's that "We believe in a fundamentally different relationship between the true God and the other powers that are his creation. We believe in a fundamentally different relationship between them. And we believe that who the true God is is fundamentally different and of another kind than these other things that are called gods, such that he is the God whom they worship. They are closer to us than they are to him in terms of being created beings."

Fr. Andrew: So then the question is: Since he's absolutely omnipotent, omniscient, etc., etc., why bother having—? Why bother having anyone else in administration at all?

Fr. Stephen: Why? Why? Right, and this is an important question, because, again, this episode is really aimed to our Protestant friends—not to attack them or belittle them or win an argument—

Fr. Andrew: No, no, no.

Fr. Stephen: —but to try to help them understand what this is about. And this is at the core of the question in some cases. "Well, God's in charge of everything, so just talk to him."

Fr. Andrew: Right. "Why do you need to go through anybody else."

Fr. Stephen: "Because maybe I can— Maybe there's kind of a: well, I can buy into this angel thing, divine council thing as a bureaucracy. But if it's a bureaucracy, why don't you just go to the guy on top? Why go through the middle management, bypass all that?" [Laughter]

We have to— The core of this is, again, the reason why God does this, because it's not out of necessity. It's not that there's just some details that he's too busy, or he couldn't do without. God doesn't need to create anything: doesn't need us, doesn't need the world, doesn't need… There is zero necessity attached to this, zero. Zero. Let me repeat that: zero.

Fr. Andrew: Is it zero?

Fr. Stephen: I know this is one of the things that we harp on on this show, is that God is absolutely free, but this is where— Honestly, this spot is where I think every place where some form of Christianity goes wrong goes wrong—is by having God not be ultimately completely free at some point. It's different points and it's for different reasons, but at some point you get to a point where theology goes bad because you impose some necessity on God. So that's why I harp on it so much on the show.

But in this case— Again, there is no necessity. There is no necessity to create anything at all, to create, full stop, or to create anything or anyone in particular. But God has chosen, out of love, to share his divine life, to share his divine nature, to share himself with creatures. And the beginning of that, of course, is creating them. And then after creating them it becomes sharing his life with them. That's why. And so there's a reason there's a council of the gods, a divine council, the reason why there is this administration, the reason why there are these spiritual beings who are in charge of these things is out of God's love. He creates them, and he shares his life, his existence, his nature with them.

Because of that, we find—and we find examples of this in the Scriptures in different places—that there are angelic beings who are assigned to elements of the natural order, like the sun and moon and stars in Deuteronomy 4:19; or the devil having being referred to as the prince and power of the air. We find this with reference to peoples, meaning people-groups, groups of people—tribes, clans, later on, nations—have angelic beings or spirits assigned to them. Think of Daniel: the prince of Persia, the prince of Greece, St. Michael who is Israel's prince. And we find angelic beings assigned to particular people, what we've come to call guardian angels, but who are assigned to shepherd and guide individual people. You can read the book of Tobit with St. Raphael as an example. But this is what you find: the holy ones, the angelic beings, being assigned to all of these elements. But these are three quick categorizations: elements of the natural order, people-groups, and persons have these angelic beings assigned to them as guides, as shepherds.

So that's sort of the state of affairs as we find it when we're talking about the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, the created world. And then, of course, things happen. But those things will happen in our second half.

Fr. Andrew: That's right. So we're going to go ahead and go to our first break, and we'll be right back with The Lord of Spirits podcast.

***

Fr. Andrew: Hey, we're back! Thanks a lot, Voice of Steve. You know, that's one of the books that you plug on this show every so often, the one that we just heard the ad for.

Fr. Stephen: I wrote a foreword for it, even!

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] You're starting to collect forewords, Father!

Fr. Stephen: Some people, based on a certain other foreword I wrote, might think I'd write it for anything, but no!

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] What could that possibly be for?

Fr. Stephen: It's only for books that I really believe in and Fr. Andrew's most recent book.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Thank you very much. What category that's in we will just leave to the reader. Hey, we're back!

In the first half, we talked about saints of the Old Testament, holy ones of the Old Testament. That's the angels. We didn't mention it, but I wanted to give a little plug for the book of Jubilees, which does a whole lot of work in terms of the creation of the angels and God assigning them to various elements of creation. It's really beautiful and poetic. Cool stuff. Worth reading.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. At some point on our docket, maybe soon, we may start doing some episodes about particular texts like that.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. That way, so all the people who say that we talk about the book of Enoch all the time but clearly do not listen to the podcast can have something to base that on.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, that one episode where we talk about the book of Enoch and then move on to other books.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: I mean, we do quote it at the beginning of the show, though.

Fr. Andrew: That's true. I mean, and the Voice of Steve delivers it very beautifully.

Fr. Stephen: So if you're one of the people who hears the show start and turns off Ancient Faith Radio, you think that's all we talk about. Yeah, so, back into the crates, the musty crates of the early episodes of this program. One of our early episodes—I don't remember if it was the second or third or something—was about the Five(ish) Falls of the Angels...

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I think that might have been episode three, maybe.

Fr. Stephen: Okay. It's all a blur.

Fr. Andrew: It is. Plus we were so much younger then.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, it's true. It's true. I had about half this much gray in my beard. This show's taken a lot out of me. Anyway. So in that we talked about how we've— Milton has trained us all to think about this one primordial fall of the devils and the angels before the creation of the world. We won't belabor all that again, don't worry. You can go back and listen to that and enjoy the technical difficulties.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] By the way, I'll just break into that sentence here and say we have an intriguing call, a Stephen from California, which— That could describe you!

Fr. Stephen: Yes! I am technically a Stephen from California.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so Stephen is calling—or at least his phone is from California. Stephen, are you there?

Stephen: I am here, Fathers. Can you hear me?

Fr. Andrew: Yes! We hear you. Welcome to The Lord of Spirits podcast.

Fr. Stephen: Are you from northern or southern California?

Stephen: Thank you. Ah, northern.

Fr. Stephen: Oh, okay. That's a different state than I'm from.

Stephen: Okay...

Fr. Andrew: Weren't they talking about making it its own state at one point?

Fr. Stephen: All the time!

Fr. Andrew: Yeah.

Stephen: I think so, yeah. They wanted to make it into, like, five different states at one point.

Fr. Andrew: Go for it, you guys! [Laughter] Just do it.

Stephen: I mean, I don't care. They can do what they want.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, nobody wants San Diego, come on. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: All right, so what's on your mind, Stephen from Northern California?

Stephen: So I was wondering if it was possible to be a heretic but then become a saint, because I remember from an earlier episode, you talked about—I think it was Constantine, the emperor, and how he didn't have necessarily accurate ideas about how God worked, but he's still considered a saint. But then Origen, if I understand this correctly, is not considered a saint.

Fr. Andrew: No!

Stephen: So I was wondering what— How that works, and I guess then how that works for all of us. How right do you have to be, if you have to be a certain percentage of right?

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] That's a great way to put it. Well, you know, I'll say this. Number one, being a heretic— I mean, I know that word gets used in a number of ways, but in its technical sense, being a heretic means you have been condemned by the appropriate authorities for not just thinking or just saying something that's wrong, but teaching it, like you are setting yourself up as a teacher of this heretical teaching. Because, I mean, if you go to coffee hour in any Orthodox church and people start to discuss theology, you're going to hear some heresies. It's going to come out, because people think all kinds of wrong things, and sometimes they say them, but that doesn't mean that they're teaching them; it doesn't mean that they're doing that. And even if they are teaching it, maybe that just gets corrected by their local parish priest and there's no council that declares them a heretic.

So, yeah, you can't— I mean, there is a certain sense in which you can accidentally do a heresy, but it's like saying, "Am I traitor to the United States of America, even though I've never been convicted of treason?" I mean, you could be. It's possible, you could be, but what really makes you a traitor is being convicted of treason. So, yeah, there's a certain amount of juridical definition that comes along with that, where there's actually been someone that's examined you and all of that stuff comes along.

Is it possible to say wrong things and also to be a canonized saint? Yes. Yes, it is.

Fr. Stephen: Witness: every saint.

Fr. Andrew: Right. I mean, everybody says something wrong. And even sometimes they write it down. We have saints who, as they get later in their life, they say, "Oh, please don't read the stuff that I wrote earlier." They themselves admit that they say wrong things early on, that might even be heretical in the sense of being a wrong teaching. It's really about how you end up and how you are assessed by the Church, is what it comes down to being. That's what I have to say about that. I don't know— Fr. Stephen?

Fr. Stephen: Well, so, I don't think this is technically an "Um, actually."

Fr. Andrew: Okay, thank God. [Laughter] I didn't need another notch on my belt. The year is almost over. Last episode of the year.

Fr. Stephen: There's a couple things we have to disambiguate. We're talking about heresy and we're talking about sainthood. Those two categories are not identical with "saved" and "damned." We have to clarify that first, because if we're talking about soteriology, if we're talking about salvation, the ideas in your head have nothing to do with salvation.

Fr. Andrew: Yes. I mean, every place that says in the Scripture what God is going to judge people based on, it's not the opinions you post on X-formerly-known-as-Twitter.

Fr. Stephen: And as St. James tells us in his epistle, all the demons know there's one God, and they all know that Jesus Christ is his Son. They all know that he died and rose again. They don't just think it; they know it for a fact. That doesn't do them any good. This is something that comes out of a certain form of Evangelical Protestantism, this idea that the ideas in your head decide whether you're a good person or a bad person. This has recently been secularized as "woke liberalism," which also believes that what makes you a good or a bad person is the ideas you have in your head.

Fr. Andrew: The worst thing about it is there's no possible repentance in that dogmatic point of view.

Fr. Stephen: Right. So we're not talking about that. We're talking about sainthood. Part of the Church glorifying someone as a saint is that the Church is saying: This is a person to be emulated. This is a person who shows us how to live the Christian life successfully. The person then being glorified is a saint. Them being on the calendar of the saints—is that this person's life lived in a certain way such that it can serve as an example. This is why you read what St. Photius the Great said about St. Augustine. St. Augustine is a saint not because the Orthodox Church has embraced swaths of his theology, but because of the Confessions, because of the life he lived. You could be wrong about a lot of things, because, as we've talked about on the show as recently as last episode, ideas don't cause anything. You can have all kinds of wrong ideas and still live a beautiful life following Christ and have all kind of misunderstandings and bad doctrine in your head.

Fr. Andrew: Which probably describes most of the best people in most parishes, frankly.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yes. And if you live your whole life that way, from beginning to end, then that person may very well become a saint. Usually in the providence of God, if they wrote down any of those mistaken things, they don't get preserved. They're sort of considered unworthy of the person and so they kind of die out over time. St. Augustine was uniquely unfortunate in that regard. [Laughter] I mean, the man— St. Augustine wrote a whole book just retracting things he had published.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, [published] against his own will with a lot of the stuff.

Fr. Stephen: And everyone ignores it! They still quote things he retracted authoritatively. "Well, St. Augustine said—" It's like: "He retracted that!" So he hasn't gotten that benefit of history, but most saints do. This is also a thing now with many modern saints in that that process hasn't happened yet, so you get a lot of quotes from a lot of 19th- and 20th-century saints that sound weird and wacky and that will probably be forgotten about 200 years from now because they'll be considered unworthy of the person who they were, and it's the person who they were that is the saint.

And then heresy— The key thing to being a heretic— A heretic isn't someone who's wrong. And Fr. Andrew was kind of getting at this. Arius is not a heretic because he was wrong. We're all wrong, to one degree or another, about theology. Arius is a heretic because he was wrong, his bishop came to him and told him he was wrong, and he said, "No! I'm right, you're wrong!"

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, St. Alexander of Alexandria, everybody.

Fr. Stephen: And a group of bishops came to him and said, "You're wrong," and he said, "No! I'm right, you all are wrong!" And then all the bishops of the Church got together, pretty much all of them—a couple from Persia!—and said, "Arius, Priest Arius, Presbyter Arius: You are wrong." And he said, "No.. I'm right, all of you are wrong!" [Laughter] That's what makes him a heretic.

Fr. Andrew: And started his own churches dedicated to his wrong teaching.

Fr. Stephen: Right. You become a heretic not by being wrong, but by refusing correction and by then setting out in your own pride and arrogance to create our own alternate church structures and this kind of thing. That's what makes you a heretic. So a person like that—unless they repent— If someone like that repented and humbly submitted themselves to the discipline and the order of the Church, they could become a saint, but then they would cease being a heretic by virtue of doing that. So as long as they're a heretic, as long as they're doing that, then, yeah, they're not going to be a saint.

An example of that would be Tertullian, who became a Montanist and left the Church, and that's why he's not a saint.

Fr. Andrew: So does that answer your question, Stephen from Northern California?

Stephen: I believe so. Thank you very much!

Fr. Andrew: All right. Awesome. Thank you very much for calling. Good. Yeah, it's not… It is relevant to what we're talking about. That will become more apparent as we go. [Laughter] We can weave it in!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. This is one of those cases where— A lot of times when we get calls on this show, it's from people who are actually tracking with us fairly well, so often to give a very direct answer the question would spoil a bunch of stuff we're getting to down the line in the episode. So we have to kind of answer it without completely answering it in a way that leads into where we're going. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Indeed. Masterfully done!

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] If I do say so myself.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yes, right!

Fr. Stephen: I did that with alacrity. So, going back to that ancient episode of yore, about the Five(ish) Falls of the Angels, we talked about how Milton's wrong, and wrong in a different way than most Puritans, or in an additional way; and how we see several discrete places in Scripture that refer to angelic falls—what we might call angelic falls. We're not going to rehash them all now, list the five(ish) falls and all that, but this has raised a bunch of questions. I think a lot of the questions we get concerning this are generated primarily by that word, "fall," and what that actually means, because, for example: If the demons are fallen or Satan is fallen, why do they still seem to be in charge of stuff?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, what does "fallen" mean?

Fr. Stephen: Or because… Milton again: "fallen" means got thrown down into hell.

Fr. Andrew: Some people also use "fallen" to mean and he turned to evil.

Fr. Stephen: Right, that "fallen" is just a question of a moral term. So what does this mean? I did what I thought was a cute wordplay in the notes I gave Fr. Andrew, but I won't burden you with that. [Laughter] Because I think that would just complicate the issue more, but— You have— We'll get concrete with this. You have— We talked about how there are— there were angelic beings that were assigned to elements of the natural order, to peoples like people-groups, and to persons like… people. What does it mean for an angelic being with one of those "assignments"—the spirit is playing the role of animating those things—what does it mean for them to fall? What does that sort of—? I mean, we can't be super concrete with it, because it's not— We can't talk about it in material terms, but a little better grasp of what that means.

We've mentioned, for example, and I think the terms we used—again, this may be part of the issue—is, for example, the angelic beings who were assigned to people-groups, like after the Tower of Babel event, Deuteronomy 32:8 and all that that we've talked about before, that they, in some cases, depending on, like, St. Dionysios the Areopagite, all of them except for Israel didn't perform their intended function. All of them except for Israel fell. And we talked about that in terms of accepting worship from people. I think that language may be a little too external, because I think that language plays into this view that, like: "Okay, well, this angelic being is, like, up in the sky somewhere, and he's supposed to be kind of overseeing them, and they decide to start sacrificing cattle to him, and he says, 'Hey this is cool,' and so he starts telling them to do evil stuff." [Laughter] And that's not where we're going. That's a little too concrete in the sense of being material.

Whereas we may even have experienced— So when we've talked about spirits, and spirits animating a group of people—or we could even extend this out to a tribal group or a nation in the ancient world—how sort of that collective spirit can kind of take a turn, can take a dark turn. That that's something that happens and includes the people. It includes the people taking this turn to evil and to wickedness, but that it's not just: "Oh, each individual person who was a member of the Amalekites, each individual one decided to become a cannibalistic, fornicating murderer, all at the same time, independently, and they just all did it."

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, or, to use a more modern example: Every single person of the probably thousands that belonged to the Nazi party decided to do Nazi things.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, they all just independently decided. At the same time, they weren't all compelled by some demonic— They weren't all collectively possessed and forced to do those things. But that there is this shift to wickedness and to darkness. That's what we're talking about when we talk about one of these beings falling, is that shift to darkness. Do you remember, Fr. Andrew, which Father it was who made that comment about the fall of the devil and the animals?

Fr. Andrew: Oh man! I— No. It sounds like the kind of thing that St. Ephraim the Syrian would say, but I am not going to attribute that to him because I don't know off-hand.

Fr. Stephen: So somebody will go digging in the crates of past episodes and remind me.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there is this idea that— Yeah, whoever said this, and it's a speculation, as I recall. As I recall, it's speculation, presented as speculation, because, hey, sometimes Church Fathers speculate, just like humans do. [Laughter] He says that—

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, St. Paul does it at one point. St. Paul says, "I don't have a word from the Lord on this, but here's what I think is best."

Fr. Andrew: "Here's my opinion."

Fr. Stephen: "Here's my best call."

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, the idea that there's animal death and plant death in the garden of Eden. Kind of as the camera comes up on Adam and Eve, you've already got animal and plant death because the devil had been in charge of those— that life, and so, since he turned to evil, it brought death to them first. Intriguing idea.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so what's important to me about that quote here is not: "Well, is that accurate or not." That's not— But look at the way that that Father in question is thinking about the issue. Even if he is just speculating and is wrong, how is he thinking about the issue? How is he thinking about the relationship between the angelic power that becomes the devil and the created order? So something happens with this spirit that is guiding and producing the harmony of the created order, and so that harmony is broken so you have animals turning on and eating each other, and attacking each other. This is the way of thinking that's important there, that underlies this understanding that we're trying to get across.

In one sense, when these angelical powers or these spiritual powers rebel or fall or whatever language we want to use, this leaves these vacancies, as it were, in the divine economy, in this sort of administration we were talking about in the first half, in that there are not "holy ones" any more in those positions, because they have fallen from what they were supposed to be doing. At the same time, they aren't vacancies in the sense that "well, all those demonic powers now get thrown down to hell and don't have any influence or don't do anything." Even though they're now fallen in sense of having turned to evil and having left God's administration, having ceased to be creatures who are administering the will of God in his creation and are instead doing the opposite—are trying to bring about the destruction of God's creation—they are still associated with the elements of the natural order or the peoples or the persons, the people, with whom they were previously associated.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, when the neighbors go bad, they're still your neighbors.

Fr. Stephen: So they are a function and a part and a parcel of the disharmony, the broken order, the injustice within the created order that results from sin. So then— I'm actually going to do this in reverse order. What were they called upon to originally do?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, they're supposed to be bringing people towards God; that's their job.

Fr. Stephen: Right. The language that's used for them, for example, in the book of Enoch that we talk about all the time, they're referred to as "shepherds." The 70 sons of God are referred to as the 70 "shepherds" in the Animal Apocalypse in the book of Enoch. They're supposed to be shepherd— I think St. Dionysios uses this language, too. They were meant to shepherd the people-groups, the people, to God, after the human fall, back to God. This was their purpose.

Because we focused on the sun, moon, and stars and the natural order at the beginning, you might've gotten this idea of, you know, the modern sense of the clockwork universe and they're sort of ghosts in the machine, but this is peoples and people, too, with agency. The natural order includes animal life and plant life and all of these things, so it's a more dynamic relationship than that. It was this shepherding of bringing back into harmony, bringing back to God, restoring order. That was their purpose.

They're guiding to a relationship that within the Scriptures is ultimately defined by the idea of a covenant, and that covenant is over and over again is referred to as a marriage.

Fr. Andrew: Like in Hosea, where God and Israel is a kind of marriage, is the image that you'd see in Hosea particularly.

Fr. Stephen: But depending on where you are, it could be God and his creation as a whole, it can be God and Israel as a people-group, it can be God and even an individual soul, an individual—well, not an "individual," but a person, because we haven't gotten to the idea of an individual yet. And that marriage is then expected to be chaste—and often isn't on one side. It is on God's side, but often the other side isn't.

So then in terms of understanding, again, the fallen demonic powers, we have to understand that as the opposite of this, that they decide to shepherd humanity towards someone and something else. Those who are being shepherded toward God become like God; those who are being shepherded away become like the demonic powers. So there are these demonic shepherds. Because we like reading it and because people freak out when we read it and resort to special pleading, we're going to come back to the quote from St. John Chrysostom, about how people become demons.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, this marginal—minor marginal Church Father that no one's ever heard of.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, we never quote the Church Fathers on this show. Just this once.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yes, I've heard somewhere… Yeah, St. John Chrysostom! And for those of you who are new, we're being a little sarcastic. He is a major major major Church Father, one of the greatest, actually. Super important. Yeah, St. John Chrysostom. So this is from what's called Four Discourses Chiefly on the Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus. This is from Discourse II. You can look this up on the interwebs.

Fr. Stephen: And that's not— By the way, that's not his title.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] No!

Fr. Stephen: He gave sermons, people wrote them down, we found them. That's just descriptive. We got four sermons; they seem mainly to be about the parable of the rich man and Lazarus.

Fr. Andrew: "Chiefly on," yeah. So this is what he says.

For it is a fact that many of the less-instructed think that the souls of those who die a violent death become wandering spirits.

And by that he means demons.

But this is not so. I repeat: it is not so! For not the souls of those who die a violent death become demons, but rather the souls of those who live in sin, not that their nature is changed, but in their desires they imitate the evil nature of demons. Showing this very thing to the Jews, Christ said, "Ye are the children of the devil."

That's a reference to John 7:44.

He said that they were the children of the devil not because they were changed into a nature like his but because they performed actions like his. Wherefore also he adds, "For the lusts of your father ye will do."

So this is exactly that relationship, this sort of participation with demonic forces making you like demons.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And this is a parallel. Our former Mormon friend, don't get triggered. When we talk about theosis, when we talk about deification in the Orthodox Church, we are not saying that there is a change of your human nature into something else. You remain a human, but you become like God by participation in his works so that we can say God became man so that men might become god.

This is directly parallel to what St. John Chrysostom says here, because St. John Chrysostom is talking about a belief that still exists today, by the way, that people who die this sort of violent, horrible death come back and haunt the place and kill all the kids on Elm Street. [Laughter] And he says, "No, that's not it. That's not how you become a demon. You become a demon by living like one." It's not that you stop being a human and become an angelic being that's fallen, but you become like them, and so you can say that you become— He can say that they become demons.

Fr. Andrew: And that's what St. John Chrysostom is talking about when he quotes Christ there. Christ is not saying… He's not saying all Jews for one thing; he's talking to the wicked people in front of him who happen to be Jews. He himself is a Jew; his disciples are Jews. It's not all Jews; it's the wicked people he's talking to. That's why he's saying that they are— And that's one other thing: that they're children of the devil because they do the work of their father.

Fr. Stephen: Right. Yes. And it's not coincidental that it's the lusts of their father that they do, because if the covenant into which we're shepherded by angelic beings is compared to marriage, then this consorting with demons is always compared to fornication. It's always compared to fornication. We know that in many cases, like with the giant clans and pagan forms of worship, it literally involved fornication, but even when we're not talking about that literal cultic fornication, it's still fornication in contrast to the marriage that is returning to God.

This is sort of the state of affairs that comes into being, again, that we have in the Hebrew Bible, in the Old Testament, and then within the prophetic tradition contained therein there is going to be a solution to this. This brings us back to Psalm 82 (or 81 in the Greek), which we sang on Holy Saturday as the gospel hymn, followed by a certain reading from the gospel of St. Matthew that we're also going to talk about here in the same context—again, not a coincidence that these two things are brought together in a resurrection service—that talks about literally the death of the gods. God stands in the council of the gods; in the midst of them he brings judgment. He says, "You were to administer the nations in justice. You were to carry out these assignments. You did the opposite; you were wicked, and you brought them to wickedness. And so now you've been called gods and sons of the Most High, but now you will die like men."

Fr. Andrew: And I just want to add, by the way, because I know that there is also a reading of this psalm which is perfectly valid as well, which is that it's about human rulers who did not do what they were supposed to do.

Fr. Stephen: I don't think that's a valid reading, but anyway, go ahead.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] You don't at all?

Fr. Stephen: No. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: But even if it is right, it doesn't matter, because the point is the point, that those who were set over others have not done what they're supposed to do, and God is judging them because of that. But, yeah, I mean, it's… To me, you can do both of those readings at the same time and they both can be understood in correct ways.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, but the problem with the other reading is it kind of doesn't make sense with the details of the psalm.

Fr. Andrew: Right! You have to bypass some parts and not others.

Fr. Stephen: What council of the gods is there that God comes and stands in? What council of human rulers—?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, he doesn't come and stand in the midst of the Sanhedrin.

Fr. Stephen: And, yeah, they're going to die like men: they're men! [Laughter] They're humans. So that reading just fundamentally doesn't make sense, and that's not the reading Christ takes of it in St. John's gospel. I don't know if we want to go down that rabbit-trail right now.

Fr. Andrew: Ah, we might need to do a dedicated episode, I think...

Fr. Stephen: Well, I don't know if I could go for a whole episode, but maybe part of one.

Fr. Andrew: Maybe a section.

Fr. Stephen: Next call-in show we do, somebody call in about that and I'll walk us through that, because—

Fr. Andrew: There we go. All right.

Fr. Stephen: —you have to grossly misunderstand St. John's gospel to not understand that this is exactly how Christ is interpreting it. But, yeah. See, where I thought you were going to go is that you will often see the beginning of Psalm 82 (or 81) quoted by Church Fathers, and then they just make a general comment about theosis.

Fr. Andrew: Right!

Fr. Stephen: So a lot of— What did St. John Chrysostom say? Some of the less-instructed therefore say, "Oh, well this psalm is about theosis," as if that solves an issue. Because I don't even know what that would mean, because, what? The people who have undergone theosis are evil and God's going to kill them? That doesn't make any sense. We'll get back to that in a second. The Fathers are just short-handing this. It's so well-known that they're just short-handing it. You're supposed to understand a whole dynamic here. So that's what happens in the psalm.

And the psalm ends with—and this is another thing that is incompatible with the other interpretation—"Arise, O God, and judge the earth, for thou wilt inherit from all the nations," which refers to a fundamental— that after this judgment against the gods, this, then, opens the way to God— And the word "inherit" is incredibly important; Israel is God's inheritance. This is the language that's used in Deuteronomy when the nations are divided, is that Yahweh chose Israel for his inheritance. So when this says, "after the judgment of the gods," now there is this shift and God is going to inherit from all the nations—not "inherit all the nations," but "from all the nations," which is important if we understand St. Paul and what's going on with him bringing Gentiles into Christianity. So there's this shift.

As I mentioned, we sing this psalm as the gospel hymn on Holy Saturday as the lead-in to us reading Matthew 28, the end of Matthew 28, the end of St. Matthew's gospel, when Christ, right before the Ascension, says, "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore, go and make disciples of all nations."

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. And: "Teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you." In other words: "I'm in charge."

Fr. Stephen: Yes. And so the Church has put those in parallel to help us interpret this correctly, that Christ has accomplished what it prophesied, that Christ has judged the gods of the nations. He now has all authority, and because he has all authority now, he is sending them out to all of those nations in order to bring from all of those nations into God's inheritance, Israel, to become part of his people.

But… So now we have legitimate vacancies. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yes, there are some posts available.

Fr. Stephen: Now, since Christ has taken that authority back, those assignments are illegitimate. Christ doesn't just say, "All authority in heaven on earth has now been given to me, so all those angels are out of a job." [Laughter] But included there is the fact that he is now re-sharing out of love.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, this is a renewal of the divine council.

Fr. Stephen: It's because he now has all authority that they're going out to bring these people in. And what is the destiny of those people going to be? The destiny of those people is going to be the destiny of Abraham: to become like the stars of heaven. So we get this language of glorification, which is, again, language of sharing in the divine life, in the life of the Holy Trinity, in the life of God, which is now shared with the human creation in a special way, because of the incarnation and death and resurrection of Christ, the ascension of Christ. So the particular— When we look at the particular metaphors we get of this, what are they? It's saying to the apostles, "You will sit on twelve thrones and judge the twelve tribes of Israel." It's the 24 elders seated around the throne of God on their own thrones with their own crowns that they cast down before God.

Fr. Andrew: We should just reiterate here, by the way, that sitting on a throne and judging does not mean like what we tend to think of in a literal sense of: "Ah, this is what I think about this" or "this is what I think about that." It's about being in command. It's like sitting in the captain's chair. You're running something here.

Fr. Stephen: Right. It's the imagery that was used in the Old Testament regarding the angelic beings, now applied also to humans. As we've commented before, it's not coincidental that "24" with the 24 human elders is a third of 72. So those vacancies for these fallen angelic beings, these spirits, are filled by humans who, in a certain way, become spirits. We'll get to that in a second—well, not in a second, in a little bit, in the third half.

Just like with the angelic beings, what would we expect? What would we expect to find, based on this dynamic that plays out in Scripture, both in the Old Testament and then as fulfilled in Christ? Well, we would expect that the saints in glory, that human saints, human holy ones—we'd expect that they would be assigned to elements of the natural order, like peoples like people-groups, to persons. We'd expect to find them doing the same thing.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, or, in the Jesus, "equal to the angels," that they become equal to the angels.

Fr. Stephen: Doing the same things. The idea of sainthood—not just the idea of being a holy person, but the idea of sainthood as it's understood within the Church is just part and parcel of this understanding of redemption, this understanding of the bodiless powers of heaven and this arc of the Scriptures that we've just gone through. It's a natural result of it. You can't sort of follow us up to here and then now say, "Ohh! But—human saints in glory don't do any of those things."

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. "They don't become equal to the angels in any appreciable way."

Fr. Stephen: Right. "That's now somehow totally different."

Fr. Andrew: I mean, you've got to do something with Luke 26, people. [Laughter] I mean, that's— You know—

Fr. Stephen: And big chunks of Revelation and lots of other things.

Fr. Andrew: Right, right. You've got to do something. It's not like: "Oh, look how wonderful it is in the next life." I think that's the way that it often is received, like: "It's going to be great!" But no, the language that's used is an active, dynamic engagement of what saints are doing.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and what's taking place now. Again, Protestant friends, I know many of you, and you've heard from other people, other scholars, a lot of what we went through, but then you get to this thing with the saints and the heebie-jeebies set in! [Laughter] It's like: "I don't know, this is starting to get kind of Catholic. I don't know what to do about this." The heebie-jeebies are okay, but, again, shouldn't be an obstacle to accepting truth. You can get over the heebie-jeebies over time. I don't see a way to break this arc functionally. I don't even see a reason. I don't see a reason to try to avoid it other than just this discomfort, that's been sort of bred into many people—which I understand the discomfort, and I appreciate the discomfort, but, again, you can't let your spiritual life be guided by comfort and discomfort. That is a way that ends in disaster spiritually.

So a final note here: One place where we see this manifested very early on in the New Testament is St. Paul's reference to the Corinthians to baptism for the dead—

Fr. Andrew: I was going to say, we're going make our ex-Mormon friend a little squeamish again.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yeah, I know! That poor guy. That poor guy.

Fr. Andrew: Baptism for the dead.

Fr. Stephen: We're just going to do this briefly. I think we've talked about it on the show before. I'm sure we have.

Fr. Andrew: We have, and you have a whole article on your blog about it as well.

Fr. Stephen: There's an article on my blog, there's a section in Religion of the Apostles talking about it, but it's very clear when you dig into it, when you look at how St. Paul uses "the dead" as opposed to just "dead" without the article, that when St. Paul uses the article, "the dead" is referring to the dead in Christ, to departed Christians, and the word that's used there, "for"—baptism for the dead—is not really in the place of; it's more on behalf of or with benefit to. The idea here is that this is literally a patron relationship in the Roman sense, in the sense that there is someone in whose name you do things, primarily as an act of humility such that the honor for those things goes to the patron. You're the one doing the work, you're the one doing the things, but your patron in a Roman sense would be sponsoring them and therefore receive the glory for them, but in this sense it's sort of voluntary. So this is referring to the practice of—which is still an Orthodox practice today—of taking a saint's name at baptism, and this idea of a patron saint, that you then operate in their name.

The folks who— I have to, as a side note. The folks who have criticized Religion of the Apostles particularly on this point, when I talk about baptism for the dead, have brought me no end of joy and laughter. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Oh! That's great.

Fr. Stephen: Because for one thing, they often say, "Well, where is he getting this? Where is this coming from?" And if you actually go to the "Further Reading" bibliography at the end of Religion of the Apostles, there are two journal articles specifically on this point in there.

Fr. Andrew: It's like the bibliography is invisible for some people, I think.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And if you go and read those two journal articles—and the titles will— If you will read the bibliography—not the book, just read the couple of pages—you can tell from the titles of these journal articles exactly what they're talking about: they're talking about baptism for the dead. [Laughter] And if you go and read those articles, the footnotes have everything that's been written about this for the last hundred years covered under there. So, first of all, there's two sources there.

I also get: "Uh, which of the Church Fathers say this?" And if you go and look this up, say, in your Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture, what you'll find is: they don't comment on it. There's one sort of little-known Church Father who comments on it and just kind of says, "I don't know what this means." And then everybody else doesn't comment at all. St. John Chrysostom just passes over this whole "baptism for the dead" thing like it's not even there. Let me suggest to you— Why would all of these well-known Church Fathers just pass over it like it's nothing weird when it's so weird to us? Maybe because it wasn't weird to them. Maybe because they knew what it was talking about.

And then, third—and then I'll be done with this little mini-rant, I promise—third, my favorite, is when they accuse me of novelty. I literally argue that an Orthodox Church practice is apostolic, and they tell me, "That's novelty!" [Laughter] "How dare you show up at this late date and argue that this practice is apostolic!" It's amazing.

Less relevant to my own personal enjoyment of my critics—and I really need a better class of them—more pertinent and more important, once we understand this idea from very early on of patron saints, this also helps us understand the phenomenon of pseudepigraphy, both in Second Temple Judaism and in early Christianity, that is, writing in someone else's name, chiefly a saint's name. Friend of the show, Bart Ehrman, has his book, Forged: "These New Testament books aren't written by who you think they were written by!" which is amazing, because it's like, you know: "This wasn't really written by St. Mark!" What is St. Mark known for, other than writing the gospel of St. Mark?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, why would you attribute something to him… I mean—

Fr. Stephen: Let's just call the guy who wrote it Mark. Like, okay...

Fr. Andrew: The reason why people might plagiarize or forge stuff today is because there's royalties at stake. You make money off of selling books. That's a thing. But in the ancient world, that was not a thing!

Fr. Stephen: Right. Yeah. So the idea was, amongst a vast swath of pseudepigraphy— Now, there are things that go on, so there are Gnostic texts, where the reason they're being attributed to some apostle is that they're trying to claim Jesus actually taught this. So there is some of that; it's not that that doesn't exist. But in many cases, at least, what you actually have is something similar to this patronage situation, and especially with someone who is under the authority of someone else. For example, we're told in the book of Isaiah that Isaiah's prophecies were written down and were later collected by his disciples. This causes a really simple solution to this whole "second and third Isaiah" thing, because there are sort of differences at the places where they draw the lines. It's like: Yeah, so there were three different collections of Isaiah's prophecies and they all got put together into one big one. You can't sell books with simple solutions, though, really, in the modern day. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Journal articles have to be written...

Fr. Stephen: Or I thought I was going to get a ton of controversy when the Whole Counsel's episode about 2 Peter came out, and I didn't, at least as far as I could tell. I don't know if I'm happy or not.

Fr. Andrew: It's because they email me all the complaints, so.

Fr. Stephen: That could be it! Did you get any?

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I don't remember.

Fr. Stephen: Oh.

Fr. Andrew: I just delete emails that refer to you now.

Fr. Stephen: Oh, okay. Well, that's probably sound practice. [Laughter] You could probably set up a junk filter, just if my name's in it.

Fr. Andrew: There we go. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: But that it looks for all the world like 2 Peter was compiled from St. Peter's preaching and teachings after his death by some of his disciples. That explains a whole bunch of things related to St. Jude's epistle, too, that I won't get into here. Or the possibility—folks, I said "possibility"—the possibility that it was someone other than the first-century St. Dionysios the Areopagite who wrote the works attributed to St. Dionysios the Areopagite. A person could have taken St. Dionysios's name—at baptism or as a monastic—and be writing in his name, and not be lying or trying to defraud anyone, but rather to have this patronage relationship where he wants the credit to go to his patron saint and not to himself who was writing. So if it was written in the second or third century by someone else and attributed to him, it's not a case of lying; that doesn't discredit the contents. Those are all presuppositions, because a lot of pseudepigraphy at least, a lot of this writing in someone's name, was founded on this principle, of giving the honor and the credit to someone else, making oneself a ghost writer, so that someone else would get the credit, which has a certain asceticism and humility to it that few today would practice.

Fr. Andrew: All right. Well, that wraps up the second half of this episode of Lord of Spirits. We're going to go ahead and take our second and final break, and we'll be right back!

***

Fr. Andrew: Welcome back, everyone. We just got a note from a listener in Australia. Welcome, Australia. We're glad to have you on board. And, hey! Nice to hear that plug for the book!

Fr. Stephen: How are they listening to us? Is it on, like, a CB radio in their weapons-equipped vehicle? [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: I don't know, there's this thing called the "internet." It's crazy, man!

Fr. Stephen: Right, but, I mean, I'm pretty sure the nuclear war took that out in Australia, based on the documentaries I've seen about life there.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I mean, I have been told that every living thing is actively trying to kill any humans that come around.

Fr. Stephen: You have the mutants of the wasteland, right?

Fr. Andrew: That's the reason why my wife will never come with me to Australia, because she's like: "I don't want to be…" And on top of that, Australians have also added something called the "drop bear." Look this up, people, I'm not kidding about this: the drop bear. And I think that drop bear legend is designed to prevent anyone from coming to Australia. Like, it's not— It was not put together by the Australian Tourism Board, we'll just put it that way. Drop bears.

Fr. Stephen: And I have to say, people don't realize how much of a humanitarian Hugh Jackman is.

Fr. Andrew: I don't!

Fr. Stephen: To go to that wasteland and go into the battered shell of a theater and perform musicals for them, like Oklahoma!

Fr. Andrew: Isn't he from there, though?

Fr. Stephen: But he escaped and he goes back!

Fr. Andrew: He goes back, wow. Yeah. So, welcome back!

Fr. Stephen: Nigh unstoppable.

Fr. Andrew: It's the third half. He's almost a patron saint of Australia. Almost. [Laughter] With the love and care he shows to his people. That's not where I thought the beginning of this half was going to go, but there we go. We just had to go and hear from an Australian.

Fr. Stephen: If Hugh Jackman is listening, go ahead and call in and give us confirmation.

Fr. Andrew: Please! Hugh! We want to hear from you.

Fr. Stephen: Hey, Hugh. Get off of that cloud! Anyway.

Fr. Andrew: All right.

Fr. Stephen: Needed more musical references, sorry.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Don't get me started. I can reference musicals.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. So we dipped our toes in the last half into this a little bit, and now we're sort of going to dive into the deep end of this. And that is… So, concretely, pulling in some stuff we've talked about before: What is a spirit? How does a spirit work? How does a spirit relate to those and that of which it is a spirit? And hopefully on the way— This is another area in which we get a lot of questions.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because this is hard to understand.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. Well, what we're pushing at right here, and already this episode, but now especially here as we come toward its climax—meaning its ladder—

Fr. Andrew: Nice.

Fr. Stephen: —this is stuff that we're pushing at, like at the edge of what humans can understand.

Fr. Andrew: And we're not claiming we understand.

Fr. Stephen: Right. So this is— And, since we're playing the hits tonight from way back, part of the problem is that the way we tend to approach this issue, what is a spirit, especially since we're thinking about the spirits of the righteous made perfect, we're thinking about saints, we're thinking about human saints in glory, is that when we approach it, we're approaching it from the idea, from the angle of: What is it like to be a spirit? What is it like to be that? What will it be like if, when I die, I'm in that number, when the saints go marching in?

Fr. Andrew: Oh, man. That brings me back.

Fr. Stephen: Shout-out to Louisiana. [Laughter] Anyway, we're thinking: What that's going to be like? It's really part of our thinking on that. As is our wont: Don't know what it's like to be a bat. We can't know what it's like to be a bat, which is below us in the created order, let alone understanding what it's like to be an angel or a glorified human, which is above us in the created order—still created, but above us in the created order, above us in terms of the level of consciousness that we're talking about.

So we can't approach this from "what is it like to be a spirit?"; we have to approach this from "what does it mean to be a spirit?"

Fr. Andrew: And saying what does something mean is fundamentally about how we relate to it.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so we can say what it means to be a bat, by giving a bunch of descriptors of bats and how they relate to humans and other creatures.

Fr. Andrew: Because everything that means means something to us. That's what the "meaning" is.

Fr. Stephen: Right. We can't understand what it's like to be a bat; we can understand what it means to be a bat. What it means to be a bat is to be a mammal with webbed "hands" essentially that form wings that allow for flight, etc., etc., etc., etc. That's assessing what we mean when we say "bat," essentially, ultimately. It's: What do we mean when we say "bat"? When we say "bat," what do we mean? So when we say, "That is a spirit," when we say, "He makes his angels spirits," what do we mean by that word?

And we've talked before—again, related to the bat—that there are different levels of conscious that, until very recently—and by "very recently" I mean until the 20th century, for the most part—the idea of consciousness was seen as a very binary thing, a zero or a one.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, humans have it; nothing else does.

Fr. Stephen: Well, angels, God.

Fr. Andrew: Right.

Fr. Stephen: But not animals. Consciousness was seen as some kind of self-awareness or something to do with language, that animals don't have. Hegel—and he's going to show up again later—animals are basically just little machines; they're not aware in any real sense. 19th, even early 20th century, people don't think animals really feel pain, or at least the way humans do, because they're not conscious. You get a lot of scientific experiments going on at that time that now we find abhorrent.

But we now understand, obviously, for a variety of reasons, that that's not accurate, that animals, for example, have different kinds of consciousness and different levels of consciousness. And we understand that even plants as organisms have some kind of rudimentary level of consciousness. They've played the sounds of water near plants, and the roots of the plant will start to grow toward the sound. The sound's being played on, like, a tape player.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] It's so weird!

Fr. Stephen: So there is something that is processing input from the environment and then acting upon it in some way. That's some level of consciousness.

And then we've even talked about how, once we go below the level of organisms, one of the first things we notice is that actually the things we think of as organisms, like animals and plants and humans, are actually not a single system, not a single organism, but are made up of other independent organisms.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which sometimes interact with systems in other organisms, in other larger organisms, weirdly enough.

Fr. Stephen: Right, like Fr. Andrew loves when I bring up how our gut flora—

Fr. Andrew: Ugh.

Fr. Stephen: —chemically communicate with the gut flora of other people around us.

Fr. Andrew: Never sit next to me again!

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] My gut flora are fascinating. I think they're mainly made up of McDonald's hamburger buns, but anyway… And liquor, sadly.

So it's not just that any given organism is a system; it's a collection of systems. And as we just said, some of those subsystems communicate with the environment, and some of them are self-guided and self-processing within the whole. So the consciousness that we ascribe to the organism is really an overarching consciousness of the sort of many rudimentary… Like my gut flora may have the level of consciousness of a plant, this rudimentary consciousness, but that's still part of my overall consciousness. What do I mean by that? Well, trust me, the state of your gut flora can affect your mood.

Fr. Andrew: Oh. Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Right? Read some of St. Gregory the Theologian's poetry when he was having stomach troubles. He writes about it very candidly.

Fr. Andrew: I mean, there's a good argument to be made that the Reformation happens...

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Because of gut flora?

Fr. Andrew: I mean… it's well known. It's well known.

Fr. Stephen: And so the end result is that there is some level of consciousness that arises out of any ordered system that transmits and/or processes information. Now, by "some level of consciousness," again, think about the plants. Think about very simple animals or things like sea anemones that are somewhere in between. We're not saying they all have human consciousnesses. We're not saying, "I am going to go and speak to the earth because plate tectonics is an ordered system. Find out what the earth wants." That's not what we're saying. [Laughter] But we're talking about rudimentary levels of consciousness.

But they're there. And so once we understand that, that there are these levels of consciousness below the level of human consciousness, there's no reason for anyone— And now I'm speaking outside of even religious terms. There's no reason for anyone, of any religion or no religion at all, to reject the idea that there could be levels of consciousness above humans, above an individual human person. There's no reason for that. Now, Christianity teaches us certain things about those levels of consciousness—spiritual beings, angelic beings, the saints in glory, everything we've been talking about this episode—but even on a purely materialist basis, there's no logical reason to exclude the possibility of those things existing in some sense, in some form.

So there's this higher level of consciousness, and so, as the examples we were given before, you have a people-group: that people-group has a collective spirit. There's this collective consciousness of the whole that is not just the sum of the parts in some kind of democratic way or something. That people move and do things as groups, not solely as individuals. As the examples we gave in the last half, this is neither being forced by a spirit to do something nor just all of these individual persons all making the same exact choices, bad choices or good choices, all at the same time, unguided by anything.

When we've talked about this in the past, when we've talked about spirits in this sense in the past, as guiding—these spirits who were assigned to elements of the natural order, to people-groups, to persons—one of the main questions we've gotten is: Well, does that mean that these spirits sort of come into existence and cease to exist, or they get assigned and reassigned? Was there a spirit of the Prussian people? There's no more Prussia.

Fr. Andrew: Are egregores real?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. This idea, do they sort of spring into being when some new—? Like the United States of America didn't exist, and then it did. So does this new—? Is a new angel born or get its wings or something? It's now assigned to it or the spirit that's moving the people—? And ultimately that's the question of: Do spirits come into existence? And the answer to that depends on how we define existence. I don't mean what your definition of is is. [Laughter] But what it means to come into existence.

The way we usually use that and the way I think it's being used in the question, at least most of the time, is it's being used— "Come into existence" as in ex nihilo, as in previously there was nothing, now there is a thing in the universe. That idea, that temporal transition between there's this second in time and this place in space that is empty, and then in another moment in time that space is filled with something. You can see how there's a problem with applying that to a spirit, because a spirit doesn't have material existence that occupies space and time.

So if you mean existence in terms of material reality, material existence: Do spirits come into material existence? Well, no, sort of definitionally. But we have to go back to the Five(ish) Falls a little bit here.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, and we have to learn— I'm suddenly reminded of the original Back to the Future movie, where Doc Brown says to Marty, "You have to think fourth-dimensionally." That's not what we're saying here, but—

Fr. Stephen: Good luck!

Fr. Andrew: You have to think phenomenologically.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. So we talked about— We have these five—four, maybe five: that's why five(ish)—points in what would be described as human history. We're not going to get into— Other episodes, we talked about what sense of history we're talking about with the Scriptures, but in Scripture, at these five points in human existence, there are points where angelic beings are said to fall, and we talked about what that means in the last half. One of the questions we get, then, is: How…? Does that mean the day before, the angel was a good angel, doing its thing, and then that day [Snap]: evil? And we've tried in various ways to make the point: No, because, see, there you're assuming an angel is like a human. You're assuming what it's like to be an angel. Angels, because they don't have material bodies, experience time and space differently than we do. And we don't know how differently because we don't know what it's like to be an angel, but we know it's different than the way that we as beings with material bodies experience time and space.

But what we're saying, when those things are attached to those points in time, is that that's when the change, the fall, the shift—however we want to describe it—that's when that shift or change or fall enters into the experience of humanity, the collective experience of humanity.

Fr. Andrew: We had somebody actually ask in the YouTube chat, essentially: Is it the case that every time an angel falls that there's some kind of effect in the world? My response to him was: How would we know if there was a fall without one? We wouldn't know. We're not given some book of objective knowledge of things that has no relation to us.

Fr. Stephen: Right, because it's the effect in the world that is written about in Scripture. It's the effect in the world of humanity, and that's why, as Fr. Andrew said, we have to think phenomenologically, not in terms of metaphysics, in terms of being, in terms of an esoteric sense. Forget Plato. We're talking in terms of human experience. So the place where humans began to experience this fracturing of humanity, of the spirits of the different nations, leading them not toward God but away, setting them against each other, they started to experience— humans started to experience that after the Tower of Babel. So that's when it gets written about.

Humans experienced the failed rebellion of the devil against God in Genesis 3 in the garden of Eden, at the expulsion from paradise. That's when that entered into the realm of human experience. How the devil himself experienced that, we can't know, let alone how God experienced that! If you can even talk about God experiencing things. That's beyond any kind of knowledge. But that's when humans— It's when it enters into the human world.

If, by "come into existence" you mean come into human experience, come into the world of humans, then, yes, there is a spirit that "comes into existence" at such a point, at the founding or forming of a nation or people-group.

Fr. Andrew: But "spirit" is a phenomenological term, because it's about relation between beings and experiences.

Fr. Stephen: Right. "Spirit" here is, yes, a phenomenological term, and that's how it's used here: "He makes his angels spirits." He makes them to be spirits. He puts them into this relationship, "he" being God. So, yes, and so the saints in glory are made spirits in this sense.

What, then, is—? We've hinted around this; we've poked around this. We've kind of said what it's not. What is the relationship between a spirit and a person, or a spirit and a people-group or a group, or a spirit and some elements of the natural world? The word that's used to describe this in Scripture and in the Fathers is koinonia. You going to offend the Greeks, Fr. Andrew?

Fr. Andrew: I was going to say, like the—

Fr. Stephen: Pronounce it the Evangelical way?

Fr. Andrew: —like the early '80s CCM—

Fr. Stephen: Greeks, plug your ears!

Fr. Andrew: —band, "Koinonia." [Laughter] Koy-no-ni-a. Actually, I think they said Koy-no-ni-a. Oh, man.

Fr. Stephen: Rhymes with "Narnia."

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Whoo!

Fr. Stephen: I didn't do that, Greek people.

Fr. Andrew: It's not the way I would normally say it, but...

Fr. Stephen: Send your Erasmian hate-mail to Fr. Andrew at Ancient Faith dot com.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I don't normally do the Erasmian, so...

Fr. Stephen: In those circles where Fr. Andrew was referring to where that term was used, it got really watered down to mean, like, fellowship, like coffee hour. But this is a much more important term in classical Greek. For example, it's used— This is the term Plato uses to describe the relationship between the Forms and things, participation, to take part in. That's how it's often translated. This is the term that St. Paul uses when he says, "What the nations sacrifice, they sacrifice to demons and not to God. I do not want you to become koinonia— I do not want you to become participants with demons." So this describes a potential relationship you can have with demons, for St. Paul, brought about in part, at least, through pagan sacrifice. It also— In the same passage, St. Paul uses the same term to refer to a relationship that can be had with God, but points out you can't have this relationship with both God and demons at the same time, this participation.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, one or the other.

Fr. Stephen: And what this participation is pointing to is an aligning of wills, meaning it's voluntary, in the original sense— an aligning of wills that then brings about an aligning of activities, meaning energies, synergeia, synergy. There's a synergistic relationship that is being talked about here. One can, through the Spirit of God, through the Holy Spirit, have this kind of synergistic relationship with God in which we align our will with God's will. We, through our activity, participate in his activities: grace, the energies, the divine energies, what God is doing in the world. We participate in that. We align our will with his. This is the path of theosis, where we become like God. The other option is that we align our wills with a demonic spirit: we align our wills, we align our activities, and then that same result, that synergy results in, as St. John talked about, us becoming like the demons, and brings about our destruction.

But this participation works in both directions, both top-down and bottom-up, as we said. It's not just top-down. It's not that this spirit comes and possesses a group of people, for example, and forces them to do things against their will and puppets them. God doesn't do that, the Holy Spirit doesn't do that on the one side; demons don't do that on the other side. The language we get is "shepherding," "guiding," etc.

On the other hand, it's not just bottom-up; it's not just the sum of the parts. Theosis doesn't happen—sorry, Pelagius—by human efforts. This isn't something that just we do one way or the other, where we are these completely free moral agents. It is going in both directions. It is actual synergy. We use still sometimes the word "spirit" in this kind of synergistic sense. The time of year it is, people talk about the "spirit of Christmas": "You need to get with the spirit of Christmas. Quit being a sourpuss."

Fr. Andrew: Or "do you have school spirit"? It's clear that "school spirit" is not just a bunch of individual people cheering for the football team. There's something more going on there. There's a sense of everyone belonging to the same thing.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and being on the same page, and there being some guiding— That there is a school spirit that is guiding everyone and bringing everyone together. Or the Zeitgeist, the spirit of the age. "He who marries himself to the spirit of the age soon finds himself a widower."

Fr. Andrew: Nice.

Fr. Stephen: Basic truth. But you can wed yourself to the spirit of the age. Notice the language there.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah! A wedding, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: And this kind of understanding of "spirit," by the way, is key to understanding what we mean by holy Tradition in the Orthodox Church. We've talked about this before a bunch, that what we don't mean by Tradition in the Orthodox Church is a bunch of secret stuff that the bishops have handed down at their consecrations that they don't tell anybody, that we claim goes back to the apostles.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] The esoterica!

Fr. Stephen: Oral tradition! Yeah, read some St. Irenaeus; he'll fix you up on that one.

Fr. Andrew: Well, and this is why— There's a famous line… I think it's in On the Incarnation, where St. Athanasius says that unless you're living— unless you're imitating the life of the saints—obviously that's pointing at the way you live— Unless you're imitating the life of the saints, you can't understand their teachings. Which is: you have to align your will with this, with the holy Tradition. It's not just a big list of things that you get right, like a quiz that you get all the answers right.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. So we talk about holy Tradition in the Orthodox Church as being the life of the Holy Spirit in the Church. And that sounds fancy and "ooh, yeah!" but what does it mean? It means that we look back at the Church's history, and we see that there are places where humans were synergizing—were in sync, where their wills were aligned, where their activities were aligned—with the Holy Spirit, with what God was doing in the world. That they were being guided by the Holy Spirit. They were speaking, but they were being guided by the Holy Spirit, where this synergy was happening. And we point at those places and we say, "These places are authoritative for us in the sense that these places in history serve as guides for us as we seek to do the same thing."

So the Ecumenical Councils, certain writings of certain Church Fathers, because, remember, we don't have all of them; we don't have writings of all the Church Fathers who could potentially be considered Church Fathers. We don't have all the writings of any given Church Father. We have the ones that have come down to us through Tradition. The copy of the Scriptures down through the ages, the canon of Scripture, etc., etc., etc.: these are all places where humans were synergizing with the Holy Spirit, and so that fact and that recognition from us means that they're authoritative in guiding us to do the same, as we continue this historical journey of the Church.

So there is a sense in which it is true to say that holy Tradition is the Holy Spirit incarnate as history. Now, as I say that—

Fr. Andrew: Don't take that as an absolute, people. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: As I say that, there are a certain number of the more-instructed who probably blanched, because they heard shades or the shade of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel when I said that. There's a ghost that haunts a lot of people. The reason I said "in a sense" is that when we say that, we don't mean what Hegel meant when he said similar things. So Hegel— When Hegel talks about "spirit," Hegel is actually very clear: he means the Holy Spirit. Hegel was a Lutheran, and if you don't understand that Hegel is a Lutheran— self-described. He always insisted he was an orthodox Lutheran. And if you don't understand that he's a Lutheran, you won't understand Hegel correctly, because he's really Lutheran. But he means the Holy Spirit.

But Hegel worked in the opposite direction. Hegel understood history as having a through-line, and Hegel is vastly influential late 19th, throughout the 20th century, in theology, in philosophy, just about everything. History has this through-line, it's going somewhere, it's progressing in a direction. Of course, 19th-century Germany and 19th-century Lutheranism were the peak of that! At least for that point. He didn't think for now it was going to be a valley. He didn't think history was at an end, but they were the peak then.

Fr. Andrew: Best so far. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: But that meant that whatever unfolds for him, whatever unfolds in history, the unfolding of history was the unfolding of the Holy Spirit and therefore the unfolding of God.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so the times equals the work of the Holy Spirit.

Fr. Stephen: So he could, having helped found the University of Berlin, see Napoleon there wrecking the place, and say, "There goes history." See Napoleon as history incarnate, because he was the one shaping what was going to come next for Europe, Hegel saw, which meant for Hegel that he was being guided by the Holy Spirit.

Fr. Andrew: Oof.

Fr. Stephen: Right. Which is not what we're saying. [Laughter] We do, however, as Orthodox Christians, believe that the history of the Church is going somewhere.

Fr. Andrew: Yes.

Fr. Stephen: We don't believe that any given generation is the peak of it, despite how sometimes you hear some Orthodox Christians talk, as if the fourth century was the denouement, or at least much better than now. [Laughter] But we look through the history of the Church to find these places that are authentically part of holy Tradition. We look through the writings. We look to find these places that constitute genuine parts of the Tradition, and we reject other places. There are more robber councils than Ecumenical Councils. There are a lot of bishops and even patriarchs who aren't saints.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, most of them, actually. That's most of them. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: And emperors you have an even worse batting average! So we identify these particulars as being places where people are syngerizing with the Holy Spirit: particular people, places, writing, events. We don't take the sweep as being automatically inspired.

But the reason I wanted to spend a minute on this, with Hegel, is I think most people now, at least in the circles of people who listen to this show, or at least who aren't hate-listening to this show, I don't think people fundamentally understand how liberal theology works, and this can give us a window into how liberal theology works. Liberal theology is in keeping with Hegel, the Hegel we're rejecting on this show, just to be clear. Not promoting liberal theology, but we need to understand liberal theology and how it works.

The reason I'm just saying "liberal theology"— I'm not saying "liberal" as opposed to "conservative." I'm saying "liberal" in the sense of post-Enlightenment, that doesn't think the Enlightenment was a bad thing. [Laughter] I'm talking about post-Enlightenment theology; I'm talking about— Well, let's get to brass tacks. Liberal theology, what it does—and I'm not identifying this— I'm not talking about liberal Protestantism or Catholicism or even Orthodoxy, because there are people in all of those groups— I think fewer of them in Orthodoxy than the other two right now. I don't know about proportionally with Roman Catholicism. Liberal Protestantism is certainly the biggest liberal theological movement, but there are a lot of liberal Catholics, but the Roman Catholic Church is awful big, so I don't know percentages. There are relatively few, but there are some within the Orthodox Church. And there of course are some doing liberal theology stuff who don't identify with any of those, and whatever.

But liberal theology essentially, like Hegel, takes whatever point in time they stand at as being the apex of history to that point. This means— And I've critiqued it this way on the show before, but I'm going to do it again. This means that liberal theology is always innately chauvinist, at least somewhat racist, colonial, because, again, you have to take your culture and civilization as being the apex, which means the other ones who might disagree with you are somehow primitive, backward, unenlightened, etc. So there's always overtones of that, always overtones of that within liberal theology. But you take your point as being the apex of history to that point, and you ascribe the developments that have led to that apex as being the work of the Holy Spirit.

So if now we, European-derived Western culture, have a new understanding of gender or sexuality or biological sex or any other ethical, moral issue of who God is, whatever—whatever has developed historically, in this Western—dare I say often white—culture, whatever is developed in that culture, this is the work of the Holy Spirit that has brought us to this, and therefore it is endorsed, and we re-shape our theology based on this. So a new understanding of gender that arises within culture and society is, for them—the work of God has brought that about within society.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah… This is where you hear people use language like "the right side of history."

Fr. Stephen: So it doesn't matter if the person questioning that is from the same culture but who says, "Hey, I don't this historical development—" they're doing more like what we're advocating for, which is saying, "Well, no, we have to sift through this and say what is from God and what isn't"; or if it's someone from another culture, who might have another skin color, might be from another continent. It doesn't matter who's questioning it: whoever's questioning it is innately backwards, is innately rejecting the work of the Holy Spirit in the world.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, this is also where you hear people say things like: "It's 2023!" Like that's an argument! "It's current year!"

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, but you have to understand, this is their understanding. And this is why trying to take any kind of approach with them, of "well, but this previous understanding…" or "this thing from the past," no matter what it is, fundamentally doesn't work, because they have this underlying presupposition that their culture now at this point in time is the apex of all human cultures and civilization and that God has brought it there. This is why, when I— when you hear me critiquing liberal theology, it's often from what sounds like a liberal perspective, like I'll say to people who express these ideas— They'll be attacking, for example, African bishops in their own church for not going along. What's nice about me using that example is there are at least three different denominations I could be talking about.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] That's right! Yes, right.

Fr. Stephen: When they, as white, bourgeois Americans or Europeans, attack African bishops and call them "backwards" and all of these things for not being on-board with their new liberal consensus, I will call them white supremacists, because that's what that is.

Fr. Andrew: Colonialism.

Fr. Stephen: Right? That is colonialism. It's: all the things they claim to hate, they're actually doing. But that's why I— If people hear me critique it that way, I know some people might get confused, but that's why I critique it that way, because that's the only critique that can function on their own presuppositions. That's the only critique that's valid from their— based on their own presuppositions. Any critique from tradition is going to fall flat on its face, because they've substituted—instead of our understanding of tradition, they have this alien understanding of history, so trying to talk tradition doesn't work. That's the only kind of critique—

And that's because, ultimately, that line of thinking is an ouroboros. It's a snake eating its own tail. It can't— Its first principles are incoherent. That's why you can critique their beliefs based on their beliefs, because they don't fit together. But so, we add that at the end this is the deviant view of how the Spirit works and how Tradition works, that we need to be aware of, because I don't think we can have productive dialogue with people who have imbibed liberal theology and who are coming at things from that perspective when we come at them from a completely alien perspective that shares none of their presuppositions. I don't think there's any way for that to be productive, other than, you know, maybe just saying, "You have to abandon everything you think you know. Change everything," which may work sometimes, and maybe if you show them how self-refuting their own ideas are, maybe that'll help that happen, but there's a fundamental lack of communication between those who have fallen prey to that kind of liberal theology and the rest of us. That it would be good for their sakes if we could find a bridge to try to bring them back to the truth.

That said, as a final digression, we come back to a topic that we talked about in our very first Halloween special which was, what, the fifth episode, something like that?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I think so.

Fr. Stephen: And that is the fact that when we talk about replacement, in the sense that saints in glory, human saints, replace fallen angelic beings, that this is something that takes place in real time. This takes place in time and space, and that's because of this synergistic understanding.

One of the concrete examples we've used repeatedly on the show is St. Demetrius, in Thessaloniki, replacing Aphrodite as the spirit of the people and of the place and of the polity, of the polis. That is something that happened in real time, at least in terms of the human experience of it, the phenomenological experience of it. The Gospel came there, and St. Demetrius was part of the Gospel coming there; it started with St. Paul, of course, and part of the process. The people of Thessaloniki began to realign themselves, not with Aphrodite—there was a time where it was all Aphrodite, and then it starts to move—and over time, realign themselves with St. Demetrius, who is shepherding them back to God, who had aligned himself with the Holy Spirit and by aligning with him—like St. Paul said, "Imitate me as I imitate Christ"—they were brought into alignment with God. So the spirit who was motivating them, who was shepherding them, became St. Demetrius and ceased being Aphrodite. This played out in real time.

That's what we mean by it playing out in real time, in this phenomenological sense in the lives of real people. So this can, as we've been asked, move back and forth. You look at the sweep of much of history, since Christ's ascension, and it was moving kind of in one direction with Christendom and everything, and then lately we see that kind of getting wobbly maybe. For any given person— A person can apostatize. A people-group can apostatize. A nation can apostatize, can turn from God, and begin to be led by something else toward something else. But that also means they can also repent and turn back.

Fr. Andrew: All right. Well, as we're wrapping up this episode on patron saints, the thought that really occurs to me in terms of summarizing my own thoughts about this— Well, there's really two, and they're intimately connected, of course. The first question is: What does salvation really mean? Because I think sometimes people might, if you bring up patron saints, especially if they're not from a tradition where this is a thing— Again, you know, these are mostly our Protestant friends. I mean, I was raised Protestant myself; this was not part of our tradition when I was in that world. Patron saints might seem like: "Well, it's this side issue. It's not really—" If you're not against it, maybe, you might say, "Well, it's not really that important for salvation." So, number one, as an Orthodox Christian, I believe that the saints assist in salvation, but that's not really why this is actually important.

It's important because, if you track the whole way—if you track all the stuff we've said in this whole episode, what you see, actually, is that this is the trajectory of the Christian, that to be saved means to be among those whom the Scripture says—the saints will judge the world; that the life of the age to come is subjected not to angels, but to humans, to glorified humans. And so salvation itself is about becoming part of the divine council, a part of, to use sort of rawer language, the council of the gods. That's what it means to be saved. That's the trajectory of Christianity; that's its purpose: to become as Christ— Again, we've referenced this a gazillion times in the podcast, but it bears repeating. As Christ says in Luke 20, that the sons of the resurrection are sons of God and equal to the angels. That is not a side issue; that's the core. That's right there at the middle, right there in the very center of what it means to be Christian: sons of the resurrection, sons of God, equal to the angels.

When we look at the saints functioning as patrons, as spirits who influence and help to guide particular people, peoples, churches, nations, groups, places, whatever, they are simply doing the thing that is where the arc of salvation goes. That's the goal. That's the goal of the Christian life, is to function in that way, to share in God's stewardship, his love, his care for his cosmos. And so the saints are simply people who are doing it.

And the reason that they're doing it— This is the second question, you know: What do we do therefore now about this? The reason that they're doing it is because, in this life, in the earthly life—that if you're listening to this, you're part of the earthly life; I'm part of the earthly life—that in this life, they practiced it. In this life, they did it as much as they could. Now, obviously, their capability magnified infinitely in their passage into the life of the age to come, and that's why we experience them in what seems to be in super-human ways, but it is actually not beyond humanity but is the destiny of humanity. It's the most human way. We function subhumanly; they are functioning humanly.

But while they were in this life and had to function subhumanly on some level, they practiced this as much as they could. They functioned to put this world into order and beauty and harmony and shepherded themselves and those around them towards God, towards that chaste marriage, as we talked about earlier. And so all the things that we do in order to orient ourselves and our homes, our relationships, our jobs, our thoughts, our libraries, our gardens, our kids— I mean, go on and on; whatever you want to put in there. Everything that we do to do that is formational, transformational, to become what we see the saints doing now. That's the goal. That's what it means to be Christian. That is the purpose of Christianity, is to be co-enthroned with Christ, to be seated on those thrones next to him, to put the world, with him, in subordination to him, in order, just like we see happening in the Old Testament with the angels, just like we see happening very explicitly in Second Temple Jewish literature—Philo, Jubilees, etc.—just like we see happening in the New Testament, just like we see happening in all of Church history! That's what the goal is.

And so the motivator of our Christian life now is to do that. The beautiful thing is we don't do this in an isolated way. We have them to help us, and we have each other as well to help us, and we help each other so that we might be seated also, in Christ, at the right hand of God. Fr. Stephen?

Fr. Stephen: So where we sorted ended up tonight was talking about changing spirits, changing the patron of a place or of a people-group or of a person or of part of the world. The most basic spiritual warfare that I think most of us, or at least most of the people listening right now are called is expressly this. Some of us need to change the spirit that's hanging over us as a person. There's someone or something that we're following, that's shepherding us, that's guiding us. We may think it's guiding us toward something like success or wealth or recognition or some feeling of fulfillment. It's not. It's shepherding us toward destruction, and we should know that because, as we follow it, as we follow its lead and take its guidance, what we're experiencing is isolation and alienation and resentment and jealousy, none of which are signs that we're moving in the right direction.

And we need to replace that spirit with another, with one of the saints, who will guide us back toward God, who will show us the way to live a life in this world, as many different lives as we live, as many different lives as the saints have led, different places at different times. We have to make our way back to God in and through this world and through our day-to-day life.

And some of us it's not maybe ourselves. Maybe we're working—not that we've arrived, but that we're working toward—working our way faithfully back toward Christ, as faithfully as we can—maybe not as faithfully as we ought—but there's a spirit in our family that we can see is at work and it's the wrong one. And we can tell it's the wrong one because our family life is marked with squabbling, bickering, resentments, anger, alienation, dysfunction. And we need to find a way to replace that one with another. It's going to show our family and shepherd our family in how to live together as a family in a way that's pleasing to God and that will help all of us draw closer to God.

Some of us, maybe we're struggling through it and our family's struggling through it, but maybe our church parish has a spirit that's guiding it that's not the one whose name is on the door, because, again, there's division, there's resentment, there's a focus on money, there's a focus on prestige, there's a focus on who's getting the attention, who's getting thanked, who's getting applauded, who has what job. And the work we need to do in our parish is to work on banishing that spirit, bringing back the one whose name is on the door, and bringing people together, to live our lives together as a community in a way that's pleasing to God, and a way that enables and equips all of us to draw closer to him.

And maybe we've even got a parish that's not perfect but we're all struggling together toward Christ. Maybe it's our neighborhood. Maybe it would be our neighborhood if we knew any of our neighbors. Maybe it's a pall that's hanging over it. Maybe it's just people who've given up, people who are depressed, people who are despondent, people who don't have hope. You can tell when you're in that type of neighborhood. You can tell from the litter. You can tell from the way people's houses look. You can tell from the way they don't greet each other or talk to each other when they see each other.

In all of these cases, making that change, banishing the one spirit, exorcising the one spirit, and bringing in the other to be followed toward God, isn't something you do with an elaborate ritual. It isn't something you do by being perfect yourself, otherwise we'd all be in trouble. It's something you do by doing little things, little, small, seemingly inconsequential things, over and over again. It's what happens when you go and you mow somebody's lawn; when you cook them a meal; when you see that their kids need new pairs of shoes so you buy them shoes, or give them shoes that your kids have outgrown; when you sit and talk to them and you're kind to them; when you learn your neighbors' names, where they're from, what they care about and what they're thinking and feeling.

Just like with Thessaloniki, that example we gave, it doesn't happen overnight. It took centuries in Thessaloniki. You're not going to turn things around on a dime. You're not going to see immediate results. But slowly, but surely, as we work to follow the angels and the saints, to follow them back to God, and to do that by doing the works of God in the lives of other people whom God has put in our life, has put in our path, change starts to happen. Pretty soon we're not the only one working on it. Pretty soon we have help. Pretty soon we have support. And things start to change a little more, and it goes on and it goes on.

And people and places and groups of people can be transformed this way. It's happened before. It's happened in the world, through Christianity. It can happen again in our day, as horrible as we all think it is. But somebody has to make a start. Somebody has to start doing those little things. And if you're listening to this show tonight—or you're hosting it—it might as well be us. Those are my thoughts.

Fr. Andrew: Amen. Well, that's our show for tonight, everyone. Thank you for listening. If you didn't get through to us live this time, we'd still like to hear from you. You can email us—the email address is lordofspirits@ancientfaith.com—you can message us at our Facebook page; or you can leave us a voicemail at speakpipe.com/lordofspirits, and if you have basic questions about Orthodox Christianity or you need help finding a parish, head over to OrthodoxIntro.org.

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. "When I die and they lay me to rest, I'm going to go to the place that's the best."

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] If you're on Facebook, follow our page and join our discussion group. You can leave ratings and reviews everywhere, but, most importantly, share this show with a friend who is going to love it and benefit from it. I got that reference.

Fr. Stephen: And finally, be sure to go to ancientfaith.com/support and help make sure we and lots of other AFR podcasters stay on the air. "Prepare yourself. You know it's a must. Gotta have a friend in Jesus, so that you know when you die, he's going to recommend you to the spirit in the sky."

Fr. Andrew: Thank you, good night! God bless you! Christ is born. And happy new year to you all.