Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick: Hey, everybody, it's March 14. Some people call it Pi Day, but if you know how to pronounce that letter in Greek, it's very different. So good evening to you, giant-killers—

Fr. Stephen De Young: Yeah, but you can't segue over into eating pie if you pronounce it the other way.

Fr. Andrew: That's correct.

Fr. Stephen: What are you going to consume if you pronounce it the other way?

Fr. Andrew: Right! See, that's why it's a problem.

Fr. Stephen: That's why I think you're making it a problem. [Laughter] Sans pedantry, there is no issue here. That's all.

Fr. Andrew: Right! Yes, what podcast is this? Oh, that's right, it's The Lord of Spirits podcast. My co-host, Fr. Stephen De Young, is with me from Lafayette, Louisiana, and I'm Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick in Emmaus, Pennsylvania. And we are live! And if you're listening to us live and not listening to the recording, you can call us at 855-237-2346, just like the Voice of Steve just said. We're going to get to your calls in the second half of the show, and our Elijah is going to be taking your calls.

Fr. Stephen: And it's— He's a little out of control. He already did that little record-scratch thing at the beginning of the intro, so who knows what's going to happen?

Fr. Andrew: Right! It's going to be a crazy night! [Laughter] Yeah, so we've talked about the Torah probably in just about every episode of the podcast, and here we are now at episode number 87. How many thousands of hours is this podcast now? I've lost count. Until now, though, we have not discussed the Torah in any focused and overarching way, to talk about the Torah as the Torah. One of the questions that we often get and that, frankly, is often raised in Christianity, is this: What is the relationship of the Old Testament, especially the Torah, to the New Testament? What exactly did Christ mean when he said he came not to abolish the Torah but to fulfill it? And what does that fulfillment look like?

Level with me, Father, when Jesus said he did not come to abolish the law but to fulfill it, he basically meant that he was abolishing it, right? I mean, no kosher, am I right?

Fr. Stephen: No.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] See, the thing is he didn't even know which "no" he's saying— which part of that he's saying "no" to. It's just a lot of "no"s.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, I could be saying: no, there's no kosher; or no, he's not right; or no… no, you do still have to worry about how your pickles were killed.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] It's not— The killing of the pickle is not ritualized!

Fr. Stephen: You especially don't want to eat a dill pickle with its blood still in it. You want to make sure it's kosher dill. Yeah. I mean, that— I don't want to go too far down this rabbit-trail, but is the Vlasic pickle stork Jewish? Is that what we're being led to believe?

Fr. Andrew: If so, he is almost certainly a Litvak, because the stork is the national animal of Lithuania.

Fr. Stephen: Ah, I see.

Fr. Andrew: See, it all comes back around.

Fr. Stephen: I played right into it.

Fr. Andrew: That's right! [Laughter] Actually, around this time of year is when the storks start coming back, so it's very timely.

Fr. Stephen: It's like the swallows coming back to Capistrano. So, yeah, we talk about the Torah a lot. We've said a lot of things about the Torah. We've even at least addressed the whole idea of abolishment versus fulfillment of the Torah before, at least in brief. But beyond those summary statements, as you allude to, there's a question of what that looks like and getting more into specifics. With tonight and next week's show and who knows what else, we're going to be sort of—

Fr. Andrew: Two weeks! Two weeks! Don't get people excited we're having a show next week.

Fr. Stephen: Oh, in a couple of weeks, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] In a couple of weeks, yeah, because people, they notice when we say these things, and then they get crazy when we don't do what they expect.

Fr. Stephen: Well, so I didn't say next week's show was going to be Lord of Spirits.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, okay!

Fr. Stephen: Like, who knows what kinds of shows I'm putting on here in Lafayette.

Fr. Andrew: There you go.

Fr. Stephen: None in the first week of Lent, though. [Laughter] But with the next one, yeah, at least with the next few shows we're going to be gradually zooming down to very particulars, because it's one thing to say, for example, as I think I said or something similar in Religion of the Apostles—I don't go back and read my own books, either; that would be really weird [Laughter]—but I said something in the last chapter along the lines of: Every commandment of the Torah is still in effect in the Orthodox Church, something along those lines. It's one thing to say that, and it's even one thing to make a broad argument where people can kind of nod their head to that, but then, you know: "So I can't eat an owl." [Laughter] When you get down to the super-detailed— I don't know why you want to eat an owl, first of all.

Fr. Andrew: I mean, maybe an owl's all you got.

Fr. Stephen: But getting into the weeds. We're going to get a little more— We're going to gradually get into the weeds. We're going to be— We're going to start sort of zoomed out. Over the course of tonight we're going to zoom closer, and then in two weeks, in a mere fortnight, we will be zooming in even closer and getting into said hypothetical aforementioned weeds.

But for tonight we're starting with the broader view, the more zoomed-out. So we've talked about before how the Torah is sort of the foundation-stone of the canon of Scripture, that the Old Testament or the Hebrew Bible is the Torah plus additional books. That's why it's sometimes referred to as the Torah and the Prophets, or the Torah, the Prophets, and the Writings. But the Torah there is always present. We've talked about— a lot at various times from various perspectives, about how all the different Judaisms of the Second Temple period had somewhat different canons, some of them very expansive, some of them very restricted, but there was one thing in common: all of them had the Torah. Even in— So we've even talked about how there were certain groups that were deeply grounded in Enochic Judaism: the book of Enoch, the book of Jubilees, and then other—the book of the Giants—other related Enochic literature form this sort of central— occupied this central place in terms of their reading of Scripture, places like Qumran, for example.

And involved with that— so, involved with parts of the book of Enoch, there is sort of diminishment of the importance of Moses and even sort of a diminishment, one could say, of the Torah in a certain sense, at least in the sense of certain of the commandments. But even in those places, for example, in Qumran, yes, 1 Enoch and Jubilees are the second and third most-common texts there, but number one is Genesis, which, lest we forget, is part of the Torah.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, the beginning of the Torah.

Fr. Stephen: So even Enochich Judaism, which in some ways was a rival to Pharisaic Judaism in the first century BC, in the first century AD, and therefore kind of a rival to the way in which Pharisaic Judaism planted itself firmly in the commandments of the Torah, it was still based and grew out of the Torah, just with a very different reading and understanding of it.

So the Torah is at the core. Everything else is added to the Torah in the Old Testament or the Hebrew Bible. What we call the historical books, sort of the former Prophets, that are called by scholars the Deuteronomistic history, because they describe the history of Israel through a lens and in terms and based on principles that are outlined in the book of Deuteronomy, which is the Torah. Everything is based on Torah.

When we get to the New Testament, we find that the structures of the New Testament canon parallel and mirror the Hebrew Bible or the Old Testament in that we have the gospels, which are presented in a certain way, as a new Torah—not as a new Torah that replaces the old Torah, but as the interpretation of the Torah directly related to the Person of Jesus as the Messiah. We tend to diminish in the gospels Jesus' preaching. We've been taught to do this by our Protestant culture. All of Christ's preaching, all of his teaching, all of those kind of things are sort of the run-up to his death and resurrection, mainly his death but then also, of course, his resurrection. You'll even see a lot of scholars point out: Well, about one-third of each of the gospels is Passion narrative, is death and resurrection, and that's an out-sized portion. Agreed, but the other two-thirds is other stuff! [Laughter] Which is important. And when you look at that other stuff, when you look at Christ's teaching and the parables, when you look at his interactions with the Pharisees and the Sadducees and the Herodians and the scribes, in all of the gospels, those leading-up parts, what they're talking about, what they're arguing about, what they're fussing to him about, the issues are all surrounding the Torah and its interpretation. They're all surrounding the Torah and its interpretation.

When we get to the epistles in the New Testament, the epistles are taking the Hebrew Scriptures as read through the gospels—not the literal text of the gospels, but what is presented in the gospels in terms of the life of Jesus the Messiah—and applying that, putting it into application in the lives of the recipients of the different letters. So even the New Testament is fundamentally grounded in the Torah. I would and have argued that if you have the Torah as a Christian, you actually have all the basis you need for Christian theology, just in the Torah.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. You know, it would be hard to test this thesis, but my sense is that almost every error in theology is an error of either not knowing the Torah or, as I think you've said before, believing that in some way God is not free, or some combination of the two.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah.

Fr. Andrew: That— And, I mean, honestly, I think a lot of the ills here in the 21st century come from not knowing what is in the Torah. A lot of it is actually really straightforward, but we don't want it to be, especially some of the stuff in Leviticus, for instance.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And there are any number of reasons why this is the case. Some of them express themselves as fairly benign, like they'll want to embrace the fulfillment language and just say, "Well, you know, the New Testament explains all that," or "Jesus is the fulfillment of that, so we can just read that."

Fr. Andrew: Right, there's this sense of: "Now we've got this other text that supersedes the first one, so it's nice if you can read that or know it, but really all you really need are the writings of the New Testament."

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, but this can lead us down really bad paths. I once, years ago—I'm going to give no hints as to who this was, but I had an Orthodox clergyman say to me, "Well, all that stuff in the Law"—which is how he was referring to the Torah. "All that stuff in the Law isn't important any more. All that's important is that we love God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength, and love our neighbor as ourselves." To which I replied, "That's Deuteronomy and Leviticus." [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, a lot of the stuff that people think is introduced in the gospels is simply a quote from somewhere in the Torah.

Fr. Stephen: Right. So when Christ is asked, "What is the first and greatest commandment?" he gives two commandments from the Torah and says, "These are the most important ones." So again, this is a discussion about the Torah. When we get to the famous passage in Matthew 5 that we've now alluded to many times but have yet to read, where this— where Christ distinguishes between abolishing the Torah and fulfilling it, we have to come to it with all of that in mind, with the reality of what's in the Scriptures, with the reality of how the gospels are structured and what they contain and how they relate to the Torah, if we want to understand it correctly, because if you go to any passage of the Scriptures, you read it— you read too small a part of it and then try to take it at face value in some literal sense, and then try to read everything else you encounter in the Scriptures according to what you think that one verse said, you're going to end up a Calvinist or something.

Fr. Andrew: Yes! [Laughter] Yeah, there are no skeleton keys to the Bible.

Fr. Stephen: Or many other things. Many other things. I just like to pick on Calvinists because some of my best friends are Calvinists, literally. But, yeah, so we need to bring our understanding of the reality of the Scriptures to bear on how we interpret Christ's discussion in Matthew 5.

Fr. Andrew: Yep. Okay, so before I read it, I actually just want to say hello to— We have someone listening from Shanghai, which I think might be the first time we've had someone actually in China listening, so that's awesome. Someone from Canada, we have someone from Germany, someone from Norway, and of course we love all of you Americans as well.

Fr. Stephen: That, you know— Canuckistan seems much less impressive when you've got those others. [Laughter] We still love you Canuckistanis, but, I mean, you're barely a foreign country.

Fr. Andrew: Oh! Wow. We're not even 20 minutes in and are already getting a little bit spicy. Of course, Canada's not really known for its spicy food, so.

Fr. Stephen: That's true.

Fr. Andrew: All right, Matthew 5—

Fr. Stephen: You'll never see poutine with jalapenos, let me put it to you that way.

Fr. Andrew: I bet that's a thing! That's got to be a thing. Someone's doing that.

Fr. Stephen: Some Canadian who moved to Texas.

Fr. Andrew: Someone's going to write us right now and is going to send us pictures of their poutine with jalapenos in it! [Laughter] Okay, Matthew 5:17-20. This is the Lord speaking.

"Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets. I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not a yod or timul will pass from the Law until all is accomplished. Therefore, whoever relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven."

So this is kind of the core text of what we're going to be talking about on this first half.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And the first verse of that and the last verse of that are the ones that tend to get broken off and used in weird ways, not related to the context. [Laughter] So the first of that, of course, is the "Do not think I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets"—the Torah or the Prophets—"I have come not to abolish them but to fulfill them." That's— You know, when you're having a discussion and you try to point to something in the Old Testament broadly or the Torah in particular, and whomever you're talking to says, "Oh, well, that's the Old Testament."

Fr. Andrew: We've all heard that.

Fr. Stephen: And you say, "Well, Christ didn't abolish the Old Testament," and they say, "No! He didn't abolish it; he fulfilled it," and they quote that one verse. But they're quoting that verse as if to say, "Eh, 'fulfilled,' 'abolished.' I mean, 'fulfill' sounds nicer, but either way you're throwing it out the window."

Fr. Andrew: Oh, we have a South African listening!

Fr. Stephen: There we go!

Fr. Andrew: Yeah!

Fr. Stephen: And then the other one that sometimes gets broken— Well, we'll start there. So the next few verses just, like, put to lie that interpretation, because Christ goes on to say, "Until heaven and earth pass away"—and this has not happened yet; sorry, preterists—"not a yod or a timul will pass from the Law until all is accomplished." And a yod, for those of you who don't know anything about Hebrew, kind of looks like an apostrophe; it's the smallest letter of the Hebrew alphabet. A timul is part of a letter that separates a chet from a teh. So it's: "not the smallest letter, not the smallest part of a letter—will pass from the Torah until all is accomplished." "All is accomplished" here is connected to heaven and earth passing away. So that includes now. None of those things are passing away, so "fulfillment" does not mean "pass away," for sure.

And then the next verse takes it even further:

"Whoever relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven."

Not only do they not pass away, but whatever Christ means by "fulfilled," by the Torah being fulfilled by him, means that we who are seeking to enter the kingdom of heaven, Christians, are going to be doing them and teaching them. I don't see how you get much more clear than that.

Those verses also kind of mess with the way verse 20 is sometimes broken off and used weirdly—and this is our Calvinist friends. They'll kind of split it off from the context and say, "I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven," and they use that to say, "Ah, see? The scribes and the Pharisees, their righteousness is from the Law; it's from the Torah. And you need Christ's righteousness, which is greater than that."

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, instead.

Fr. Stephen: So here's the problem with that. The people who are being talked about here are people who will not enter the kingdom of heaven. And we're just told that the people who do and teach the commandments of the Torah will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. So if doing and teaching the commandments of the Torah excludes you from the kingdom of heaven, how can you also be great in the kingdom of heaven?

Fr. Andrew: I'm trying to do the math in my head here...

Fr. Stephen: Yes, yes. [Laughter] That math cannot be done; that circle cannot be squared.

Fr. Andrew: Right! I mean—

Fr. Stephen: Again, Calvinist friends, you may have a bunch of good points about this, but this verse should not be one of them, because that's not what it says.

Fr. Andrew: Yep.

Fr. Stephen: Very clearly here, Christ is saying, "It's not abolished. None of it passes away. It's fulfilled. Not one stroke of a brush passes away. Not one commandment should be taught against or relaxed!" So again, "fulfilled" does not mean "relaxed," because we tend to—and we talked about this a little in a very old episode— There's this idea that Christ sort of fulfills different commandments in different ways. When folks who want to use "fulfilled" to mean something like "abolished," they'll say, "Well, Christ fulfills the moral law because he keeps all the moral commandments in the Torah, but we still have to keep the moral commandments. So he fulfills them because he keeps them, but we should keep them, too." I'm not even sure what "fulfill" means there vis-à-vis us. But then they'll say, "Well, but Christ fulfills the sacrificial system by his sacrifice, and therefore we don't do those any more." So in that case Christ fulfilling it means we don't do it.

Fr. Andrew: I was going to say, it seems like the whole idea is: How do we work this out so we don't have to do the stuff that's in the Torah? [Laughter] Like, that seems to be what it's about.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and, as we're going to get into in the rest of this first half, this is not a wheel you need to reinvent. [Laughter] People are trying to sort of reverse engineer Christian practice. They're trying to say, "Okay, well, we do keep these commandments about sexual immorality, but we eat shrimp, and probably somebody out there eats owls. So, like, how do you explain that?" So there are all these attempts to reverse engineer. That's a very bad way to interpret Scripture, let me just say. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Right. The presumption there is: "Okay. Okay, guys. I'm going to figure this out, and now we can apply all this the correct way. Like, who cares how this has been being done for all these thousands of years. We've got to figure it out for ourselves. We need to figure out what exactly does 'fulfillment' mean and how does this apply and all these specific—" As you said, to reinvent the wheel, come up with a new system.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so in the pages of the Scriptures themselves, including the pages of the Torah itself, we have the tools to understand why things came to be the way they are in the Christian Church vis-à-vis the commandments of the Torah. And that's a lot of what we're going to be getting into now for the rest of this half.

Let's say we're successful in talking through the gospels and going through Matthew 5 like we just did to show— And this is in the Sermon on the Mount; this is near the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount, just to locate that part that we read. So Christ is teaching this right after the Beatitudes, so this is part of the beginning: he's framing what he's about to teach. Everything he's about to teach about the Torah and about the commandments, he's framing with: "I'm not getting rid of nothing. I'm not even relaxing anything. This is going to continue to be done and taught within this."

So even if we do our jobs well, or people who don't know who we are and haven't heard this show just read the text in an honest and straightforward way and come to the same conclusion, that this is what Christ is doing, there's still an issue that crops up, because there's this whole swath of people—it's an interesting collection of people, who have probably never been collected together before—who, even if they're willing to accept Jesus as a teacher of Torah and an explainer and an interpreter of Torah, throw in a monkey wrench with St. Paul, in a different way.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and I think the reason why that gets done— Or maybe I should say one of the big— Yeah, I need to flip it on the other side. One of the big consequences of why people think that there's this huge shift with St. Paul is this idea that there was this religion called Judaism that was based on the Torah, and then there was this religion called Christianity, and St. Paul belongs to Judaism and he converts to Christianity, that they're these two different religions. And so, as we're going to see here, there's all kinds of reasons why you might want to say that. And one of the things that we're saying and I think is a major, major theme throughout this—the hundreds of hours we've spent on this podcast now—is that the religion of the Old Testament and the religion of the New Testament, the religion of the Christian Church: same religion. Same religion. It's not two different religions.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And that's especially connected in the case of Martin Luther, but some of the people we're going to be talking about even precede Martin Luther, so this isn't just something he starts, but this is something he returns to.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, we can't blame him.

Fr. Stephen: There has been, since a very early period in the history of the Church, a bad way to read St. Paul. This may even be what St. Peter is referring to in 2 Peter when he talks about the people who— talks about how there are some things in St. Paul's letters that are hard to understand and people twist them to their own destruction. This may even be the particular reading he's talking about. St. Paul even sometimes seems to allude to people understanding him that way, because when he does his rhetorical "Is this what I'm saying? No, of course I'm not saying that!"— [Laughter] So there's been this bad way of reading St. Paul, from very early, probably from some of his critics during his lifetime, which is that he is speaking against Moses, against the Torah, saying, "Get rid of that stuff. Now we've got Jesus, it's not important."

And this affects— This reading affects all kinds of things in big and small ways. An obvious early example would be the Marcionite movements and the various Gnostic movements that adopted that position on the Old and New Testaments.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and they were really explicit about it, too. Like: "The God of the Old Testament is a different God, and he's evil, then forget about that stuff. The Father of Jesus Christ is a different God."

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and, sorry, DBH, but saying that you think the evil Old Testament God doesn't exist doesn't make you not a Marcionite. [Laughter] If the Gnostic shoe fits, you must wear it.

And there's a whole swath of Gnostic groups, then, that had a reading of St. Paul. They tried to twist and use certain elements of St. Paul talking about the Torah to try to say, "Yeah, see? This is bad," and to try to make this contrast with Christ—however they saw Christ, because we're talking about Gnostic groups, so "Jesus Christ," "Logos," sometimes these are separate emanations of something, you know Gnostics. [Laughter] But who try to drive this wedge.

But— And let me say, before I name any other groups, these are disparate groups. This is an odd collection of disparate groups. I'm not saying these groups are all the same. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: No, but they do have this one weird thing in common!

Fr. Stephen: They have this one weird thing in common, but they are not the same. So another group that does this is dispensationalists, at least classic dispensationalists. There's a lot of different versions, because there is no pope of dispensationalism any more; Scofield died. [Laughter] So now everyone can do what's right in their own eyes.

Fr. Andrew: A great disappointment to them all.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. [Laughter] But so dispensationalism will— classically affirmed: Yes, Jesus is talking about the Torah all the time, and so those things that Jesus teaches in the gospels don't apply to the Church. Those are going to apply to the Jewish people in the millennial kingdom when they return to Christ, when they return to Jesus as the Messiah. And so what St. Paul writes, that's directed toward the Church, and the Church is, for them, innately non-Jewish, innately Gentile, not made up of a mix, just the Church is Gentiles.

And so, again, though for very different reasons, they end up reading St. Paul in much the same way, that St. Paul is this— There's this break in distinction between Christ and St. Paul, and that St. Paul is arguing for "Forget about that Torah stuff; we're doing a whole new thing now." Frankly, there's at least a light strain of that even outside dispensationalism and Evangelicalism in that when you look at issues like worship, there's an assumption that, as St. Paul is planting churches, he's essentially starting worship from scratch, that none of the things with incense or sacrifice or any of that, even very much of the synagogue stuff, is carried over into Christian worship. Christian worship is just this simple thing that happens in people's houses, where a few songs are sung and somebody reads Scripture and preaches, which looks an awful lot like what folks are doing, you know, a couple thousand years later, suspiciously, being projected into the past. But there's sort of that assumption of starting from scratch, which is sort of a light version of this, but still points to some kind of distinction where St. Paul is taking at least parts of the Torah and setting it aside.

I'm going to go ahead and say it. This is going to sound like a cheap shot to some people, but I do not mean it as a cheap shot, not that that disclaimer will help. And I will clarify after I say this as to what I mean by it. So there is this division, classically, that comes out of John Calvin but is in a lot of Protestantism and Evangelicalism, where you divide the Law into these three parts: the civil law, the ceremonial law, and the moral law. That's the basic— For your average Evangelical or even confessional Protestant person, some version of that is part of this explanation or reconstruction. It's not like a Marcionite position where there's this total break; it's sort of a partial break? This is just a historical point. Historically, the first place where we see the commandments of the Torah broken up like that is in a Gnostic text from the late second and early third century, called the Letter to Ptolemy.

Fr. Andrew: How about that?

Fr. Stephen: And that Gnostic text is deliberately trying to find a compromise between Marcionism and what the Orthodox Church was teaching. So he's deliberately trying— Now, I'm not saying that's where Calvin got it—in fact, I'm pretty sure Calvin never knew that existed—I'm not saying Evangelicals are Gnostics—some of them probably are, but I'm not saying all of them are! [Laughter] I'm not saying that. I'm just saying, historically this is the first place where we see that kind of argument. And you can understand historically why, in that historical setting, that kind of argument would emerge. It's a species of this same kind of argument for a disjunction, either partial or total.

But going back to people who thought there was a total disjunction, so far we've had Gnostics and dispensationalists, and now we have Friedrich Nietzsche.

Fr. Andrew: Wait, what? [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: All hanging out together at a party. What kind of playlist would we put together? Anyway.

Fr. Andrew: It's exhausting. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: And Nietzsche took this in a way that's very counter-intuitive, based on what we've already said about Scripture and based on subsequent theological and philosophical history, but Nietzsche thought there was this complete break between Christ and St. Paul, but he thought it went the other way, meaning from Nietzsche's point of view, Christ was an example of the Übermensch. He comes along, he revalues all values, he transforms everything, thinks completely outside the box, through his preaching calls into view a whole new world, a whole new way of ordering the world and possibilities and everything. And then for Nietzsche, St. Paul comes along and Judaizes it!

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Wait, what?

Fr. Stephen: Yes! St. Paul comes along and just turns it, like wrenches it back into this Jewish mold.

Fr. Andrew: Wow. Well, he is a Pharisee, so.

Fr. Stephen: Right, yeah. So he's included here, even though he's kind of the inverse: he still has this break, this idea that there's this big break between what St. Paul is doing and saying and writing and what Jesus did.

Next up is Islam!

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, well...

Fr. Stephen: Which means if we're— Well, already with the dispensationalists we couldn't have alcohol at our party, but now we definitely can't.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Which means Nietzsche's going to be bored. [Laughter] But this is a major move, of course, within Islam, because Islam teaches dogmatically that Jesus is the Jewish Messiah; they believe in his virgin birth; and they believe he was a prophet. However, they believe that he was a prophet who taught Islam. So if they're going to say that, then they need somebody who came up with Christianity, so they pick St. Paul: St. Paul made this up.

In some of the more advanced modern versions of this—and I say "modern" because honestly these aren't arguments you would've heard being made at the Caliphate against St. John of Damascus; these are modern arguments, based on modern biblical scholarship in a lot of cases—but they've tried to revise St. Peter and St. James into being totally different people than they're presented as by history or the Scriptures in order to make them also kind of Islamic, like they're the real heirs of Jesus, and St. Paul comes and stages this coup or something when he creates Christianity. But again, there's this huge divide.

And then, of course, as I just alluded to, modern scholarship does this all the time.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because they're just trying to take the whole thing apart, frankly.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And having done a lot of work in St. Paul recently, I have less and less appreciation for this, and I think it's dumber and dumber, because the kind of things they point to are, like, linguistic things, like Christ talks about the kingdom of God a lot, and St. Paul only uses that term a couple of times.

Fr. Andrew: Um… Okay. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, like it's that level of stuff. Like, St. Paul doesn't use the same words that Jesus did. Jesus says, "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength; and love your neighbor as yourself. The whole Torah is summed up in these two commandments." And St. Paul says, "The one who loves keeps the whole Torah." See, he uses totally different words! [Laughter] They're totally at odds with each other!

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Normally we reserve calls to the second half, but we actually have someone calling who has a question that is directly connected to what we're talking about right this moment, so I thought I would go ahead—

Fr. Stephen: Is it Bart Ehrman!?

Fr. Andrew: I— I don't think so.

Fr. Stephen: Okay, it's not friend-of-the-show Bart Ehrman.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] No!

Fr. Stephen: Because if he calls in, if he ever calls in, it doesn't matter what half, he gets straight through.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, let him in, Elijah, if Bart Ehrman calls in. No, no, this is actually Michelle from Florida. Michelle, welcome to The Lord of Spirits podcast. Are you there?

Michelle: Oh, yeah. Hi! Thank you.

Fr. Andrew: Hi! Welcome! You are probably the first person ever to get in during the first half.

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Michelle: I'm flattered; I'm truly flattered. Thank you.

Fr. Stephen: You yourself have staged a coup.

Michelle: [Laughter] Thank you. Oh, you want my question, obviously.

Fr. Andrew: Yes! So what's on your mind, Michelle?

Fr. Stephen: Unless you want to talk about Wrestlemania. I'll talk about that beforehand, if you want.

Michelle: I have no expertise in that, I'm sorry.

Fr. Stephen: It's okay.

Michelle: I'm just trying to understand why there was such limited Christian resistance to Hitler, given that the Jews— we share the same commandments. It just seemed to me that we're kind of all Jews in spirit, if you want to use that term. And so I can't understand— And it wasn't just one branch of Christianity; it was right across the board. I think the only objections I've ever read about were from the Greek Orthodox archbishops didn't—in Greece, obviously, and Roddie Edmonds, whose famous phrase was "We're all Jews here." So I'm just trying to understand why was that. Is that because of what you were talking about earlier, that the strict Protestants really didn't see it that way? I'm sorry I'm not phrasing that very well, but I just wondered if you had an opinion on that.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. I think the first thing I'll say is there certainly were plenty of Christians in Europe, including in Germany, who resisted what Hitler was doing to the Jews. I think— Wasn't it, Father, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was the one that— I'm blanking out.

Fr. Stephen: Tried to assassinate him?

Michelle: Yeah, Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so that definitely existed, and certainly outside of Germany there were people who resisted that, largely on the basis of, say, these are human beings and human beings shouldn't be treated this way. But at the same time, I mean, there was a lot of people who agreed with Hitler. My sense—and now, mind you, World War II is not really my area of history, so I'm not really an expert on this, but my sense is that when people maybe engaged in a little bit of Marcionism, that is to say, this kind of rejection or at least marginalization of the Old Testament as part of this, it was largely to justify the way that they already wanted to behave, much like, for instance, in 19th-century America people used passages from Scripture to justify race-based slavery. It wasn't because they had read the Bible and concluded: "Oh, we should be keeping slaves, you guys!" No, it was: "Oh, we have slaves, and, yeah, I'm a good Christian. In fact, here's a Bible verse." I think that that's more the way that it went. I don't think that World War II era and previous anti-Semitism and the Holocaust and so forth was based on a reading of the Scripture. I don't know. Correct me if I'm wrong about that, Father.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so you're right in that ideas don't cause things; people do things, and they generate the ideologies they need to justify them, to do work for them. You have to— I mean, I don't want to pull a Putin here, but you have to go back a few centuries in Germany. [Laughter] And you have to look at Martin Luther. Sorry, Lutheran friends. I am not arguing here that you are fruit of the poisoned tree or something, but we have to be honest about the historical person, Martin Luther.

Michelle: Oh, yeah, the fifth book of Luther. Is that right?

Fr. Andrew: Fr. Stephen, did we lose you? Oh wow, this is like the old days when we—

Fr. Stephen: Um.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, there he is!

Fr. Stephen: So Martin Luther, his continued— in existence after breaking with and being excommunicated from the Roman Catholic Church, depended on the goodwill of certain German princes. And so not so much theologically but in matters related to it—

Fr. Andrew: Oh, kind of breaking up there a little bit. This is like the old days of Lord of Spirits. It's exciting!

Fr. Stephen: —isn't revolt. He just provided and encouraged the princes to murder thousands of peasants. You can see this with the crushing of the Anabaptist movement in Germany.

Fr. Andrew: There he is!

Fr. Stephen: And he did this with On the Jews and their Lies, where he called for synagogues to be burned, Torah books to be burned, which was to justify what those German princes were doing in wanting to seize the wealth and land and holdings of Jewish people who had accumulated some wealth within Germany. So they were otherized, their things were taken, they were killed—Luther justified it in service to those princes.

That ideology became baked into the German state as it formed. Hitler did not just come along and start anti-Semitism. There were pogroms, there were outbreaks of violence against Jews for centuries all through there. What Hitler was doing— And so the state—the state Protestant churches in Europe—had bought into that ideological superstructure by the time Hitler came along.

When we're talking about the Roman Catholic Church, it's a little different. The Roman Catholic Church had gotten into bed with colonialism. One of the things people— There are some good books on this that have been published in the last decade or so, but one of the things people don't realize as Hitler formulated his plans was: Germany didn't have any colonies, unlike Britain or France or Belgium or Portugal, Spain. And so his idea was to colonize the Slavic lands. His plan, his overarching plan, was not even primarily focused on the Jews; it was primarily focused on he wanted to kill 90% of the Slavs and enslave the rest and put them to work and make everything east of him greater, a greater Germany, essentially have it as colonies. And all the stuff he wanted to do was the stuff that, like, Belgium had done in the Congo, that Britain had done in India, that Spain had done in various places, that the United States had done in Cuba at one point.

And so the Roman Catholic Church, along the way with the settlement of the New World and these things, had put similar elements of ideological superstructure in place that condoned that kind of behavior overseas, condoned that kind of behavior in the colonies, because of what now seem horrifically racist comments about the native populations. One of the heroes of the settlement of Central and South America is Bartolomeo de las Casas, who managed to argue the pope into seeing the indigenous people of North and South America as human, but in the process he sold out Africans.

Fr. Andrew: Wow!

Fr. Stephen: And gave his blessing to the pope blessing the slave trade from Africa.

Fr. Andrew: I was going to say, I just want to add one other piece of context, which is that, you know, this episode is not about anti-Semitism, although there's— Right, when you start to reject the Old Testament, then this question kind of gets raised to some extent.

Fr. Stephen: It is tied up in this, yeah. When you read 19th-century biblical scholarship from Germany, it's there in how they read the Old Testament.

Fr. Andrew: Right, right, but I should say I know that sometimes— Orthodox people sometimes like to point the finger at our Protestant and Catholic friends and say, "Look at these problems you guys have had. We've never had that issue," or whatever. The reality—

Fr. Stephen: Oh, no. No. Under the tsar, there were similar things in place about Jews in Russia, in the Russian lands, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: Literally, in most of Russia, Jews were not even allowed to live during what was called the Pale of Settlement. They only could live west of a certain line, and they were treated super badly.

Fr. Stephen: But this question was specifically about Hitler: because he was after the Slavs, that made the Russians and the Russian lands his natural enemies. So where I'm going with this is the Roman Catholic Church also had that ideological superstructure in place that could be used to justify those things. I think one of the things that happens after World War II is that just that level of those atrocities and the fact that those atrocities were committed in Europe so they were in front of everyone. People in Europe and in the United States didn't see what was happening in the Congo. They didn't know. They didn't really know. But when it was sort of revealed in their faces and everyone knew and couldn't avoid it, that started to break down that ideological superstructure. Those things have become much less justifiable now.

So I don't think it's directly related that now people are sort of reassessing the relationship between Old and New Testaments and that kind of thing. I think that's more related to discovering the Dead Sea Scrolls, some other textual discoveries, and that kind of thing. But it has certainly cleared some space. It has made those kind of ideas that were used to justify that kind of thing much more unacceptable and, being more unacceptable now, kind of a space has opened up.

Fr. Andrew: That was a long response, Michelle! Does that answer your question? [Laughter]

Michelle: Yeah, no, no, I'm just super grateful. That was super helpful. I think it's interesting to note that the first thing that the Germans did when they invaded Poland is to round up all the Catholic priests in these small villages and send them to Dachau.

Frs. Andrew and Stephen: Yeah.

Michelle: I have relatives who were part of the Slavic Holocaust. I understand. I mean, people don't probably know. Thank you, Father, for mentioning that 11 million Slavs died as well as the six million Jews. So, yes, that was really, really helpful for the context. It does, yeah, it answers my question. I'm sorry to have taken up so much time.

Fr. Andrew: No, no. I mean, we can always cut you off, so… [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: You think on this show we worry about going long? [Laughter] Is this your first episode of this?

Michelle: Oh no, no, I'm a devotee. I've done over 300 hours of your other podcasts.

Fr. Andrew: All right! A true fan.

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: All right, well, thank you for calling in tonight.

Michelle: Thank you, Fathers. Bye.

Fr. Andrew: All right. Okay, yes, right! Yeah, so we've just ticked off Gnostics, dispensationalists, Nietzsche, Islam, modern biblical scholars—

Fr. Stephen: —modern scholars walk into a bar...

Fr. Andrew: —and, oh, by the way, state-worshiping anti-Semites! All have this one weird thing in common… Yeah, they on some level reject the Old Testament and want to separate it from the New Testament in one way or another. But isn't that justified? Isn't that what St. Paul said? We actually had someone ask in one of the comments, like: "Wait, you said the religion of the Old Testament and the religion of the New Testament are the same religion? Well, St. Paul, he doesn't say that in his letters; he says the opposite!" I responded, "Well, keep listening."

Fr. Stephen: Ask him which of those categories he was in. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: The next thing we're going to talk about— Yeah, exactly, which category—

Fr. Stephen: Are you: a modern scholar, a dispensationalist, a Muslim, a Gnostic? Are you Friedrich Nietzsche? [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: If you are, please call into the show!

Fr. Stephen: Yes, are you that hologram that Jordan Peterson was talking to me about? Listening to the show and in the YouTube chat.

Fr. Andrew: Wow… That's a story for another time.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah.

Fr. Andrew: So what does St. Paul say about this? Does he regard himself as making some kind of dysjunction from the Old Testament, from the Torah?

Fr. Stephen: Well, other than continually saying the opposite, over and over and over again throughout the book of Acts, there's lots. I mean, this in and of itself, we can do a whole episode on just St. Paul's view of the Torah. And who knows what lies in the future, but that's not tonight! But we have just a couple of examples, a couple of examples of the way St. Paul talks about the Torah that kind of put the lie to this idea that he was somehow opposed to it.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. So, Exhibit A: Romans 2:12-16. He says, "For all who have sinned without the Law—" And we should understand, by the way, that "Law" in the New Testament is referring to the Torah, so I'm just going to go ahead and say the Torah, because I think that makes it a little bit clearer for us.

For all who have sinned without the Torah will also perish without the Torah; and all who have sinned under the Torah will be judged by the Torah. For it is not the hearers of the Torah who are righteous before God, but the doers of the Torah who will be justified. For when Gentiles, who do not have the Torah, by nature do what the Torah requires, they are a Torah to themselves, even though they do not have the Torah. They show that the work of the Torah is written on their hearts, for their conscience also bears witness and their conflicting thoughts accuse or even excuse them on that day when, according to my gospel, God judges the secrets of men by Christ Jesus.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, so this is— In the past I've done my list of people who the Bible says kept the Torah perfectly, which gets many people upset among our Protestant friends, but one of those groups on the list is, from what we just said, some Gentiles. Some Gentiles, because St. Paul isn't presenting this as a hypothetical: Hypothetically, some Gentile could just, you know, be a really good guy and keep all the commandments even though he hasn't heard the Torah. He's saying, "This happens."

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, he doesn't say, "If Gentiles do this"; he says, "When Gentiles do this."

Fr. Stephen: "—do this, they show that—the Torah is written in their hearts."

Fr. Andrew: "—this is an actual thing."

Fr. Stephen: Right. And St. Paul is using this as an argument against the Jewish Christians whom he's writing to in Rome. St. Paul writes the epistle to the Romans after the Claudian expulsion of the Jews from Rome to try to help reconcile—which was for two years—to try to help reconcile the Jewish and non-Jewish Christians in Rome. And so in chapter one of Romans, he spent some time talking about how horrible the Gentile world was before the Gospel came into it, how sinful, how wicked, how idolatrous, but then he also, in chapter two, turns to the Jewish Christians and says, "Now before you get all excited, you had the Torah. Did you keep it? Did you actually keep the commandments?" Because as St. Paul says, "It's not the person who hears it. It's not the person who goes in the synagogue and hears somebody read the Torah who's justified, who's in the right, who's a righteous person; it's the person who actually does what it says." And he's holding up: "There are Gentiles out there who have never heard the Torah in their lives, never seen a synagogue, don't know what a Torah is, but who have kept it better than you, because it's written on their hearts. And those Gentiles who never heard a word of it are going to be in a better place," as he says at the end, "when God, through Christ, judges the world. They're going to be in a better place than you are if you heard the Torah and didn't keep it."

But so where in here is he saying the Torah is bad?

Fr. Andrew: I mean, the opposite! [Laughter] He essentially says even the people who don't have it, they have it if they do it.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And the mark of them being righteous people and being found to be righteous people on the day of judgment will be that they have kept it, even without having heard it. And the condemnation of Jewish people who haven't kept it is going to be by the Torah. Notice, he says this condemnation stuff he's talking about is when Christ returns to judge the earth. When Christ returns to judge the earth, they're going to be judged according to the Torah, he says.

Fr. Andrew: Right, because Christ is, in a very real sense, the last word of the Torah.

Fr. Stephen: And so it's not that you were judged— in the past you were judged according to the Torah and now you're going to be judged according to something else which has superseded it.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, no.

Fr. Stephen: That's not what he says. And he's writing entirely to Christians here, Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians. Galatians 5:14 is what I quoted earlier when I was joking about the different phrasing.

Fr. Andrew: Where he says, "For the whole law is fulfilled in one word: you shall love your neighbor as yourself."

Fr. Stephen: Right. Totally different [from] what Jesus said, because it's phrased somewhat differently in the Greek. [Laughter] And so we can go on and on and on. Again, these are from Galatians and Romans. Galatians and Romans are the two epistles where he supposedly is saying bad things about the Torah. He says elsewhere, "The one who loves keeps the whole Torah." He's taking the same approach to the Torah that Jesus did. He's taking the same approach to the Torah that Jesus did.

But we have this fundamental fact that we've already mentioned, that in the Church, throughout her history, the Torah has been seen to apply to Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians differently, at bare minimum. The answer to why this is, the answer to why I can enjoy a good crawfish boil here even during Lent is found in Acts 15, which, interestingly enough, is another place people go when they want to say the Law has been done away with.

Fr. Andrew: There you go. Right. [Laughter] Like, read the chapter, everybody.

Fr. Stephen: What happens in Acts 15 is called the Council of Jerusalem.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, this is the apostles getting together to talk about, basically, the big controversy about Gentiles becoming Christians. Do they need to be circumcised first?

Fr. Stephen: Do they need to be circumcised to receive the Eucharist? Too often, that Eucharist part gets left out. Yeah, and calling it a council is kind of anachronistic and kind of not. It's anachronistic in the sense that we're using "council" in the sense that we talk about later Church councils. And this is obviously before councils were a formal thing, but at the same time, the Council of Jerusalem really sets the paradigm and the structure, including the phrasing of the proclamation at the end that's going to be used at later Church councils.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because they'll all say, "It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us," which is literally a quotation from the Apostolic Council in Jerusalem.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so this is sort of the Ur-council. This is like Ecumenical Council Zero, or Negative-One, I guess; Minus-One if we're doing the Godzilla thing. [Laughter]

There is this issue. There is this issue about circumcision, and it relates to the Eucharist, because within Judaism— There was not— Let me say this first. Just as today, there were not Jewish people going around trying to circumcise Gentiles and get them to be Jews, in general.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it was not an evangelistic—

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, this was not a thing. [Laughter] Not a thing that happened. So when we see these people from the party of the Pharisees in Acts 15—so we see Pharisees wanting to circumcise Gentiles, that should trigger something. You should go: "Wait a second. What's— Why? Why would they want to do that? Why would they think that was necessary?" Well, if you go back in Exodus to when the Passover was given—I believe this is in Exodus 14, during one of the reiterations—it is stated that everyone who eats the Passover must be circumcised. That Gentiles, sojourners, could come and live in the land of Israel and not become Israelites; they didn't have to, to live there. But if they wanted to eat the Passover, then they and their household had to be circumcised and become Israelites.

So Christ, of course, institutes the Eucharist at the Passover. And the practice of the Eucharist and the way it was seen, as we've talked about on the show, in our episode on the Eucharist and other places, is deeply embedded in what's going on in the Passover. And so this was viewed by the early Christians as a ritual sacrifice that's very closely connected to the Passover. So the question really was: Yeah, it's cool that these Gentiles are coming because of the Messiah to worship the God of Israel with us. This is wonderful, this is beautiful, this is something that was prophesied in the Hebrew Scriptures, when the Messiah came this would happen—but are they allowed to eat the Passover? Are they allowed to eat the Eucharist if they haven't been circumcised? So this is a question about how does the Eucharist that Christ instituted, how does that relate to the very particular set of commandments and regulations in the Torah? So this is a Torah question.

This is a Torah question, and so these people from the party of the Pharisees with the one view come to the apostles, led by St. James who ultimately issues the decision, not St. Peter [Clears throat; laughter]—I don't know why I had to point that out—

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, what does that have to do with anything?

Fr. Stephen: —to get a ruling. What is the ruling for our communities? You're the leaders: what is the ruling for our communities in terms of how we apply that part of the Torah in terms of our practice?

And so this is how the issue is ultimately decided, is St. James in particular, who we know even from outside of the Scriptures, even from, like, Josephus, was this incredibly pious Jewish man who knew the Torah, who spent so much time praying the Temple he had calluses on his knees so his legs looked like camel legs—that's what we're told by Josephus—renowned among all the Jewish people, even those who weren't Christians, for his piety—he makes a ruling, and he makes that ruling based on the Torah, not based on setting aside the Torah. Because if you go to chapters 17 through roughly 23—people disagree whether it ends in 23, 24, 26, because, you know, you've got to publish papers about something—there's what is called in Leviticus the holiness code. And most of the commandments within the holiness code are prefaced with "God speaks to Moses and says, 'Say to the sons of Israel— dah-dah-dah-dah-dah' " Chapter 19 has a bunch of food laws. "Say to the sons of Israel, 'Of the owl, the night-hawk, and the sparrow, thou shalt not eat.' " Because, of course, Moses spoke King James English, as we know.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: What else?

Fr. Andrew: That's what we speak at my house.

Fr. Stephen: But there are other places, like Leviticus 18, which gives the commandments about sexual immorality, where God says to Moses, "Say to the sons of Israel and all of the strangers and foreigners who live in the land," and then gives the commandments. So there are some commandments in the Torah, on a very literal reading—in fact, most of the commandments of the Torah—apply to Israelites, and then there is a subset of those commandments that apply both to the Israelites and to anyone who is living in the land. Anyone who is living in the land.

What St. James does is he looks at this and says:Okay, well, these are Gentiles. I don't see anything in the Hebrew Scriptures—St. Paul will agree with this; he will say the same thing—remarkable how St. James and St. Paul actually agreed; sorry, Muslims—that says that these people are going to stop being— when they come to worship the God of Israel they're going to stop being whatever they were—they're going to stop being Greeks, they're going to stop being Egyptians, they're going to stop— In fact, quite the opposite. What those prophecies about the nations say over and over again is that those nations and their kings are going to come and make these offerings, are going to come and worship the God of Israel. It doesn't say they're all going to become Israelites, ever.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, all the nations— all the nations will come and worship Israel's God.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And so St. James says they don't need to become Jewish, and therefore, since they're not becoming Jewish, they are only responsible for the commandments that are directed toward those who live in the land. They're not responsible for, therefore— They can eat an owl. [Laughter] They can't be sexually immoral.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and no idolatry.

Fr. Stephen: Right, no idolatry. And if you look in the holiness code— The reason I brought up the holiness code in particular is that there are four places where the commandments are applied to everyone, and they are: sexual immorality, idolatry, and in two places that you can't consume blood.

Fr. Andrew: Which— This is literally the list that's agreed upon in Acts 15.

Fr. Stephen: Right. Acts 15: those are the four commandments. That's why I focused on the holiness code. So he literally says: Here's the four commandments that everyone has to keep, so these are the ones that you need to keep, by the way. Those are still part of Orthodox canon law; those still apply to you, including the whole blood-eating thing.

But the other ones, if you're not Jewish, do not apply to you! God didn't command you to do those things. This is what— So, for example, in Galatians, when St. Paul says to Gentile Christians, "If you go and get circumcised, you have to keep the whole Law," this is what he means. "You want to become Jewish, you're going to have to become Jewish." Now, he'll go further. He'll say other things, like he'll say, "Right now, you have these promises in Christ, and so if you go and get circumcised, you're basically saying: Ah, forget about Christ; I'm going to go keep Torah." Obviously, that's a problem. [Laughter] And that's what he means by cutting yourself off from Christ, but he also makes the point: Now you're bound to the whole Law.

And this is how Romans 2 can work, by the way, because if when we went through Romans 2, you might have been thinking, "Really? There's some, like, random Roman out there who somehow never ate shrimp, never did any of those things?" He wasn't responsible for any of those things! He's not an Israelite!

Fr. Andrew: Right, no Gentiles keeping kosher.

Fr. Stephen: Like, that's not required of them!

Fr. Andrew: —but why would they? What weird confluence of coincidence would that have to be, that there was some Gentile somewhere, keeping kosher?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, accidentally. But that's not required of him. That's not required of him by the Torah. And this is not, by the way, just to be clear— This is not something, like, St. James came up with. This is not like: "Oh, man, this is a real problem. What are we going to do? Well, hey! Have you noticed this in Leviticus?" There was already— This was already firmly established in terms of Jewish interpretation of the Torah.

And an example of this from the Second Temple period—so, pre-Christian, in the Second Temple period—is in the book of Jubilees. The way it's presented in the book of Jubilees is not in terms of the holiness code but in terms of Noah, because after the flood Noah's the father of everybody. Shem is one of his sons, and then one of those sons goes on; from Shem's line comes Abraham; from Abraham's line comes Israel, but Noah's everybody's dad, whether you're European, African, Asian. And so the book of Jubilees goes there and comes up with basically the same list, basically. Now, murder is added, but I think we were kind of clear on the murder being bad thing. [Laughter] I don't think St. James needed to reiterate that to Gentile Christians: "By the way, no murder!" He didn't have to— theft. You know.

So this was already something. This was already a known principle, that— And this is why Israelites and later Jewish people didn't go out and try to convert Gentiles in terms of— They're happy for them to give up idolatry and worship the true God, but didn't go out and try to get them to get circumcised or try and get them to keep kosher, try and get their neighbors to stop eating pork—because that's not how they understood it. They understood it as: No, we don't. And that's not given to them.

What St. Paul is constantly doing— St. Paul is not trying to make overarching rules or lay down principles or construct this new religion, Christianity, because he doesn't think there is one. St. Paul was a Pharisee his whole life; he was Jewish his whole life. So were the other apostles—not Pharisees, but Jewish. Their whole lives, they didn't think they had a new religion at all. But what St. Paul in particular is doing, because he's going out and planting church communities in these pagan Gentile cities that have a membership that is part Jewish Christian and part Gentile Christian, is he's constantly working to navigate between those two and bring those two groups together as one. And everything he says about the Torah is in that context. It's not in the context of "What still applies and what doesn't for all Christians?" or "Morality among non-Christians." He's not talking about any of that. It's: "How do Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians, who live differently in some ways but share a certain part of their life as Christians together—how do we keep them together? How do we keep them together? How do they function together?" That's what he's doing.

Fr. Andrew: Yep. I also want to recommend, everyone, by the way, if you want a really long and detailed description of what's going on in the book of Romans, Fr. Stephen has that on The Whole Counsel of God podcast. All right! Well. It's been a good, beefy first half. We're going to go ahead and take our first break, and we'll be right back with the next half of The Lord of Spirits podcast.

***

Fr. Andrew: Hey, everybody. It's one of my favorite commercials that we just heard. It's a nice long one. So, yes, well—

Fr. Stephen: Oh, sorry, I was taking a power nap.

Fr. Andrew: Oh! [Laughter] Wake up, Fr. Stephen! Get back to work!

Fr. Stephen: See, you really missed an opportunity there, you guys, to do the "I'm Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick—and I am Richard Rohlin—and we are…"

Fr. Andrew: Activate! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: I don't know what you would have said, because "We are The Great Tales..."

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, no, it's just...

Fr. Stephen: Maybe: "We are the defenders of the earth," I don't know.

Fr. Andrew: And this one is on YouTube, everybody, so look up The Great Tales on YouTube, and you can subscribe and check out the trailer. Last time we played this commercial, I told everybody that one of my podcasts was going to die because this new one is being born later this year, and people got freaked out. They were like: "Wait, is it Lord of Spirits that's dying? Is it Amon Sûl? Is it The Areopagus? Is it something else?" It has not yet been revealed what it will be! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: I like the mental image that you just gave, of, like, each of your podcasts beginning in this, like, parasitic phase, and then consuming one of your previous podcasts and leaving its withered, hollowed-out husk behind as it emerges to life.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Exactly! I mean, there's only so much time one has in the day.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. Also, I will point out that every episode of this podcast is the last episode until the next one comes out.

Fr. Andrew: That's right! Well, especially when the next episode comes out, then the previous one becomes the last episode.

Fr. Stephen: Is even more so the last episode!

Fr. Andrew: Exactly. Exactly, so that last episode that we did, that was our last episode.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah.

Fr. Andrew: Now we're on this one. So we're talking Torah, Torah, and Torah, or Torah! Torah! Torah! And we— I think we actually do have some— I'm not sure; it looks like there's some calls coming in.

Fr. Stephen: Let's do this!

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] That's right! So is there anybody we can connect with now?

Fr. Stephen: I'm going to Leroy Jenkins this first call.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, man.

Fr. Stephen: I'm going with that.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, well, we have Bob calling. His phone says it's from Massachusetts, but who knows? Where is Bob? Where are you, Bob?

Bob: Can you hear me, Fathers?

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

Bob: All right. Yeah, I do normally live in Massachusetts. I'm in Korea right now, so it's the morning show for me.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, you do sound like you're from Massachusetts.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, I was going to say, I can still hear a little Massachusetts. So they can take you out of Massachusetts, but not it out of you.

Bob: Oh, yeah, you can't take— I'm from the north shore of Boston. You can't escape it. All right.

Fr. Andrew: What's on your mind, Bob?

Bob: I just had a quick clarifying question, Fathers. So I'm wondering… My understanding is that we understand the Church to be Israel, right? Am I correct in this, before I continue?

Fr. Andrew: Yes!

Bob: All right. So I guess I'm just wondering… If we understand the Church to be Israel, and we are all full participating members of the Church which is Israel—I'm not still quite understanding how, even though we are Gentiles, we are treated according to the Law and stuff, still like foreigners and sojourners. Does the question make sense?

Fr. Andrew: Sure! Sure. Well, there's a couple ways to understand it. On the one hand, there is this— And this would probably be a good future episode, I think, Father. But there is the sense that the Church is the reconstitution of Israel because of Israel having been scattered into the nations, those ten northern tribes having been scattered into the nations so there is this regathering of Israel. But also that Israel is not the same thing as being Jewish. I mean, the word "Jewish" or "Judean" refers to Judeans, but someone can participate in Israel without being Jewish, like, that is an actual possibility. Well, yeah, we'll talk more about that. I don't know, Father, do you want to address this?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. So one of the key things—and this really comes out of St. Paul—is that he doesn't see— Not only does he not see different— So I don't— Even though the Latin word gentiles means "nations," I don't really like "Gentiles" because it has these ethnic connotations now. But people from different nations, because nobody's, like, just a Gentile. We're from somewhere. We're something in particular. But not only does St. Paul not see people from all these other nations coming and becoming Jewish in order to enter the Church, he also doesn't see everyone—including Jewish people, Greek people, Roman people, Ethiopians, Egyptians, the people whom St. Paul would have encountered, Samaritans, Syrians—he doesn't see them coming into the Church and no longer being Egyptians or Greeks or Jewish or any of these things. So it's neither extreme. It's not sort of: we come into the Church and now we're just Christians and we're not any of those things any more, and it's also not on the other side: well, we all become Jewish.

And this comes out of the prophecies about the nations coming to worship the God of Israel that talk about the nations bringing their treasures, bringing in their treasures to give to God. And the understanding that those treasures are all the uniqueness and all the particularity of— Now we have a more expansive list: of Greek culture, of Italian culture, American culture, Mexican culture, Korean culture, Russian culture. All of the best, all of the treasures of those particularities we bring with us when we become Russian Christians, Korean Christians, American Christians, Greek Christians, French Christians, etc., etc.

In terms of the sojourners issue, I think the way that's dealt with in the New Testament is not by— I mean, on one hand St. Paul will say things like, "You who were far off have now been brought near," and he's very much wanting to argue in Romans, "No, neither the Jewish Christians nor the Christians from the nations are second-class citizens; neither of them are second-class citizens." But the way that's resolves seems to me to be with what St. Peter says, which is: "We should all be living like aliens and sojourners in this world."

Bob: Okay.

Fr. Stephen: That none of us should be seeking power and authority in this world; none of us should be seeking to control institutions in this world, that all of us should be living that way, whether Jewish or not, as Christians, because our actual homeland, our ultimate homeland is one that we will all share together in the new heavens and the new earth and the life of the world to come. Does that make sense?

Bob: Okay. Yes, it does, Fathers. Thank you.

Fr. Andrew: All right. Thank you very much for calling.

Fr. Stephen: I wonder if you can get Dunkin Donuts coffee in Korea.

Fr. Andrew: I— Wow!

Fr. Stephen: If not, I feel for the man. [Laughter] He might go into withdrawal.

Fr. Andrew: I mean, I can't— It's got to be some time in the morning there in Korea. I'm not sure what the time zone is there, but… Yeah, we've got people— Except Antarctica, we've got people on every continent listening tonight! That's crazy!

Fr. Stephen: If you are at the Russian research station, call us now!

Fr. Andrew: Yes! We will have a, I don't know, some kind of crazy record or whatever. [Laughter] All right, thank you very much for calling us, Bob. We're going to go ahead and take one more question before we move on. This one comes from Daniel, so, Daniel, welcome to The Lord of Spirits podcast.

Daniel: Hi, Fathers! Can you hear me?

Fr. Andrew: We can hear you! What's on your mind?

Daniel: All right, so my question was about Noah, and he took— It said that he took two of every kind of animal and seven of every kind of clean animal on the ark. I was wondering, well, he's not Jewish—that's not a thing yet—so what's up with there being a difference: clean and unclean animals, at least one that he knows about that he can appreciate?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah! What's with that? It seems kind of anachronistic. The clean and unclean stuff hasn't been given yet. So what's that about, Fr. Stephen?

Fr. Stephen: So the— There are a couple of pieces here, but we have to remember Genesis is the prologue to the Torah; it's part of the Torah. The narratives are part of the Torah. Sometimes this is one of the reasons why I think it's better to just go back to calling it the Torah instead of using the word "law," because when we hear the word "law," we just think about commandments. There's a lot of stuff beyond just commandments. There are a lot of things in Genesis that, I mean, starting with chapter one and the beginning of chapter two, God creating the world in seven days and the whole thing with the sabbath. And then the sabbath commandments aren't given until Exodus, even though they're sort of presented in Genesis as sort of being built into creation.

So in terms of clean and unclean animals, there are a couple of things going on there, and we're actually going to get into this more. I'm going to answer your question; I'm not punting, but we're going to get into this more in our next episode. We're going to be particularly talking about the concept of clean and unclean in our next episode in some depth.

Daniel: Okay!

Fr. Stephen: But to answer the question now, with animals the primary distinguisher between clean and unclean in terms of eating is what we would call domesticated animals versus wild animals, with a few exceptions, donkeys, for example, being one of those exceptions. But one of the primary— And there are certain classes of animals, like scavengers, predators, that are unclean for different— You know. It might be obvious why they're unclean: they prey on other— Scavengers eat dead bodies, and dead bodies are unclean. So you can't eat a buzzard or a vulture. And so, because that is based on something about the animal itself, that means that's something that Noah could take into account, even if he didn't necessarily see it in clean and unclean terms the same way Leviticus would lay it out.

Daniel: Ah!

Fr. Stephen: There are certain animals— Clean animals could be used for sacrifices, for example, because they could be eaten. So the idea is he's taking animals— more of those animals with him because there are animals— He didn't have permission to eat them yet in general, but to offer as burnt offerings, that kind of thing. There needed to be more of those.

Daniel: Ah! Okay!

Fr. Andrew: All right, well, Daniel, thank you very much for calling in. Stay tuned!

Daniel: Thank you, Fathers.

Fr. Andrew: In a future episode, I think the next episode, we're going to talk a lot more about that clean and unclean stuff, because I know that's something that people think about a lot. All right. Okay, so in this half, we're going to begin talking about some of the basic principles of what the Torah is about and talk about exactly what it means that these are fulfilled by Christ as the new covenant. So how does that actually work out? Again, we don't need to reinvent the wheel. We knows how this works out.

Fr. Stephen: So first half, we were zoomed way out and just talking about the Torah as such, and now we're zooming in sort of halfway, and we're going to zoom in tighter on a few things next time. But so in these last two halves we want to lay out a couple of core principles that run all through the Torah and talk about how those core principles that run through the Torah run straight through into the New Testament and into the life of the Church. And then next time we'll be getting into more particulars.

So the first sort of core principle that we're going to talk about in this half is this idea of the Torah as a series of structures—sometimes literal structures, sometimes more figurative—that allow God to dwell safely among his people. We've talked before on the show about death by holiness.

Fr. Andrew: The other DBH. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yes! May they not cross paths. I'm feeling generous and charitable. [Laughter]

So there is this danger—not for God; for us, for humans, for sinful humans—presented by God's holiness, by the holiness of God, by God's complete otherness, by his goodness, by his— And I don't know how much I want to go down this rabbit-hole. I won't go down this rabbit-hole too much, but, again, as we've talked about before on this show, we are talking about the divine energies here. And that's really how to understand this, that there are— There's imagery used in the Scripture. The most common imagery is fire: God is a burning fire, a consuming fire, a fire consuming the unworthy. But what this is getting at is, for example, one of the divine energies is justice, meaning God is continually, eternally, putting things right and putting them in order. Well, if you are a profoundly unjust person, then for you to encounter God putting things in order is going to be a painful experience. Or God being good and therefore driving out evil: if you are evil, this is going to be a bad experience.

And this is what we see, even when we're not talking about death by holiness. Isaiah comes into the presence of God and doesn't jump up and down happily, saying, "Oh wow! This is so cool! I get to see God!"

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah, no, it's: "I'm a man of unclean lips from a people of unclean lips!" Like: "Ohh, I'm undone! This is not good!"

Fr. Stephen: It's: tearing your clothes; it's: "Woe is me!"

Fr. Andrew: Even though he's a righteous man.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, he's one of the righteous, and that's his experience of God. So that's what we're talking about here.

Nevertheless, God loves his people and wants to live with them and among them and share his life with them. And so certain structures need to be put in place to allow that to happen in a way that will be beneficial to humanity rather than the opposite, because God doesn't want to inflict excruciating pain on his people all the time.

So we see this problem already laid out in Genesis, because as we were just saying to Daniel, Genesis is the prologue to the Torah; it's setting things up for the Torah. And one of the things it sets up is the problems that the Torah is aimed at, the rest of the Torah is going to be aimed at, that what's given at Mount Sinai is aimed at. Right from the beginning: we see this right away in Genesis 3, the expulsion from paradise. Adam and Eve are cast out of paradise because, having become sinful, having come to know evil, they can no longer exist in a positive way in the presence of God. And remember, this is why God gives them mortal flesh, this is why death comes into the world: as a mercy. God said, "It is not good for them to live forever, eternally in this state, knowing evil," much less that they would live eternally in that state in the presence of God, which would be torment, which would be hell, which God does not want for them. And so he expels them from paradise, and the cherubim is put there with a flaming sword. Why is he there? He's not there to protect God from people.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it's not to prevent breaking and entering or whatever. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: It's to stop people, in their sinful state, from trying to draw close to God. So it is another example. This cherubim is another example of how God has allowed for physical death as a means to help humanity avoid spiritual death, which is far worse. Remember, physical death is the separation of the soul from the body; spiritual death is the separation of our soul from God.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and I mean it calls to mind the thrice-holy hymn, where the angels sing, "Holy, holy, holy, Lord of hosts." It's not just saying God is awesome, but it's really that sense that God is set apart, is separate, is utterly different from mankind. And so it is a praise of God, but it's also a warning to a sinful creation. Holy— This is why we call it death by holiness. Those throne guardians, the cherubim and seraphim, singing that song, it's to say: this is a dangerous place, powerful place, dangerous also.

Fr. Stephen: So I'm not sure, because I was told over and over and over and over again that our God is an awesome God. [Laughter] So.

Fr. Andrew: Wow. Kicking it old school tonight, huh?

Fr. Stephen: So moving on in Genesis...

Fr. Andrew: A lot of triggered people listening right now.

Fr. Stephen: Oh, yeah. Sorry, folks. It's not just that they're triggered. There are people out there who are going to have that stuck in their head all night. And for that I apologize. That is a fate none of you deserve if you listen to this show.

Fr. Andrew: Big earworm.

Fr. Stephen: Moving on in Genesis, the next place we see this play out is the flood. Preceding the flood, what does God say? "I can abide with men no longer. You've got 120 years left, and then it's over."

Fr. Andrew: Which doesn't mean, by the way, "I can't take you people any more."

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yeah, no.

Fr. Andrew: It's literal, of abiding.

Fr. Stephen: His presence, because they've become so evil— The text says that their every thought was always evil all the time, which, you know— I've been pretty bad at various points in my life, maybe all of them, but I don't think I've ever been quite that bad. I have a good thought once in a while—not my own; it comes from somewhere else, but…

But so because humanity has come to that state, God can't dwell with them any more, and God's presence ends up destroying humanity in the flood, which, as we've talked about before, basically uncreation, and then a re-creation on the other side of it. And so then God sets his bow, like a bow and arrow, in the clouds. He says, "I will not make war against humanity again." And then we see in Genesis 10 the whole cycle starts again. We get Nimrod, like the giants; we get to see all of these things coming up to the Tower of Babel. God is not going to destroy humanity again, and so he withdraws. He withdraws, so his presence is no longer there, therefore it's no longer dangerous.

The problem is God withdrawing, God's presence no longer being among humanity, doesn't make things better for humanity. Things are bad; they stay bad. And so when we get to Abraham in Genesis 12, this is the beginning of the story of God drawing near to his people again. We aren't told— We were told at the flood that Noah is righteous among his generation, like he's— There's this one guy who is not— His thoughts are not always evil all the time, and that's why God saves and preserves him. But we're not told that about Abraham. We're not told about Abraham: "Oh, hey, even though things are pretty bad, there's this one guy in Ur who's got it all together, who's one of those Gentiles who was doing what he was supposed to be doing, even though he hadn't heard anything from God about it."

Fr. Andrew: And if you follow the life of Abraham you know he needs some work.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, he has an arc, an arc of growth as a person in his— what is literally described as a friendship with God.

But God comes and appears to him, and this is a key thing here in the Torah, is that it's not that humanity repents and all becomes righteous and God says, "Oh, okay, now I can draw near to you again because now it's safe." God chooses to draw near to humanity even though we're still talking about sinful humanity.

But there is still this problem that plays out. It plays out a really subtle way. You've got to really be paying attention as you read the patriarchal narratives of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and Joseph and the rest of Jacob's sons. But there is this descent; there is this ongoing problem. And one of the very subtle things that a lot of times people don't notice is God appears in person to Abraham and comes and sits and eats with him, appears to him over and over again. He appears at a couple of points to Isaac. He comes and he appears to Jacob a couple of times. One of those times they get in a fight! [Laughter] And he gets renamed Israel. So you go from hosting God for dinner to wrestling him to the ground! Things are changing, and by the time you—

Fr. Andrew: Festivus. It's Festivus.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] By the time you get to Jacob's sons, God doesn't appear to any of Jacob's sons. Joseph has dreams and interprets dreams.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so it's less. It's more distant.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so God can only draw so close to sinful humanity without it becoming dangerous. When God gives the Torah at Sinai, a major element of what's going on in the Torah is going to be: Okay, here's how God can now draw close to a sinful people, live and dwell among them, share his life with them, and have it be safe for them—if they follow this, which they won't. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, exactly. "This is what you need to do so that, when God draws close to you, you don't die."

Fr. Stephen: Yes. So when I said sometimes this involves literal structures, I mean like the tabernacle. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Right, and just to remind everybody what the tabernacle is— I think sometimes they think it's a building. No, it's actually not a building in the sense that we think of buildings. It's sort of a big fence, and there's a big open space in that fence, and inside there there's a tent, a big tent, and inside that tent there's a smaller tent. So you've got these layers of enclosedness, enclosure, where most people are outside most of the time.

Fr. Stephen: Completely, outside the fence.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, they don't even get to go inside the fence. Only the priests go inside the fence, if I remember correctly.

Fr. Stephen: Right. There are priests and Levites inside the fence. There are priests who, during their time of service, go into the outer tent of the tabernacle, and then the high priest, once a year, goes into the inner tent, the holy of holies: once a year, just the high priest.

So there are these sort of concentric circles. And really, the fence is not the last one; the edge of the Israelite camp is the last one. Or, later when we're talking about the Temple, the borders of Israel is the last one, or Judah, Judea is the last sort of concentric circle. And the closer you go in within those concentric circles, the higher of a level of holiness and purity is required of the human person.

So this is part of why we have— Not "part of why": this is the primary reason why we have the division we were talking about in the first half between commandments given to the Israelites and commandments given to everybody else, is that God was not dwelling in Egypt in the tabernacle. God was not dwelling on Crete in the tabernacle; he was not dwelling in Damascus in the tabernacle. He was dwelling in Israel in the tabernacle, and so the Israelites, in that most outward concentric circle, had to maintain this level of holiness and purity higher than the people of the other nations.

And then the Levites and the priests who were going to go into the courtyard of the tabernacle had to maintain a higher level: they had to engage in more ritual washings; they had to eat different foods. The priests during the time of service, when they went into the outer tent, they would have shifts. They would have days when they would do it, and during those days they had to abstain from their wives. There's a whole other— They had to take everything to another level. And then finally the high priest on that one day had to go to this very highest level and had to create this cloud of incense so he wouldn't see God and die, and had to enter with blood and had to offer these sacrifices for his own sins first before he could even start the rest of the ritual, and on and on, this highest level. The closer you were going to go in, the higher level of purity someone had to maintain.

There are two main kinds of purity when we're talking about the Old Testament, and this'll come up again in our next episode when we're talking about clean and unclean, but those two kinds of impurity or kinds of purity are moral purity and ceremonial purity.

Fr. Andrew: Not the same thing.

Fr. Stephen: Right, not the same thing. And if you don't understand that these are different things, you will not understand the Torah—at all. [Laughter]

If you became morally impure, you were also ceremonially impure, meaning: You murder someone, you are now morally impure; you are also ceremonially impure, meaning you don't need to be going into the tabernacle after you murder somebody: you'll have a bad result, if you try to draw close to God immediately without purifying, purification.

Fr. Andrew: And ceremonial impurity is about not being ready to go into the tabernacle, or, in some cases, near it.

Fr. Stephen: Right, to whatever level you were allowed or supposed to be.

Fr. Andrew: And there were things that could make you ceremonially impure that were not moral impurities. So, like touching a Torah scroll or touching a dead body, going to the bathroom: these were things that made you ceremonially impure, so you couldn't go into the tabernacle.

Fr. Stephen: Until you washed and were purified.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, you had to be purified first. But these are not moral impurities. It's not a sin to touch a Torah scroll. It's not a sin to bury your dead grandfather.

Fr. Stephen: In fact, quite the opposite.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah! These are good works!

Fr. Stephen: Some of the things that were seen as the greatest good works from the perspective of the Torah were things that required a person to contract ceremonial impurity on behalf of someone else. So if you want an example: Tobit, in the book of Tobit. The great good thing he does before God is he goes and he buries the dead who have been left unburied. Well, doing that requires you to touch and handle dead bodies.

Fr. Andrew: So "unclean" does not equal "sinful."

Fr. Stephen: —"bad," right. And in fact, being willing to do that, meaning you're not going to be able to enjoy the full communion of the rest of the people and with God for a time until you're purified—being willing to do that for the sake of helping someone is seen as this great good thing you could do.

This is in the background of the parable of the good Samaritan. This is why the priest and the Levite pass by on the other side of the road, because they're more concerned about preserving their own ceremonial purity than they are about helping someone in need, because that person is bloody and beaten, whereas the Samaritan is already, by virtue of being a Samaritan, ceremonially unclean, and so he goes and he helps. He goes and he helps. This is in the background there. This dynamic, this dynamic of being willing to become unclean for the sake of someone else, is also something that's going on— And I'm not going to elaborate on this right now, just because it's a whole other thing, but elsewhere at some point we'll discuss this more. This is part of what's going on in the understanding of Christ's incarnation as a descent for our sakes. But we'll get into that.

But so, yeah. Ceremonial impurity: not sin, even though sin also makes you ceremonially impure.

Fr. Andrew: Right, one causes the other, but the other doesn't cause the one.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And we're going to be focusing in more on moral purity and sin in the third half coming up here. But so there may be some folks who think, "Well, okay, yeah, but we don't have the tabernacle or the Temple any more. So that's all gone now, so I guess this sort of doesn't apply now. This is one of those things. Ceremonial law, we can just toss all that stuff out related to the Temple, because God's presence isn't in just this one place with concentric circles around it and all that." And I say to you, "Not so fast!" [Laughter] Because that's not what the New Testament does with this principle.

Fr. Andrew: No! I mean, number one, there are washings that we see in the New Testament, and washings that we see in liturgical practice of the Church.

Fr. Stephen: Baptism!

Fr. Andrew: And on the other side of those washings is entering in to a holy place to do a holy thing.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, and remember Matthew 5. It's not even that this is relaxed. It's not even that these commandments are relaxed. In fact, if anything they're heightened in a certain way, because the presence of God doesn't go from being in that one locale within that one tent or that one building to being everywhere and/or nowhere. But according to the book of Acts, that presence of God, the Holy Spirit, comes to dwell in each human who is baptized and receives the Holy Spirit.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and this is demonstrated at Pentecost. When you look at Pentecost, you need to remember how the presence of God descends into the tabernacle and the first Temple. This is what it's doing. It's descending again now, but now it's in the Church. That's what happens in Pentecost in Acts.

Fr. Stephen: Right, it's in people. Like Soylent Green, the Temple is now people. [Laughter] Well, not like Soylent Green.

Fr. Andrew: Not, yeah. More like Green Day.

Fr. Stephen: I don't even know what that metaphor means, but okay. I get it, you tried to make a band reference. I'll acknowledge it.

Fr. Andrew: You don't know that Green Day is named after a banner in that film that says "Soylent Green Day"?

Fr. Stephen: Oh, no, I didn't know that.

Fr. Andrew: Yes!

Fr. Stephen: I actually learned something today!

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Hey! I got one, everybody! Write it down! I got a pop culture reference and Fr. Stephen didn't!

Fr. Stephen: I'll have to go back and watch it. I rewatched it a couple years ago, with Charlton Heston— I had a Charlton Heston thing. I watched Soylent Green, I watched Omega Man, I watched a whole bunch of them, but I'll have to go back again.

Fr. Andrew: Ooh. Any Planet of the Apes in there?

Fr. Stephen: Omega Man is— I continually watch Planet of the Apes movies. I can't wait. There's a new one coming out that looks amazing.

Fr. Andrew: Nice.

Fr. Stephen: Okay. Omega Man, by the way: worst adaptation of Richard Matheson's I Am Legend ever, of the three. [Laughter] The one that's actually closest to the book is Last Man on Earth, starring Vincent Price. Second is Will Smith's I Am Legend, with the original ending that you get as a bonus feature. Then that movie with the theatrical ending. Then Omega Man. Omega Man not even really in the running. It's, you know… I was going to say it has the same title, but it doesn't even have the same title. It's like vaguely related, even though it says "based upon" in the credits. But anyway, enough of I Am Legend.

But so I think a lot of times when we look at the day of Pentecost, and we celebrate the day of Pentecost, we don't see that that sense of danger has been maintained or should be maintained. I've never heard at a baptism, "Okay, now the Holy Spirit is going to come upon this person and they are in grave danger." No one does that. But the Scriptures do go out of their way to point that out, because there's this pattern that St. Luke follows in— at the end of Luke and the beginning of Acts, which is a pattern he's getting out of Leviticus. So if there's a tertiary takeaway from tonight's episode, it's: go read Leviticus, everybody! But so in Leviticus they build the tabernacle, they purify the tabernacle and all its accoutrements with blood, and then the presence of God comes down and fills the tabernacle; the Holy Spirit fills the tabernacle. And then in the next chapter, after the presence of God comes and fills the tabernacle, Aaron's ne'er-do-well sons, Nadab and Abihu, go in drunk to offer strange fire at the wrong time in terms of incense in the tabernacle, and fire comes out and kills them. This is the first instance in the Scriptures of someone being on fire with the Holy Spirit.

Fr. Andrew: Whoo!

Fr. Stephen: We use that term differently now. That's part of my point!

Fr. Andrew: Yes! Glory!

Fr. Stephen: Not to connote danger! And St. Luke— Because, again, all of the New Testament authors assume that their readers are thoroughly familiar with the Torah. They assume it. And this is part of our problem in reading and interpreting the New Testament well, is that we, by and large, aren't. Because he does this very subtly. St. Luke's gospel ends with the Christians, the disciples, all "continuously in the Temple, praising God." Have you ever noticed that?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: And then you go over to the beginning of Acts, and they're hiding in a room, waiting for the Holy Spirit? Ever struck anybody as odd? [Laughter] What was just before that? What was just before that was the story of the road to Emmaus, Emmaus being the climactic battle of the Maccabean Revolt—you can read about this in 1 Maccabees—after which they rededicated the Temple. So the idea that St. Luke is telegraphing by that ending to his gospel is the rededication of the Temple is coming, and it has to do with the Temple being filled with Christians. So he's teasing it, teasing volume two.

So when we get into volume two, we have the Christians. They have been purified by the blood of Christ through his death, and now the presence of God in the Holy Spirit descends upon them and fills them, and then what happens afterwards? We get this story about Ananias and Sapphira, two people again, who come to the apostles, who come to the Church, who come to the people who are filled with the Holy Spirit, and they lie, and St. Peter says, "You have lied to God. You have lied to the Holy Spirit." And what happens? They fall over dead, and people carry them out, just like Nadab and Abihu.

So St. Luke uses that pattern to very deliberately communicate: "Oh, no, no, no, no. This is still a dangerous thing. The presence of God in us is still a dangerous thing." [Laughter] And this becomes the basis for everything St. Paul is going to say in various places about our body being a temple of the Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit dwelling with us and within us, not quenching the Holy Spirit.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it's not just like a neat, beautiful little metaphor. It's really about: well, how do you treat the Temple? How do you treat the tabernacle? What are you supposed to be doing?

Fr. Stephen: Right, and this is why he has this. He's not just a prude. This is why he has this emphasis on sexual immorality, and precisely in this context of our body being a temple of the Holy Spirit and being defiled.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, exactly.

Fr. Stephen: So this principle, now, we've seen. It was kind of a quick run-through, but we did a kind of quick run-through of this from the Torah and then into the New Testament. So there's a lens; there's a refraction point there, as we move from the Torah to the New Testament, where something shifts. How would we describe that shift? I would describe that shift as a move from external to internal. So the Israelites are given this structure external to them: you have to go to the tabernacle, and you can only go so close; or you have to go to the Temple. It is external. It may be far away. But, through the way you approach, like literally physically approach this literal physical sanctuary, and the way you treat it and the purity and the holiness that you have to maintain, this is sort of preparatory to understanding what it's going to mean to have the Spirit of God, God himself, come and dwell in your heart, and what that means in terms of the holiness, the purity that has to be maintained, the dedication that has to be maintained—of yourself now. Of yourself, not just a building over there.

And this also gives us an image— That refraction point, that lens, gives us a better idea of what St. Paul means, for example, when he says that the Torah was a teacher. It gave this external thing as a way to help humanity understand this spiritual internal thing so that we would be prepared for the fullness that comes in Christ.

Fr. Andrew: All right, well, we're going to go ahead and go to our second break, and we'll be right back with the third half of The Lord of Spirits.

***

Fr. Andrew: Welcome back! So I should say there at the end of the second half, I had someone dispute my claims about the origins of the band name for Green Day.

Fr. Stephen: Ah ha!

Fr. Andrew: And said that it has to do with a certain plant that people like to put inside pipes and cigarettes and so forth. But I will say, having done some very fast research on the interwebs during the break, that this is a contested issue! So I am going to stick with the ancient legends that were given to me in the elder days. [Laughter] But, yes, it is a thing. It is a thing both ways. Yeah. The marijuana thing, I mean, that's just not anywhere near as interesting as "Tuesday is Soylent Green Day," as it says on the signs in the film. Just throwing that one out there! I'm happy to take sides on this one.

Fr. Stephen: I do have to consider, for my own purposes, the way in which the weed explanation fits into my "all rock songs are actually about heroin" theory. [Laughter] Every single one of them.

Fr. Andrew: I do not have the time to listen to you whine. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: About nothing, and everything, all at once?

Fr. Andrew: Yes, exactly! At the end of this episode, we'll say, "I hope you had the time of your life." Anyway, so we actually do have a caller on the line who is probably just getting irritated and annoyed at listening to us go on about this stuff. So we're going to go ahead and talk to Avery. So, Avery, welcome to The Lord of Spirits podcast. What is on your mind?

Avery: Fathers, bless!

Fr. Andrew: God bless you.

Avery: Thank you. I will say I just finished my mainline of Lord of Spirits podcasting, starting in September and ending now, and I'm glad I was able to call in before the impending end of the show. [Laughter] So I'm very happy about that.

I did have a question about— I know you've talked about how the Gentiles fulfill the ten tribes, the lost tribes of Israel, but my question is: How do the two remaining tribes fit into Christianity, and then how do they operate with the Torah in that way?

Fr. Andrew: All right, that's nice and clear. I'm going to go ahead and punt it directly to you, Father.

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Because I know you have something to say about this!

Fr. Stephen: This is one of the most controversial things I ever say, and since I'm longing for cancellation, I love an opportunity to say it as publicly as possible. If we're talking about individual Jewish people converting to Christianity, there's a fundamental problem with the idea that they would fully keep Torah in that to really keep Torah fully you have to keep it in community. So this is a practical issue. If I have a Jewish person come and join my parish, and if I were to say to them, "Okay, you need to keep kosher because you're Jewish," that would just mean he couldn't eat with the rest of us. That would be excluding him from our community. So that is not a burden that the Church places on individual converts like that, and I don't think that that's the controversial part.

Here's the controversial part. I think, as I hope and pray will one day happen—and I'm going to talk about this more in my concluding comments—that one day we will have a mass conversion of Jewish people entering the Orthodox Church. The day that I think would be wonderful would be the day that the Patriarchate of Jerusalem is just so overwhelmed by Jewish converts, including the high rabbinate, that we end up with a Jewish patriarch of Jerusalem in the first time in 1970 years. And if that happens, by God's grace, and we have whole churches and communities of Jewish Christians, then I would expect that that Jewish Church, just like the Greek Church or the Russian Church, or any other church of a people and a nation, would keep their own ways. And I suspect that such a church would keep Torah in a way more reminiscent of the Jewish Christians of the first century.

Avery: Wow. That would be amazing, wouldn't it?

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: I mean, we're just sitting here speculating, a bunch of Gentiles on microphones… [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Well, I'm going to comment more on that at the end here.

Fr. Andrew: Okay!

Fr. Stephen: I think there are things we can do to help that along if we really want to see that happen.

Avery: Well, thank you. I do want to say quickly that this podcast has not only changed my faith, but it's really changed the way I see community and hopefully it's working its way to change— not that it's just that, but the way my parish sees community and togetherness, so I do thank you for that.

Fr. Andrew: Thank you, Avery. Thanks for listening.

Avery: Thank you. Bye-bye.

Fr. Stephen: I have to admit, for a second there I dared hope that that was going to be Avery Brooks. [Laughter] And I'm pretty sure that wasn't.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah… He has a pretty distinctive voice.

Fr. Stephen: I mean, I'm not 100%, but pretty sure.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. He didn't ask about flying cars once, so yeah. That's the big question I associate with Avery Brooks, is: "Where are the flying cars?" [Laughter] Okay, it's the third half—

Fr. Stephen: I personally really like the interview he did with William Shatner, where he just sat there and plinked around on a piano for half the time.

Fr. Andrew: Yes!

Fr. Stephen: Yes, fascinating.

Fr. Andrew: William Shatner, who has been on probably more documentary films than any other human who has ever lived!

Fr. Stephen: Yes. Agreed.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, all right. First half, we talked about Torah in general and how it relates to the Church; second half, we started to zoom in, and we talked about one of the core principles of the Torah, which is how to live in such a way as to be compatible with the presence of God so that we don't have to suffer DBH—death by holiness, that is; in the third half, we're going to zoom in a little more. So what's on the menu now?

Fr. Stephen: Yes, so now we're zooming in a little more on moral impurity, specifically sin, to put a finer point on it, and the way in which the Torah functions as a sin-management system. To start with, we have to make sure we're keyed in on a correct understanding of what sin is, because I know for a lot of us, based on cultural things, sin is breaking a rule, specifically one of God's rules. And then God is mad or God has to punish it or however you view that. But that's not how the Torah sees sin. We'll just start with that: that's not how the Torah presents sin.

There are sort of two valences, I guess, in terms of how sin is presented in the Torah. The first is sin is described as sort of like a biological entity, meaning like a [bacterium] or a virus, like a disease. Now, of course, they didn't have the idea of bacteria or viruses at that time in history, but they saw diseases and how diseases worked and how they spread and how they brought about death if not treated and not dealt with. And so sin is portrayed very much in that sense, but there is sort of a reality to it. And the ways of dealing with sin and the result, and moral impurity, are very closely related to the way that disease was dealt with: things like quarantine, like you have to separate— the sinner is separated; until he can be purified by various means, he's separated from the tabernacle, from other people. And then that purification and healing is required.

And we've mentioned before—it was way back in the long-ago time; I won't even guess which episode; it's a dim memory, fading off into the sunset, because I'm an old man—but we talked about Christ's healings in relation to this at one point, that one of the reasons why Christ performing all of these healings of physical diseases is so prominent in the gospels is that this is an image of healing, forgiveness, restoration from sin. And often in the story of Christ's healing, these two things are tied together. "Which is easier to say to this paralyzed man: Your sins are forgiven? or Rise up and walk?" And so the physical healing and the forgiveness of sins is sort of tied together in this way, sometimes very explicitly, and that's related to this understanding of sin.

And then, relatedly—this isn't really another concept; it's more of another valence or another sort of slightly to the side perspective—that sin leaves a kind of metaphysical taint; it leaves a kind of stain or a spoor in the world and in people and on people and on even physical objects get tainted.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, places. I was going to say, I've just been reading the Oedipus literature from ancient Greek mythology and stuff, and, you know, if you guys know about the life of Oedipus, you know he was pretty messed up. But he shows up in Oedipus at Colonus, which is one of the plays by Sophocles. He shows up, and people are like: "Get out of here! This guy is cursed by the gods!" And that's exactly this idea, that there's this evil that messes up places by an evil person or a cursed person just being around.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And of course, first example of this in Scripture is Genesis 3, when Adam is told, "Cursèd is the ground because of you," that what Adam has done is not just going to affect him or his relationship with God, but it's going to affect the ground that he has to work to get his food from, so there's going to be thorns and thistles and effort. So there is this taint left. Of course, this is— The day of atonement ritual, the blood that's taken in the sanctuary is used to purify the physical objects: the ark of the covenant, the altar of incense: the physical objects in there, not people.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, what did they ever do? [Laughter] Nothing! But it's the sin that kind of got on them, so to speak.

Fr. Stephen: But the language is: "You have to go in and atone for the altar." It has to be purified again with blood from— And it has to be done in the sanctuary because that's the place where it's most dangerous, because that's where God is. When you're outside the camp, sin's still a problem and sin is still sin, but that residue, that stain, that taint doesn't present the same danger as it does the closer you are to the presence of God. And so the usual way in which this is dealt with, in addition to that quarantine idea, is that once the person is quarantined and separated, the way that you deal with the sin, the disease and its residuum, is through the cycle of daily sacrifices, the daily sin-offerings, and then, as we just mentioned, the annual day of atonement ritual, which not only takes away the sin of the people— And again, here, sin has this metaphysical reality to it, because you can take it and you can put it on a goat, and the goat can carry it away.

Fr. Andrew: And for lots more on that, everybody, check out our episode called "The Priest Shall Make Atonement." We go into incredible detail in that.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. But that's a very particular way of seeing sin. You can't take a series of rule-violations and put it somewhere. [Laughter] But in addition to, in tandem with, that cycle of daily sin-offerings and the annual day of atonement, there is also what we today, thanks to Latin, call penance. [Laughter] There was restitution. There was repentance that consisted of concrete actions that had to also be done. So if I go and I steal something from my neighbor—I go and steal money from my neighbor—I can't just go and partake of that day's sin-offering and go: "Cool! We're all good!" The Torah prescribes: "Okay, here's how you deal with that": I have to go back and pay back five times what I stole, then go participate—

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, make it right.

Fr. Stephen: —in the sacrifice, and then I am healed, then I am restored. See Psalm 50 (Psalm 51, if you're not using the Orthodox Study Bible), with David: "Then shall I offer bullocks on thine altar." Not: "Sacrifices aren't important at all. God doesn't care about the blood of bulls and goats." It's that God doesn't just want that. I'm not going to bribe him with that. He wants me to have a broken and contrite heart about what I've done, and then, once I've been restored, then I go and offer the bullocks. Then I can go and offer the sacrifices.

And so one of the things that's very commonly misinterpreted— And it's weird. Let me say this, it's weird, because this is an idea I only encountered relatively recently, like within the last ten years. I've been studying the Bible for a lot more than ten years, but in the last ten years I've been running into this idea over and over and over and over again among certain Old Testament scholars—only certain ones—and I don't even have a good idea of what connects them to give me an idea of why they might be reading this this way, but there's this idea now that people put forward that sacrifices in the Old Testament couldn't deal with voluntary sins, that the sacrifices, the daily sin-offerings and the day of atonement, only dealt with involuntary sins.

Fr. Andrew: Huh! But… But… [Laughter] I mean, there's explicit things in there, like you can accidentally… do, you know?

Fr. Stephen: Well, that's the thing. Just so people know, when we talk about voluntary and involuntary sins, what we usually mean is that if I throw a rock at someone's head and it hits them and kills them, that was a voluntary sin; if I throw a rock over a fence and I don't realize there's a person there and the rock hits them and kills them, that's an involuntary sin, meaning I had no intent to sin whatsoever; I was just negligent in some way, or careless or incautious. And so, yeah, even though people say this all the time—not everybody, but a certain group of people says this over and over and over again like it's just a fact—it doesn't really make sense when you read the Torah, because how do I involuntarily steal? If I steal from my neighbor deliberately, there's no way to atone for it. I'm just done. But if I accidentally steal something, I have to pay back five times?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, no, it's like when you accidentally pocket a pen at the bank. [Laughter] That's what they mean.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. Like, then I have to go and give the bank five pens.

Fr. Andrew: Five pens!

Fr. Stephen: But if I deliberately steal the pen, there is no forgiveness for me. That doesn't seem to be what the text is saying.

Fr. Andrew: No.

Fr. Stephen: It just doesn't seem to be what the text is saying to me. I don't understand how that's tenable, and I don't understand how there would have been any Israelites left after a relatively short period of time, because all you would have to do is commit one voluntary sin, and you're done, because there's no forgiveness to you. There's no way to be reconciled, according to this view.

Fr. Andrew: And, you know, David. Just, you know… [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, there are lots of people in the Old Testament who commit voluntary sins and yet are somehow reconciled and offer sacrifices. So it just— It doesn't work! And I'm not sure, because a lot of these people are very intelligent people and well-educated and I respect them, but I don't know where they've gotten this idea or how they think that works.

What you actually see in the Torah— And the place to look for this is in everybody's favorite book of the Bible, the book of Numbers; once you're done with reading Leviticus, read Numbers. [Laughter] Call it a challenge or something, like an ice-bucket challenge.

Fr. Andrew: I was told there would not be math. [Laughter] Yeah, so Numbers 15— By the way, people, if you haven't read Numbers or you haven't read it in a while, it's not just a bunch of census-taking. There's some narrative in there.

Fr. Stephen: It's not just numbers, despite the name.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, right! [Laughter] So Numbers 15:30-31.

But the person who does anything with a high hand, whether he is native or a sojourner, reviles the Lord, and that person shall be cut off from among his people. Because he has despised the word of the Lord and has broken his commandment, that person shall be utterly cut off; his iniquity shall be on him.

So what's that "high hand" thing? Is that someone waving: "Hey! Look at me! Look at me!"?

Fr. Stephen: Right. [Laughter] Well, so this can't mean, again, voluntary sin, because the punishment for this is being cut off from the people, meaning death or exile. And the Torah doesn't command the death penalty for everything, clearly! You can eat an owl and not get the death penalty.

Fr. Andrew: There's a lot of owl-eating this episode!

Fr. Stephen: My go-to example is owl-eating, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: I know! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: The owl-eating episode.

Fr. Andrew: Someone asked on the YouTube discussion whether we had already passed Owlfare Week. [Laughter] Afraid so, afraid so.

Fr. Stephen: Yep. No owls for you. Now I'm petrified someone's going to show up with some kind of cooked owl at Pascha.

Fr. Andrew: At your church!

Fr. Stephen: And I'm in Cajun country, so… Somebody catches an owl, they're going to cook it up. But on the other hand, it'll probably be delicious, as much as I regret to admit it. [Laughter]

You don't get the death penalty or exile for anything, and again, if you did, there would not be any Israelites for very long.

So let's talk about something else. What does it mean to hold your hand up high? What is that referring to? That's referring to taking an oath.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so in other words: I'm committed to this.

Fr. Stephen: And so this isn't deliberate sin; this is unrepentant sin. So it's not that it's deliberate before the fact, which most sin is; it's that it's unrepentant after the fact, which an unfortunate amount of sin is. So the idea is: "Yeah, I did it."

Fr. Andrew: "I'm going to keep doing it!"

Fr. Stephen: "I'm going to keep doing it, and there's nothing wrong with it." And if you think about that for a second and think about some of the people, again, in the Torah, who suffer being cut off from among the people, and this describes them. Think about Korah. "Why does he get to be the high priest? He's no better than me! I should be a priest, too!" Or think about Achan in Joshua. Not only does he take the gold and the treasure and he hides it, but when it's found out that someone has it and so the wrath of God is upon all the people, he doesn't repent; he doesn't fess up; he doesn't confess what he did. They have to go find it. He's unrepentant; he gets cut off from among the people.

So this not only makes sense as just a reading of this text, but it makes sense of the Torah, of how it fits into the rest of the Torah, the rest of the Old Testament, how it was practiced. But notice that this fact— We're told as that passage in Numbers continues, for this kind of person, this high-handed person, the person who sins with the hand held high, this person who is unrepentant: you can't offer any sacrifices for him. You can't offer sacrifices for this guy, because he's not repenting. So there's not going to be forgiveness and there's not going to be healing if he's not repentant. It doesn't matter how many bulls and goats you offer to God: the guy's unrepentant. This is related to what St. John is talking about in 1 John when he talks about the person who sins unto death whom you shouldn't pray for. It's the same kind of idea. This is the sinner who is not repenting. If someone is sinning completely unrepentantly, and I pray to God to forgive those sins that they haven't repented of, God is not going to forgive those sins until and unless they repent. Now, I can pray to God and ask God that he will do something to move them to repentance—that's different! That he will— And bless them and do other things for them, but God isn't going to forgive someone sins that they aren't repenting of.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. And I think this is important to underline, that there is a difference between being a sinner and being an unrepentant sinner. I think a lot of errors are committed when people just collapse those things into the same thing.

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: I've heard it said one time, and I believe this very much, that it's not sin that keeps us out of the kingdom of God; it's lack of repentance that keeps us out of the kingdom of God—because we're all sinners. We're all sinners, but if we don't repent, that's where we have the problem.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and there's a lot of people whom we think of as sinners, whom we think of as "the bad people," maybe who are doing horrible things to themselves and even other people, but the reality is these are people who are deeply lost and literally, from their perspective, struggling to survive every day. And what they need is not to be sort of vilified and identified as sinners, but what they need is they need the way out presented to them, the way out: of repentance. That that is possible and that healing is possible. Because even though they look unrepentant to us, in the sense that they're not changing, and they may be justifying horrible things that they do because from their perspective they have to do those things to survive, and we interpret that as unrepentance, but in a lot of cases it's because they don't know or think repentance, transformation, healing, is actually possible for them.

Fr. Andrew: And God knows whether they are repentant or even trying to be.

Fr. Stephen: So the fact that the sacrificial system of the Torah, the fact that you can have this problem of: "Well, we're doing the sacrifices, but people aren't repenting, and so the purpose, the ostensible purpose of those sacrifices, in terms of reconciliation and healing and restoration, isn't working because the people aren't repenting" points to a certain problem of externality, the fact that, sort of like we saw with the sanctuary, the actual offering of an animal and the eating of the parts of the animal is this thing external to people, that was intended to help teach them about repentance and transformation. This is another place where we see that lens we talked about in the last half, of something moving from external to internal. When we say there's this move to internal, we don't mean that forgiveness is purely an internal thing: I go, I say I'm sorry to God, I'm healed of in internally in some way. Because repentance— the repentance part is still accomplished externally.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, you can't just say, "Well, I said I was sorry!" [Laughter] Even if you say it in a heartfelt way. Okay, you're sorry, now make it right.

Fr. Stephen: Right. So there's confessing sin; there's correcting, becoming faithful to God, ceasing from repeating to do it; there's making restitution, healing and restoring the damage you've done to yourself and other people through that sin. But what we don't have any more is that purely external offering of animals. And also, when we say that it's internalized, we're not saying that this was purely external in the Torah.

Here's what I mean by that. Sometimes people will read what Jesus says when he's teaching Torah in the gospels as: "Oh, well, Christ is cranking this up and making it more severe. It used to be just you couldn't commit adultery, but then Christ says if you look at a woman with lust in your heart, that's just as bad. See, so he's ratcheting it up." I hate to tell you—or I hate to break it to you—but in the Torah it was already bad to lust after women in your heart. That's not something new that Jesus is adding. And especially I chose that example, because there's a commandment, "Do not commit adultery." There's also that whole thing about not coveting your neighbor's wife.

Fr. Andrew: There it is!

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Right?

Fr. Andrew: That's in the top ten, everybody, in case you don't remember.

Fr. Stephen: Like, that's in there! And this is, you know— Folks, read Deuteronomy! See, now I'm going to have you read the whole Torah. We've got Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. Read Deuteronomy: Deuteronomy over and over again. Yes, you're circumcised in the flesh—is your heart circumcised? That's not some later metaphorical thing, like: "Oh, circumcision was literal, but then we talk about it metaphorically." That's right there in the Torah. The same Torah that talks about physical circumcision talks about circumcision of the heart.

What Christ is doing is he's re-internalizing it, because that danger of externality had really set in. You get to the point in the prophets where God tells Israel, "Stop offering the sacrifices. You honor me with your lips, but your heart is far from me. You aren't repentant; stop killing the goats. Let the goats live, because it's not fulfilling any purpose, because you're not repentant."

And this is one of those things that Jesus is always going after the Pharisees about. It's about what they're super concerned about and what they're less concerned about. For example: "You tithe of mint and dill and cumin. You go to your little spice-garden, and you go and you cut out ten percent of these little herbs in your herb-garden so you can tithe and make sure you give ten percent of everything." He says, "How about, like, justice? Are you meticulous about that?"

Fr. Andrew: Justice, mercy, faith, love...

Fr. Stephen: Compassion! "Are you so deliberate about that as you are tithing from your herb-garden?" Notice, though, what Jesus says. He said, "These things you should've done, while not neglecting the others also." He doesn't say, "Don't worry about tithing from your herbs." He says, "You should be just as concerned about keeping these very important internal commands and demands of the Torah as you are about these external ones."

So, that said, as we move into the New Testament, the sin-offerings and the day of atonement get taken up in Christ's sacrifice, because Christ's sacrifice enacts this cosmic day of atonement, which was spoken of in various pieces of Second Temple Jewish literature—2 Enoch is a good example—this cosmic day of atonement, meaning atonement for the cosmos, for the creation. The whole creation is purified by the blood of Christ from the residuum of sin, the taking away of sin that happens: Christ's own offering of himself to the Father as a sacrifice.

And so now the climax of our repentance as God's people is not going and participating in the daily sin-offering and not participating in an annual, once-a-year day of atonement; the climax of our repentance is now participating in the Eucharist, which is a participation in Christ's sacrifice for us.

Fr. Andrew: So the pattern is the same, and the climax in a sense is the same in that it is about communion with God, but now instead of the temporary animal sacrifices, it is the sacrifice of Christ himself. The meal has gotten much higher—as high as possible, because we're eating the very body and blood of God himself.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And we still have a type of quarantine. There are times when we've committed certain types of sin where we have to separate ourselves—from the Eucharist, from the community. The repentance needs to happen. The healing and the transformation needs to happen. And then that culminates in receiving in the Eucharist again. This is the same principle from the Torah at play.

Notice that it's not just the Eucharist. I mean, it's the Eucharist. We receive the Eucharist for the remission of sins, but there are a number of sacraments that bring with them forgiveness: absolution, obviously, after confession, but: holy unction, the anointing with oil. St. James says, "Gather the presbyters; gather the priests. They will anoint him, pray for him. He will be healed; his sins will be forgiven." Right there again: physical healing tied together with the forgiveness of sins. Baptism is for the remission of sins.

That all makes sense if we understand again what healing is. If sin is a disease that leaves a taint and a spoor, then forgiveness of sin is reconciliation, healing, restoration, purification, cleansing, and a restoration of right relationships between us and God and between us and other people. So of course all of the sacraments, all of the ways in which we receive God's grace, all the ways in which God works in our life, [bring] with us healing, restoration, reconciliation. So all of them bring, in that sense, forgiveness in one way or the other.

Fr. Andrew: Yep. All right, well, we've reached the end of our third half now, and—surprise, surprise, everybody: this is not the last episode of the podcast. Although, when there's another episode, this will be the last, as we said earlier. Anyway, we can't do that joke too many times. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: That is the good thing about Sisyphus jokes, though, that you can tell them over and over again.

Fr. Andrew: That is true.

Fr. Stephen: And they get funnier each time.

Fr. Andrew: That is true. Yeah, so next time we will continue more on some of these same themes, so there will be another episode in a couple of weeks. But just to try to wrap up this one…

I said earlier, but I think it's worth bringing this thought back around, because it's difficult when you've been raised to think that there's these very sort of distinct stages, where there's this Judaism thing in the Old Testament and there's this Christianity thing in the New Testament, which is definitely the way that I was raised. I was raised in contexts that were very much shaped by dispensationalism, and I think that a lot of Christians in America, even if they're not part of a dispensationalist group, have this sense in one way or another. The theme that I wanted to reiterate is the idea that there's not this religion in the Old Testament and then there's a separate, different, new religion in the New Testament—that it's simply one.

I thought this was very beautifully expressed in what you wrote, Father, in your book, The Religion of the Apostles, where you start out with the question: "Was St. Paul a convert?" There's a certain sense in which the answer is: Yes, he converts to Jesus Christ, for sure, who speaks to him directly. But does he convert from one religion to another? No! Absolutely not. Jesus didn't found a new religion. It is simply that St. Paul realized: "Wait a minute. My hope as a Pharisee is coming to fruition right now. It's come to fruition; I didn't realize that it was happening right now." He realized, "Wait a minute. I'm a different point on the timeline that I've always believed in," that that time of fulfillment had come, that the Messiah had come—because you can't really believe that Christianity is a new religion and also say that Jesus is the Messiah.

We talked about this a little bit in the previous— Was it the previous episode or two before? I'm blanking now, but the one where we talked about: Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God. You can't say that he's the Messiah and also say that he's started some new religion, because calling him the Messiah means that he fits into this existing story that has been being told all this time. So to say that there's this new story and that we don't need to pay attention to what's been being told contradicts that very idea. That he's the Messiah means that he's the Messiah of Israel. It means that the Church is Israel.

This is very much a big paradigm shift if you're not used to thinking this way. I don't mean to say, "Oh, Christians don't like to read the Old Testament," although I'm sure that's true for a lot of them, but to say that that means, actually, that we have to take the actual content of the Old Testament itself very seriously. We can't just look at it as sort of being a long prologue that now— Now the prologue's over and now we've got kind of the real story. No! It was leading up to Christ, and our eyes are fixed on Christ, but to understand who Christ is we need to know the Torah and the rest of the Old Testament, but especially the Torah. Because why? He's the One who gave it. He's the One who spoke to Moses on Mount Sinai. It came from him. He's the Law-giver. Moses receives the Law from him, but he's the Law-giver. He's the Torah-giver, to use the more precise language.

When we begin to take the Old Testament, especially the Torah, much more seriously, number one, it means we're going to read it a lot more, which I very much recommend everybody does. Especially in the Orthodox Church, let's face it: a lot of ignorance about just the contents of the Old Testament—to say nothing about how to understand it, but just the contents, like who are the characters, what are the stories. There's a lot of ignorance about that within the Orthodox Church and certainly I know that in other groups as well that can often be true.

But also that as we read it and begin to understand it better, then I think what it does is it vivifies our experience of being Christians. We see how deep the roots go. We see where we are in the story. There's something profoundly unhistorical about trying to ignore or marginalize or even reject the Old Testament. People say, "Oh, well, that was the Old Testament; we're in the New one now." No, no! That's not what that means. As Orthodox Christians, we are profoundly historical people, and by that I don't just mean that our churches are really old; I mean that it is rooted from Genesis 1, and you can't uproot it. You can't say, "Well, I've got the flower, so the rest—who cares?" That's not how this works. That's not how this works. It's all connected; it's all one thing. It is the same God; it is the same Lord, the whole way through.

I know that there are parts of the Old Testament that can be difficult to understand. We joke about that a little bit sometimes—Leviticus and Numbers especially can be difficult for people, and Joshua is another one that can be really difficult, and so forth—but this is worth wrestling with. As grown-ups, we've all got things in our lives that we wrestle with, that we know it's worth it. "I wrestle with this because it's worth it, because this needs to be part of who I am; I need to be part of this. This is really worth it." And I think a lot of times people won't wrestle with what's in the Old Testament because they don't actually think it's worth it. It is worth it! The apostles wrestle with the Old Testament in their lives and in their writings. The holy Fathers that follow them do. The divine services of the Church are constantly engaging with what's in the Old Testament, constantly! If you're looking for a place where that's true, come to the services next week, the first week of Lent that are happening in the evening. The Great Canon of St. Andrew of Crete: that is a deep, deep engagement with the Old Testament, and if you don't know the Old Testament, a lot of this stuff is just going to kind of fly by, I'm sorry to say! That doesn't mean you should skip those services if you're not there yet. Go, and begin to have a kind of index for what you need to be working on.

As I said earlier, I'm going to say again: one of the most important themes of this show— And I don't mean just this episode; I mean The Lord of Spirits podcast, which we started in 2020 and we're barreling on down towards completing four years. One of the most important things is that this is all one Scripture; it's one faith, one Lord. All of it is together. All of it is together, and the more that you let that sink in, I think the more that your experience of our Lord Jesus Christ, the more that your faithfulness will increase—all of these things I think will become vivified and therefore enable us to be living the way that we're supposed to be living, to live in faithfulness and repentance, not as the high-handed sinners that we read about in Numbers. Don't be that guy, you know? When you sin, put your hand down. [Laughter] And say, "Okay, I sinned. Forgive me. I'm going to live differently now." And not just "don't sin," but do good, because we are created for good works, as the Scripture says. And part of the way we understand what those good works is is precisely in a deep engagement with what's in the Torah and the rest of the holy Scriptures. Fr. Stephen?

Fr. Stephen: So in my ongoing quest for cancellation, as I teased to that caller, let's talk about the Jewish people. How could this go wrong? [Laughter] I've been doing a lot with St. Paul lately, as I mentioned, and the Jewish people were St. Paul's own people. They're not my own people. I've done the DNA; I have no Jewish blood in me, if that means something.

But St. Paul has this deep concern on a number of levels, and I think it develops over the course of his life. It starts out as sorrow that so many of his fellow Jewish people haven't embraced Jesus as the Messiah, and I think in the later epistles of St. Paul, it transforms into something that was even more sorrowful for him because I think he saw the beginning of something that unfolded over the next few centuries, helped along by Roman violence, which was I think he saw the movement surrounding Jesus, the Church, leaving the Jewish people behind.

What do I mean by that? Meaning at the very earliest phase, not only was Christianity profoundly Jewish, it was a Judaism. It had as much claim to being Judaism as any other Judaism in the first century AD. The leadership, the apostles, were Jewish. The main bodies of every church he planted were Jewish, people from the synagogue who embraced Jesus as the Messiah and then "convert"—because it wasn't a new religion, as Fr. Andrew just reminded us. But he saw more and more that Gentile Christians, Christians from the nations, were coming in; they were embracing Jesus as the Messiah. And past a certain point, his fellow Jewish people were not, at least not in the same numbers and not at the same rate. After his death, of course, the Romans destroyed Jerusalem. They de-Judified Judea. They cracked down. Even the patriarchate of Jerusalem, from 70 AD on, frankly, is a Gentile entity, because it had to be, because the Jewish people, including Jewish Christians, had all been expelled.

And that certainly hasn't come back. In the first half, we talked about just some of the horrors and atrocities that came to Jewish people from outside over the centuries. I'm not going to do the thing where we infantilize the Jewish people and act like they're just these pure, innocent, childlike victims of everyone else. That's not true, either. Plenty of Jewish people have done plenty of atrocities, sometimes to their own people, sometimes to other people. That's continued to this very day, let the listener understand. So that's not the issue.

Some people will come and will say, on social media where this won't get them banned— They will say, "Well, Jews hate Jesus" or "Jews hate Christ." Probably a lot of them do. So do a lot of atheists, so do a lot of pagans, so do a lot of other people for various reasons. That doesn't mean we stop caring about those people. That doesn't mean we write those people off, or those people become irrelevant.

So what do we do in our present day within the Orthodox Church about the Jewish people if we want to see Jewish people come and embrace Jesus as the Messiah after all these years, and if we want, as I said I do, if we dream of a day when an actual Jewish patriarchate might be reconstituted because of the waves of Jewish people accepting Jesus as the Messiah within the Orthodox Church, which would be a great and wonderful day—is there anything we can do to help bring that about? I am not going to suggest that what we need to do is a bunch of proselytizing, meaning going and finding Jewish people and trying to preach at them and preach the Gospel at them. Not only has that happened a lot throughout the centuries, in some really dark ways— And when I say really dark ways, again, there may be some people who get defensive about that, but think of the way, for example, that certain Protestant missionaries in Orthodox countries have treated Orthodox people, trying to proselytize. When we're the ones on the receiving end of the proselytism, it feels a certain way. I would suggest that since it feels that way, we should not adapt those same procedures toward other groups and other people.

But what I am going to suggest is that it is very possible for us to try to go back to something that was very much present in the early Church, and I don't just mean the first century and St. Paul, though St. Paul is a great example of it. The reality is Judaism and Christianity, like Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity, were not really two separate things until around AD 500. I won't go into all that now, but I can back that up. Even when we're talking about in the fifth century, they're not completely separate. And a concrete part of what that means is that there was a conversation going on. There were people who knew each other and shared social bonds, and those social bonds are the arena in which a lot of those conversations were happening, where people were talking about the Torah, the Hebrew Scriptures. The part of the inheritance we have as Christians that is also part of the cultural inheritance of the Jewish people: there's an overlap in that Venn diagram, and it includes but is not limited to the Hebrew Scriptures; it includes but is not limited to the Torah. And that overlap presents a place for conversation, a place for discussion, a place for trying to move people, not in a proselytizing way, but an ongoing way of seeking to understand the text and present and communicate that understanding, and bring more people to our understanding of the text.

It's why St. Paul always started in the synagogues. He would go to the teachers. He would go to the rabbis, and he would sit and he would discuss the Torah with them. He would talk about interpretations and traditions of interpretations with them. And some of them— A lot of them he didn't persuade, but some of them came to see what he saw and ended up becoming part of the Christian movement. And so if we threw St. Paul in a Tardis and brought him to the present day, and he ran into a rabbi, I guarantee you I know what he would do. He would start talking about the Torah with him, and he would try to say, "Jesus the Messiah has come, and I know so, because: look here in the Torah." That's what he would do. And they'd argue. They'd argue a lot, because that's how Jewish theology works. [Laughter] But out of that argument and those disagreements, that discussion, things would happen.

So if I'm saying this is what we want to try to restore, how do we do that? Well, here's the step one. Step one is we need some Orthodox Christians who actually know the Torah, who can actually speak that language. And that's something we've left behind. That's something we're now unfamiliar with. We can't have that discussion with Jewish people to try to show them the right way to read the Torah that leads us to Jesus as the Messiah if we don't know the Torah and if we don't know how to have that discussion and we don't know how to reason from the Torah. So we need Christians who can do that. We need to prepare ourselves. Even if you're not going to be— I'm not suggesting every listener to this is going to put in years and be able to sit down with a rabbi and talk about it. I know! But everyone who is listening to this can get to the point where they can have a constructive conversation with a Jewish person who showed up at their parish. You can get that far. It'll take some work, it'll take some time, but you could get there. And some of us can work on that even more, and potentially do even more.

There's a big obstacle. Let me be honest about this, too. Most— The more religious a Jewish person is, the less likely they are to be willing to talk to you as a Christian. There's a lot of barriers; there's a lot of reticence. But the only thing you and I can do to try to break down that reticence is to prepare ourselves to have the discussion, to prepare ourselves to have that discussion in a constructive way. This requires work on our part. And everything Fr. Andrew said in his closing comments, about all the benefits of our understanding the Torah? You get all those, too. Even if you do what I'm suggesting and you never meet a Jewish person in your whole life, you still will have gained all those things Fr. Andrew was talking about.

But maybe also, if we do this, we can be part of the generation or the generations or the beginning of something that could result in something truly glorious, of the Jewish people turning en masse toward their Messiah, to embracing a faith that really originally belonged to them, that we share with them. Jewish people like St. Paul came, and the early missionaries and the Fathers came and shared the truth about God, the truth about Christ, with my ancestors. I think it's about time that we prepared to do the same with those people's descendants.

Fr. Andrew: Amen. Amen. That is our show for tonight. Thank you very much, everyone, for listening. If you didn't happen to get through to us live this time around, we would still like to hear from you. You can email us at lordofspirits@ancientfaith.com; you can message us at our Facebook page; or you can leave us a voicemail at speakpipe.com/lordofspirits. And if you have basic questions about Orthodox Christianity or 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. "There I was, completely wasting, out of work and down. All inside it's so frustrating, as I drift from town to town."

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] And if you are on Facebook, which—reminder, everybody: Fr. Stephen's not, so you could try to call him out in the group, and he won't appear.

Fr. Stephen: You shouldn't be on Facebook either, though.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] If you are on Facebook, you can follow our page, you can join our discussion group, leave reviews, ratings all those places, and share this show with a friend who's going to benefit from it. Also, by the way, if you happen to be listening and it's still March 14, you can get Lord of Spirits, the book, at 50% off, just today only.

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. "Feels as though nobody cares if I live or die, so I might as well begin to put some action in my life. You know what it's called!"

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