Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick: Good evening, giant-killers, dragon-slayers, serpent-stompers. You are listening to The Lord of Spirits podcast. My co-host, Fr. Stephen De Young, is with me from Lafayette, Louisiana, and I am Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick in Emmaus, Pennsylvania. This is not a live broadcast—it’s not Memorex, either—but it is, nonetheless, pre-recorded, because when this episode releases, I will be across an ocean from where I normally am.

Fr. Stephen De Young: I was going to say, I mean, technically you’re always across an ocean.

Fr. Andrew: That’s true, but from where I— It’s all relative. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: So many oceans to choose from, really. [Laughter] Yeah, so tonight, everybody, we have a hot one! There’s probably no subject more subject to pop theology than damnation. Some of you out there were raised with the idea that everyone is born going to hell. Sometimes it’s that good people go to heaven forever when they die, but bad people go to hell forever when they die. Sometimes it’s a little more complex than that, with some religious involvement being key to heaven forever; and some people think that hell is a temporary problem with forever-heaven being everyone’s eventual fate. Yet the Scriptures speak of eternal condemnation, and there is also the resurrection of the body, which is a key Christian dogma.

So what is eternal condemnation? What are the biblical images? Is universalism an acceptable Orthodox view? It’s a hot and spicy episode tonight. So, Fr. Stephen, isn’t it true that with really core questions like the nature of damnation that there are a range of acceptable Orthodox views and we can just pick the one that we like best?

Fr. Stephen: No.

Fr. Andrew: Good night, everybody! Haven’t done one of those in a while. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: I think— I read your little intro thing, and I think I got the wrong idea, because I have this tray of successively spicier hot wings in front of me… [Laughter] I thought we were doing that when you said it was a hot one.

Fr. Andrew: So as we go you’re going to taste another wing?

Fr. Stephen: That was where I thought we were going, but I’m thinking maybe I read that wrong.

Fr. Andrew: An animated gif of Shaquille O’Neal tasting a spicy hot wing.

Fr. Stephen: But, yeah, I mean, we’ll get into this more later, obviously, but orthodoxia, right or correct opinion or viewpoint or perspective—you can’t have multiple ones.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s not like the details of should you wear high-back or low-back vestments, where there’s variation—

Fr. Stephen: Right, because that is not a matter of orthodoxy, that distinction.

Fr. Andrew: Right.

Fr. Stephen: You could have an infinite number of heterodoxies, by definition. There could be an infinite number of other opinions that are incorrect to varying degrees, but you can’t have “these two or three conflicting opinions are all correct.” Kind of basic logic.

Fr. Andrew: Right. There can be— As we have pointed out many times, there can be variation in language, like is man body and soul or is he body, soul, and spirit? Well, those are different ways of talking about essentially the same thing. But that’s not what we’re talking about here.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, but if there is genuine disagreement, where there is genuine disagreement, you can both be wrong; you can’t both be right, equally and in the same sense.

Fr. Andrew: Yes. This is how— Yeah, this is just very, very basic logic.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, and this is actually a good way to set the tone for this episode, because one of the themes tonight is going to be: this isn’t really hard. This isn’t really a hard question. This is really simple. You could read Scripture, you could read the Fathers, you could read our hymns—there is no real ambiguity here.

Fr. Andrew: No, there’s not.

Fr. Stephen: There’s no real complexity here.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, especially the hymnography! I mean, you really have to work at it to get some kind of ambiguity out of it.

Fr. Stephen: And that’s it. The waters have been muddied by people for various reasons. This has been made confusing by certain modern theologians, deliberately, not because it’s really unclear but because they don’t like what is clear. And so things get muddied; people get confused. There are other ambiguities that aren’t a result of that kind of deliberate problematizing. There are some that are just the result of a long history of pop theology, as you mentioned, and oversimplifications and that kind of thing. So there are some things that we’re going to be disambiguating that are going to be of that nature.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and that’s basically where we’re going to start, because this idea of “going to hell when you die,” which is sort of the idea of damnation that a lot of people have in their heads, is actually not Christian teaching, not really.

Fr. Stephen: Right. Christianity does not teach that where bad people go when they die is they go to a lake of fire and fry.

Fr. Andrew: Wow. That rhymed. Very nice.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, well, it might have been a reference to something.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, okay. [Laughter] It also had alliteration, so I really appreciated it.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yeah. And what we’re trying to do in this episode is not sort of— Because I’m anticipating certain things. Let’s just set them out in the beginning. We’re going to be criticized for our tone. We’re going to be called “condescending” and “flippant.” We’re going to get the very glib mad, very glib. [Laughter] And we’re…

Fr. Andrew: Warning: This podcast includes sarcasm!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, it’s so lame, because I know exactly, already in advance, no matter what we do— We’re going to get accused that we’re “teaching our own opinion as if it was the teaching of the Orthodox Church,” because we’re going to disambiguate the teaching of the Orthodox Church and some people aren’t going to like it, and therefore they’re going to say, “Well, that’s not the teaching of the Orthodox Church. That’s just, like, your opinion, man!” [Laughter] Which it isn’t.

Fr. Andrew: I caught that reference!

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] There are these things we’re going to get— There’s going to be appeals to authority with smart people who disagree with this, because the way we’re going to be presenting it—you can call this a trigger warning—like I said, our goal here is to present the apostolic teaching on this, and so we see people who disagree with that as disagreeing with the apostolic teaching. And so we’re going to get, “Yeah, well, so-and-so disagrees, and he’s really smart.” You know, whatever. Those are the things I can say in advance we’re going to get, and it’s not actually going to be with reference with any argument we might make or any data we present or any material we present. All those things are just based on disagreement.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. There are some substantial disagreements that could be made, and we’re going to talk about some of that stuff as we go, but, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: But if you want me to do anything but just, like, chuckle and treat it as a trophy, your virulent criticism of this episode, you need to actually respond to the content.

Fr. Andrew: There we go.

Fr. Stephen: Not just take shots at me or talk about how much smarter your guy is in your mind. [Laughter] So, yeah. So the first big disambiguation we need to make is between Hades and hell—sort of.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. On the one hand, these are synonyms in the sense that they both— that “Hades” comes out of Greek and “hell” comes out of the Germanic languages, and both refer, in those pagan contexts, to a place—the underworld, where people go when they die, especially in a pre-Christian sense. In that sense, they really are synonyms, and of course it’s why “hell” is used in the King James Bible, because that is the traditional word for the underworld in Germanic languages like English.

Fr. Stephen: Right. But in modern English parlance, “hell” is used to refer to where bad folks go when they die. It’s used to refer also to the place where the devil and demons and bad folks go after the last judgment. And those two things, by using the same term, get sort of smooshed together. Then you get your added Miltonian notions of the devil being “the ruler” of hell?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which is frankly kind of pagan! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Instead of being confined there… So, yeah, look at the transition. If anybody still doubts me on this Milton thing, look at the difference between the devil in hell in Milton as romantic figure who’d rather rule in hell than serve in heaven and the devil in Dante, who’s the prisoner in the deepest pit.

Fr. Andrew: Mm, yeah. There’s not a lot of time between those two texts.

Fr. Stephen: In the grand scheme of things, yeah. But there’s a definite transition there in the way the devil’s viewed, and in just kind of the popular Christian world, at least in the United States, the Miltonian view is the one that has sort of taken over, despite its sort of ahistoricity in the fact that it’s not really reflected in the Bible per se either.

Hades— and we talked about this in terms of the cosmic geography of the underworld. I think that’s what we talked about in “Down to Hades.”

Fr. Andrew: “Down to Hades: A Chthonic”— I’m never quite sure how to pronounce that word.

Fr. Stephen: Chthonic, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: “—Chthonic Odyssey.” Yeah, that’s sort of the geography of the underworld.

Fr. Stephen: So we talked about the underworld as “place” with “place” in scare quotes, because, of course, what do we mean by “place”? We don’t mean an extension of physical space that you could measure. We’ve gone through this before, that this is— Spacial terms and temporal terms being used sort of analogically, because of course the underworld is full of, at least relative to us humans, bodiless beings, that therefore don’t have extension in space per se.

We also talked about this a fair amount in our “Lord of Spirits Goes to Hell” episode, where we talked about the harrowing of Hades. We sort of revisited it in some of those places. So when you look at all of the hymnography surrounding Pascha, for example—

Fr. Andrew: Yes. “Not one dead remains in the tomb,” for instance.

Fr. Stephen: —all the “harrowing of Hades” language, this is talking about Hades. This is talking about the place where everyone went when they died, before Christ’s harrowing of Hades. And in those episodes—we’re not going to go all through it again in detail because we’re doing this to disambiguate: this episode is not about Hades. Remember, for example, that was sort of schematized in the book of Enoch, that there were these sort of four caves, and one cave was the martyrs and one was the righteous, one was the ignorant, one was the wicked. The righteous dead sort of had a spring of water in their cave, and that is kind of reflected in the background of the rich man and Lazarus, where Lazarus is in this place that’s very bad—or the rich man is in a place that’s very bad. Lazarus is in Abraham’s bosom; he’s with Abraham. And since the rich man asks for water, that sort of implies there’s some sort of water where Lazarus is and not where he is.

And then the idea, of course, the harrowing of Hades—you can go back to that episode for all the details—is Christ ascends and brings the righteous and the martyrs to paradise. Hades gets cleared out.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, but only of the righteous. The wicked and the angels who left their former estate, they are still chained there, as St. Peter mentions, post-resurrection, in his epistle.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and part of the “no body remains in the grave”… Keep in mind, there’s nothing in the gospels at least to say that everyone was physically resurrected at that time.

Fr. Andrew: No. [Laughter] Right, and I know that’s the funny thing. I’ve seen some people interpret this as—I mean, we’ll get more into this, but as essentially everybody is saved or whatever, based on this. But it’s like: Well, that’s the harrowing of Hades, and it does mention that a bunch of people came out of their tombs, for a while, but not everybody, and it says it was the saints. It wasn’t—

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and it was only for a while.

Fr. Andrew: And it wasn’t everybody. Those people all died again. They were essentially resuscitated; they weren’t really resurrected in the truest sense.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And that’s because what that paschal hymnography is trying to convey, in addition to the harrowing of Hades, is what we talked about last time, about Christ being the firstborn from the dead and the first fruits of the resurrection.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there will be a general resurrection, and Pascha participates in that.

Fr. Stephen: Right, is the beginning of it, is the down payment on it, as Christ’s resurrection, the sign of it. So you have that going on, but the problem you just mentioned, of how people interpret it, is in part because of the idea that hell or Hades has been sort of equated with the place of ultimate condemnation after the last judgment. And these are two different things. So we’ve done a couple episodes talking about Hades; tonight’s episode is not about Hades.

You could also talk about Hades, that type of Hades, as, in scare quotes, “place.” There’s also Hades as sort of experience, after people die. And we’ve talked about this in terms of what’s called the intermediate state, and the reason it’s called the intermediate state when you’re talking about it theologically is that it’s the state of a human soul between their physical death and their bodily resurrection.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. We believe in a two-stage eschatology as it’s sometimes called. There is an eschatology of what happens to you immediately when you die, and there’s an eschatology of the general resurrection and what happens after that, as long as we’re talking in linear temporal terms.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And there is a way in which, then, paradise and Hades are used as terms to describe that state for different people. For some people, that state is described as paradise, being in the presence of God, being with Christ, being in Christ, the dead in Christ, our life being hidden in Christ; and then on the other side as Hades, as some kind of negative state: but paradise and Hades as an experience or as a state in which the soul is. And we’ve talked before on the show about all the problems of how exactly we could imagine that as embodied beings, not just accidentally embodied beings but by nature embodied beings, what that state is like and how one experiences things like time and space when one is no longer embodied. That’s not something we can really conceive of.

So we use metaphors, but we don’t mean that your force ghost is sitting around somewhere for years and years and years and years, waiting for Christ’s return. That’s why I keep using the language of “state”—state of being, state of existence—because it’s the best sort of vague way to not— to help prevent us from over-literalizing things in this regard. Really, it isn’t even over-literalizing; it’s over-materializing, thinking of them in material terms. This is a problem, too, by the way. I know, because I saw a little bit of feedback on our last episode where we talked about the Ascension, that “literal” and “material” are not synonyms.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Like, “scientific material reality” and “literal” do not mean the same thing. There are lots of things that are literally true that are not statements of scientific materialism. So all the things that Scripture says about the intermediate state, about paradise and Hades and how they’re experienced by people after the death of the body, are all literally true, but none of them are scientific material statements. Those aren’t the same thing.

And we’ve talked a little about how in the past this relates to the idea of praying for the departed, and I know this has been a sticking-point for a lot of people, too, so we’ll spend a little time with it here and hopefully this’ll help sort of disambiguate. So what we’ve said before in a couple of different contexts is following St. John of Damascus that our bodily life in this material world, in the present age, is given to us for repentance. We have mortal bodies so that we can repent. And so beings without mortal bodies—angelic beings, whatever label we want to use for them, whether they’re fallen or unfallen—and humans who have died physically, meaning their soul’s been separated from their body because therefore they are not embodied in that state, are not able to repent. And so repentance is sort of confined to this life.

I know this is a hard thing to get your brain around, and I think part of the reason why people have trouble getting their brain around what St. John is saying is the bad way we’ve been taught to think about what repentance is.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, we tend to think of it as how you feel, really. Really, that’s what it comes down to. I mean, we’ve all heard this in confession, people saying, “I know I’m supposed to forgive, but I just can’t forgive him; I just can’t forgive her.” And by that they don’t mean “I can’t take the 3-D world actions not to take revenge, to be reconciled”; they mean “I can’t imagine I will feel any differently about this.”

Fr. Stephen: Right. “There’s not a wand I can wave where I don’t feel hurt and upset about what happened.” And it’s like: Yes! You are right! There is no such wand.

Fr. Andrew: Forgiveness is not the opposite of feeling hurt and upset.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. And… I’ll just go ahead, as is my wont. [Laughter] So part of what’s happened in our society— And this actually started in Evangelical Christianity and has spread outward to the rest of—again, this is where I live, so I have to mainly speak about American culture, but since we export our American culture imperialistically to the rest of the world, it’s probably true of a lot of other places, too. We’ve— Obviously, one of the things we’ve talked about a lot is the difference between the contemporary idea, or even the historic, Protestant idea of “faith” and the idea of “faithfulness,” and how that concept of “faith” is the direct result of having set up a dichotomy between it and “works.” So when you set up a dichotomy, you can’t set up a dichotomy between faithfulness and works, like, it doesn’t—work, pardon the pun. But when you set up that dichotomy, when you remove works from faith so that faith is a thing and then works is another thing that is somehow related to it, and then you can argue about how they’re related, but it’s a separate thing, then essentially what “faith” becomes is intellectual assent plus feelings—plus feelings of love, loyalty, whatever—that grow out of that intellectual assent.

As Evangelical Christianity, at least here in the United States, has evolved, over time, slowly but surely, the actual content of faith—meaning the propositions to which you have to give intellectual assent—have dwindled down and dwindled down and dwindled down and dwindled down. You look at a historic Calvinist or Lutheran or even Methodist church and old-school Baptist church: there are a whole list of things that you have to sign on for, that you have to give your intellectual assent to in their minds. But those have dwindled down and down now to the point where a lot of non-denominational Evangelical churches, it’s like: you have to believe in Jesus and that he died for you. And beyond that, even who Jesus was or is, and what it means that he died for you and how that worked are up for grabs. [Laughter]

So what happens when you take away—when you have something that’s a combination of intellectual assent and feelings, essentially, and you take away the propositions to which you have to assent, is you’re mainly left with feelings. And so faith primarily becomes about these sort of feelings of attachment, and that’s been opposed to works. And this plays out in all of these places in society I’ve talked before, like all the “woke” stuff that people get so mad about online is just atheistic Protestantism; it’s just “I need to publicly give my assent to certain propositions that mark me out as a good person, one of the elect.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that you’re one of the faithful.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. But one of the ways—one of the horrible ways—this has actually worked out in our modern society with the feelings thing is empathy. Yes, Fr. Stephen De Young is now going to speak against empathy.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I don’t think anyone who knows you would be shocked about this.

Fr. Stephen: Well, this is true, but empathy is mostly worthless. The person who comes to you and needs food doesn’t care if you feel his pain. He doesn’t actually want you to sit next to him and be with him in his suffering. He wants you to give him food.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I think most of the people who want the empathy, their lives— In terms of their needs and their suffering, their lives are probably pretty good most of the time.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. Actually doing things has value. Thoughts and prayers, tweets that you’re thinking of someone, don’t help them; helping them helps them. Calling them and spending time talking to them, if that’s what they need—again, actually doing it—helps them, not just having general good feelings toward them. And so repentance, likewise, has been sort of reduced to feeling: “Well, I feel really bad about it.” That’s “repentance.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, no, it needs to be change; you’ve got to make change.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and our definition of an unrepentant sinner now is someone who doesn’t feel bad about it.

Fr. Andrew: Hmm, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: And gone is actually doing anything. [Laughter] Instead of doing anything about it.

Fr. Andrew: And people hijack things from the Scripture to kind of back this up. For instance, there’s scriptural language about doing things with your whole heart. That doesn’t mean that you feel it really big.

Fr. Stephen: No.

Fr. Andrew: That means that if someone observes you, they could say, “Oh, yes, he’s really doing it.” [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yes, and you’re doing it intentionally.

Fr. Andrew: If someone’s digging a ditch half-heartedly, that means they’re barely digging.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. If I walk by someone and happen to drop my water bottle, that’s not the same as giving them water. You have to do it intentionally. But so yeah, and so repentance is not just about you feeling guilty; it’s not about— It’s definitely not you feeling bad about the consequences of your actions and wanting to get out of them. But then you have this whole— And this is destructive in the case of repentance because people get lost in this sort of psychoanalytic maze of “Oh, am I really repentant? I don’t know… Am I? Is it just because of the consequences? Am I trying to… Do I really feel bad about it? Do I feel bad enough about it?”

Fr. Andrew: Right, and then they often think, “Wow, I’m in danger of hellfire,” related to this episode, “because I don’t feel all the right things.” As a really interesting anecdote… So I don’t know that I’ve mentioned it on this show, but one of the projects that I’m working on is a documentary related to my pilgrimage to Lithuania, called The Wolf and the Cross—a couple episodes out; everybody, listen to it!—but one of the things that will show up in episode three, which as of now has not been released yet, is a poem written by St. Athanasius of Brest when he was thrown into prison by the Uniates. A friend of mine who’s in Lithuania not only dug this up but translated it for me from what’s called Old Chancery Slavonic, Slavonic.

And if you read it, there’s parts where he’s sort of blessing his enemies, and there’s parts where he’s super mad at his enemies and condemning them. You read it and it’s like: “Okay, this is a guy who has all kinds of feelings. Some are beautiful and kind and tender; others are really—like, he’s not doing well! He seems to be pretty depressed.” But it’s clear that he’s a saint, and it’s not just because they shot him in the head and dumped in him the ground when he didn’t die, buried alive, although that did happen. But saints have— Or St. David in the psalms! There’s some pretty serious depressed feelings going on in some of those psalms. It doesn’t mean he’s not repenting.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, feelings are epiphenomenal. They have value only if they’re related to your actions. Without actions, they’re valueless. Someone in your community has a spouse pass away. You sitting in your house and feeling bad for them does nothing for them. You making some food and bringing it to their house does something for them: you actually doing something for them. And you doing that for them and going over there with the food and eating the food with them—there will be feelings and emotions that will come along with that and that you’ll share, but those will be valuable because they’re accompanying what you’re actually doing. They aren’t valuable just sort of in abstraction, in and of themselves.

So on the one side, yeah, repentance is not about how you feel. So when we say that demons can’t repent, we don’t mean demons can’t be like: “Man, this stinks. I’m going to be confined to a lake of fire for all eternity.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. “Maybe I should change my mind.” [Laughter] We don’t know what it’s like to be a demon.

Fr. Stephen: Well, yeah, but, I mean, there’s a scene in 1 Enoch where the Watchers are like: “Hey, Enoch, God likes you. Could you go put in a good word for us, maybe get us out of this punishment a little early?” That’s not repentance!

Fr. Andrew: No, and even the rich man and Lazarus, there’s not any repentance in any of the sins he says; he just doesn’t like to suffer.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, he’s just like: “Yeah, I don’t like this suffering, and, hey, I like my family enough that I don’t particular want them to suffer like this,” but that’s not repentance! That’s not repentance.

So we’re not saying that somehow being outside the body means you can’t have certain feelings or think certain thoughts.

Fr. Andrew: We don’t know.

Fr. Stephen: Of course you can. That’s not repentance, though. And it’s also not about making God not mad at you. Repentance is not something you do—and this is more maybe from another perspective; this may come— Well, this is another thread in Western theology, let’s just say, because there’s various Western groups that are more on this side, where it’s: You have sinned; you have broken one of God’s rules. Therefore he’s quite irate, and he’s going to send you to hell unless you do whatever is required, usually involving just asking for forgiveness, but sometimes doing that in a context. Then if you do that, then you’re off the hook and God’s not mad at you any more. That also is not repentance. There is nothing that we do in the Church that changes God.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, or in the somewhat amusing to me but really on-point words of Metropolitan Hierotheos (Vlahos), “God does not need therapy.” [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, he does not need to change—and doesn’t, and isn’t going to. So this is the difference between liturgy and prayer on one hand and magic on the other. We aren’t trying to change God; God doesn’t need to change. The father in the parable of the prodigal son always loves his son and is always waiting for him to come home. Even though disrespected by his son pretty abominably and abandoned, etc., etc., he never gets angry at his son and throws him out or puts some barrier in the way of his coming back. So this has nothing to do with— Repentance has nothing to do with changing God.

Repentance is about when you sin, you do damage to yourself and to other people and to the world around you. And repentance is you doing everything you can to repair the damage you’ve done and to heal it, both to yourself, to other people, and to the world around you. That’s what repentance is. That kind of requires a body.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because you have to do stuff.

Fr. Stephen: You have to do stuff. And demons can’t directly do stuff in the world. And humans, after the physical death, can’t directly do stuff in the world. They can’t— Not only can they not roll back the clock and not-do the things they did, they can’t go and apologize. They can’t make amends. They can’t any more. They can’t make restitution any more. That’s why we say repentance isn’t possible, because of what repentance really is.

And so, as we’ve mentioned before, in terms of prayers for the departed, they’re not able to repent, and so in a sense we repent for them. So we offer our prayers to God as instruments that God can choose to use to grant forgiveness and healing to that person.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and if someone thinks, “Well, you know, that shouldn’t count!” Like, why should your repentance count? God chooses to use it for your salvation. It’s all mercy.

Fr. Stephen: And why wouldn’t it count? Because again the problem is not how the departed person feels. The problem is not that God is angry with the departed person; God loves the departed person. So if someone has sinned against me and dies, and I pray to God and I say, “I have forgiven this person. Please forgive this person their sins,” why shouldn’t that count as repentance? Or if someone I love has done something I know, and I go and in their name try and fix it in the world, why would that not “count”?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because it’s a legalistic view, or a sort of a financial view.

Fr. Stephen: If you have a correct view of repentance. I find out my departed loved one swindled somebody, and I go and give the money back to that person and make that person whole and apologize on their behalf and heal that, and I and the person my loved one swindled pray and ask God to forgive that person… Again, I don’t understand why this is complicated, other than we have a weird, messed-up view of what repentance is.

Fr. Andrew: Which we do! [Laughter] And so all this is relevant because none of this applies to people who are in eternal condemnation, because—

Fr. Stephen: All of this is talking about people who are in that intermediate state during this age. That’s when we’re doing the praying.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so it’s not about “praying people out of hell,” if “hell” means eternal condemnation to you.

Fr. Stephen: So you could say, “Well, wait, are people who are experiencing eternal life in the age to come going to pray for those who are experiencing eternal condemnation in the world to come?” I’m going to be like—what? [Laughter] There’s literally nothing speaking to that anywhere in Scripture or our Tradition.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that’s not what it’s about.

Fr. Stephen: This is definitely— This is going to be a cheap shot, but it’s kind of an important cheap shot.

Fr. Andrew: “An important cheap shot…”

Fr. Stephen: We don’t in the Orthodox Church have Thomas Aquinas’s thing about how people enjoying eternal life in the world to come are going to be more happy because they’re going to watch the people suffering in eternal condemnation.

Fr. Andrew: If I didn’t know that was true, I wouldn’t imagine that was true, that he actually said that.

Fr. Stephen: Well, so, you’ve got to give the qualifiers. It’s from [Tertia Pars]. It’s based on his notes. He didn’t actually write it. It was posthumously put together, etc., etc.

Fr. Andrew: And at the end of his life, didn’t he say, “Yeah, I got a lot of stuff wrong”?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, well, this was after that, but it was from his notes. He didn’t finish it.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, I see. Okay.

Fr. Stephen: So they did it from his notes. Had he lived, he might have edited that out or said something different or framed it somehow or whatever. But Nietzsche and everyone else has been quoting that for a couple hundred years now, so…

Fr. Andrew: It’s been received as a thing.

Fr. Stephen: I’m just saying that’s no part of Orthodox Tradition. If Roman Catholics want to come to me and say that’s no part of Roman Catholic tradition, I’ll be happy.

Fr. Andrew: We rejoice.

Fr. Stephen: I’ll say: Good!

Fr. Andrew: Good! This is one where we’re together on this.

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: So, yeah, okay. We’ve spent this whole half disambiguating: What does happen to Hades, long-term?

Fr. Stephen: Right, so Hades, the underworld, that intermediate state, however we want to talk about it, whether we want to talk about it as underworld and those kind of quasi-spatial terms, or the intermediate state in sort of quasi-temporal terms, this is part of the present age, the current creation: this world, over against the world to come. And so it is something that is destroyed at the last judgment. And actually, though a lot of people I don’t think have ever thought this through, both what we call heaven and what we call hell in our common sort of modern American parlance, these intermediate state places, cease to exist. There’s going to be a new heaven. It’s not just a new earth, but a new heavens.

Notice, though, there’s a tripartite division in the Scriptures. There’s the heavens, the earth, and under the earth, the underworld. Notice there’s a new heavens and a new earth; there’s no new underworld.

Fr. Andrew: How about that? No basement.

Fr. Stephen: Right. So there’s sort of a contrast here. Isaiah 24:21, for example, talks about the purification of the heavens.

Fr. Andrew: Yep. It says, “On that day, the Lord will punish the host of heaven in heaven and the kings of the earth on the earth.” So there’s a justification going on.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Right, and this is dealing with the spiritual powers, the evil spiritual powers. But then there’s a new, purified heavens, purified of them, and new earth, but then in terms of Hades you get Revelation 20:14.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which says, “Then death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. This is the second death, the lake of fire.”

Fr. Stephen: So Hades is going to be gone. [Laughter] This is the ultimate disambiguation. We’re talking about what comes next tonight. We’re talking about after the day of the Lord, after the last judgment, after the resurrection of all the dead, after the glorious appearing of Christ: what comes after that for those who experience condemnation. Even though we’re using the “eternal condemnation” language, in the biblical idiom, this is the condemnation of the age to come, literally the condemnation of the age, meaning the age to come, not this age. So these are two different things.

As we said back in the beginning of this first half, if you want more on Hades and the underworld and this age and the harrowing thereof, we’ve done a couple episodes about that. So now the rest of tonight’s episode is going to be about that eternal condemnation, that condemnation of the age to come, the people who opt out of eternal life and the new heavens and the new earth.

Fr. Andrew: All right. That said, we’ll be right back with the second half of this episode of The Lord of Spirits.

Fr. Andrew: Hey, welcome back, everybody, to the second part of the show! This is a pre-recorded one, so don’t call. Or if you do call, I mean, who knows what’ll happen.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, let us know what happens.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I’m kind of curious. But, yes, we will not be taking your calls, because, again, I am across an ocean from where I normally am. Fr. Stephen’s still living in his swamp.

Fr. Stephen: Not one of those low-grade oceans, Indian Ocean, or anything…

Fr. Andrew: That’s right, one of the big ones!

Fr. Stephen: One of the big ones.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, the one that has Atlantis underneath it somewhere. Okay, so—

Fr. Stephen: Or does it?

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Find out on another episode… No.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, on a completely different episode of Lord of Spirits.

Fr. Andrew: That would be fun, actually, to do an Atlantis episode!

Fr. Stephen: Well, that would just be a flood episode with an Atlantis section.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, of course. Of course, but, you know… Yeah. Because I read all that stuff; the stuff that’s in Plato and so forth, I read that for a paper I was working on a number of months back, and, boy, it’s fun! [Laughter] And there’s giants in the Greek version, too, so that’s great!

But that’s not what we’re talking about in this particular episode. We’ve just disambiguated where people go when they die, in this age, with the life or death, as it were, of the age to come. And we’re talking about the death of the age to come in particular, eternal condemnation, the condemnation of that age, the age that has no end.

Fr. Stephen: And specifically we’re talking about what the biblical language— What language does the New Testament use?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah! A lot of people like to think of the Old Testament as the fire-and-brimstone part of the Bible, but it turns out there’s language for eternal condemnation in the New Testament, and it’s some pretty frightening imagery. It’s images that don’t all work with each other as images, like you can’t really super-combine them. I mean, there’s some combinations you can make, but it’s really about different angles from which to describe an experience that is very difficult to describe.

Fr. Stephen: And you’re not supposed to like it or be comfortable with it.

Fr. Andrew: And that’s kind of the point.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, the purpose of the language is to present this as a terrifying possibility, to be avoided.

Fr. Andrew: To motivate you.

Fr. Stephen: That’s sort of the whole point. And, cards on the table, the main reason we’re focusing on the New Testament is that most of the people who disagree with the apostolic teaching on this point are at least a little bit Marcionite.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, they’re like: “Oh, that’s the Old Testament, and that doesn’t really apply now.”

Fr. Stephen: “Ooh, grumpy Old Testament God.”

Fr. Andrew: Which, you know, if you think that: Welcome to The Lord of Spirits podcast, because obviously this is your first episode! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Right? But so, just for the sake of laying this out clearly, and laying this out as the apostolic teaching, since, you know, the apostles produced the New Testament, we’re focusing on the New Testament in this half. Not to say we won’t mention anything from the Old Testament, but we’re focusing on the New Testament in this half to show: Oh no, it’s the good, loving New Testament God whom everybody claims to like who is saying these things and setting out this terrifying possibility. I was tongue-in-cheek there about there being a different New Testament God, just to clarify. [Laughter] Sometimes we have to.

Fr. Andrew: Someone’s going to clip that out…

Fr. Stephen: No. I am opposed to the Marcionism that results from the other view.

Fr. Andrew: Wait, wait, after 200 hours of The Lord of Spirits podcast…

Fr. Stephen: Depending on how salty I feel in the third half, I may express just how much disdain I have for that particular view, but for now… [Laughter]

One of the primary images for eternal condemnation is the lake of fire, and that sort of a hackneyed, over-materialized version of that stands behind, I think, sort of the popular contemporary perception of hell.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, what I like to call Far Side eschatology, where depictions of hell are always people kind of standing in lava pits, with flames coming out of the ground, and usually there was some kind of—

Fr. Stephen: Standing around in a bunch of fire, getting poked with pitchforks.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, demon with a pitchfork or a trident. Usually tridents, I’ve noticed. They always talk about pitchforks, but they always draw tridents. So go figure!

Fr. Stephen: Is it a Neptune thing?

Fr. Andrew: I don’t know. I mean, I own an actual pitchfork, but I do not own a trident.

Fr. Stephen: Now, if it has more than three, it’s technically not a trident.

Fr. Andrew: That’s true.

Fr. Stephen: Sometimes you get these things that look kind of like tridents, but have five.

Fr. Andrew: Quadrent— Pentad—!

Fr. Stephen: By definition, not a trident.

Fr. Andrew: Pentadent. Pentadent? I don’t know. [Laughter] It literally means “three teeth.”

Fr. Stephen: They need to just start calling it a pitchfork, right?

Fr. Andrew: There’s some etymology for you, everybody. Good night! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Fr. Andrew’s work is done here.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: But the lake of fire is not meant to convey that imagery. A lake of fire is — Imagine a lake, a big depression in the earth, and it’s full of fire. So this isn’t a cave with some fire in it; it’s not the Fire Caves of Bajor. It’s not. And so the imagery is of being thrown into a fire, not a place that has some fire in it. The lake of fire image isn’t found in the Old Testament per se. Daniel 7, which we’ve come back to many times with the enthronement of the Son of Man, when it talks about the judgment, describes a river of fire at the judgment.

Fr. Andrew: Which is not the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, much to my surprise!

Fr. Stephen: Although it has been ablaze on occasion.

Fr. Andrew: Yes!

Fr. Stephen: So this is a hypothesis, because, as we’re going to talk about, the lake of fire imagery shows up in other Second Temple Jewish literature—hypothesis that there is a connection between this river of fire in Daniel and the lake of fire, the idea being the river pools into a lake. It seems odd that “river of fire” and “lake of fire” would be completely disconnected, especially since the main place we see the lake of fire imagery is the book of Enoch, which is obviously influenced by Daniel 7 in a bunch of places related to the Son of Man and other things.

So there is likely a relationship there, but we don’t have the data to conclusively show. So this is just sort of an Occam’s Razor thing, that those are probably related. But we do get this imagery of this lake of fire in 1 Enoch; it’s the place where the Watchers get chucked for their sin and wickedness. It’s Tartarus, it’s the abyss, it’s the deepest part of the underworld. It’s the horrible place of punishment for demonic powers. And so when the lake of fire comes up in the New Testament, it’s also kind of unsurprising that it’s in the two books of the New Testament that are most influenced by the book of Enoch, those being the Revelation of St. John and St. Matthew’s gospel. The book of Revelation, it comes up, of course, as you might expect, at the end, and just like in and specifically in Revelation 19:20, 20:10, and verses 14 and 15 of chapter 20, in that context, much like 1 Enoch, death, Hades, as we read in the last half, the beast, the false prophet, the devil—all of those demonic powers all get chucked into the lake of fire. Also, however, along with them are those who received the mark of the beast, meaning those who—those humans who joined with the demonic powers, who allied themselves with the demonic powers in their rebellion against and hatred of God.

Fr. Andrew: Wait, are you saying it’s not people who have credit cards or people who get some kind of medical intervention?

Fr. Stephen: Vaccine?

Fr. Andrew: I was just going to say, medical intervention! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Just saying! Once again, the mark of the beast, if you read Revelation—the mark of the beast is talked about in tandem with a mark of Yahweh, a mark of the Lord. So whatever you say the mark of the beast is, there has to be a corresponding one for faithful Christians. So if it’s a bar code tattoo, then there’s going to be some kind of divine QR code issued by the Church on people’s foreheads.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. It turns out, everybody, it’s actually about what you do. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. So unless your proposal— Anybody who proposes “X is the mark of the beast” to you, you have to say, “Okay, is there a holy X that stands in contrast to it?” [Laughter] So is the Church issuing a different vaccine? Otherwise, it can’t be the mark of the beast. Things can be bad without being the mark of the beast, also. Not everyone you disagree with is Hitler.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, and my favorite from recent years is there’s now something called “the forerunner to the mark of the beast,” which— I’m like, is that a theological category now, because… I don’t know. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Again, things can be bad without being the mark of the beast. You don’t have to— It’s not all or nothing. Two things can be bad! [Laughter] But as I mentioned, the lake of fire language is also used in Matthew, specifically in Matthew 24:41, and this is the last verse; this is the end of the parable of the sheep and the goats.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, where you get— Jesus says—again, this is Jesus speaking, by the way, everybody—“Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you cursèd, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.’ ”

Fr. Stephen: Now, this is important because notice he says that the fire is prepared for the devil and his angels, the devil and his messengers, meaning: not for humans. The purpose of the lake of fire was not for humans, say, humans that God hated and created to be vessels of his wrath—sorry, Calvinists—but for the devil and his angels. So, as in Revelation, the humans who end up there, it’s like—it’s because they’ve decided to sign on with the devil and his angels, the devil and his messengers. That’s how they end up there.

So what is this fire? Well, we’re not talking about, like, obviously material fire, as we mentioned with the Far Side thing. This isn’t like people are literally… I mean, it is after the bodily resurrection, but it’s still not a literal place, literal material place of literal material fire where people are literally set on fire.

Fr. Andrew: Wait, I’m not supposed to get my eschatology from Jack Chick tracts either? [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: No.

Fr. Andrew: It’s funny, because I now have, thanks to a very kind listener of The Areopagus podcast—I have in my studio a complete set of the currently in-print Jack Chick comics. And whenever he depicts hell, that’s what it always is: big flaming space with demons with pitchforks who are really happy to see you, and stabbing you in the butt. [Laughter] It’s amazing.

Fr. Stephen: I mean, that would be a kind of hell for them, I imagine, because it would have to get boring. [Laughter] But, yeah, as we mentioned in the contrast between Dante and Milton, the answer to the question, “Who’s the boss?”—

Fr. Andrew: Angela is the boss.

Fr. Stephen: —in hell, in eternal condemnation, is not Angela or Samantha or Mona.

Fr. Andrew: Definitely not Tony.

Fr. Stephen: Definitely not him. The answer is nobody.

Fr. Andrew: Right, because it says in the Scripture that all those who get tossed into—all those who get tossed into the lake of fire get tormented, forever and ever.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and it was prepared specifically for the devil and his angels to be tormented forever and ever there. That’s what we’re told by Scripture.

Fr. Andrew: That’s what it says.

Fr. Stephen: So he’s not in charge there. And the reason I’m emphasizing this is not just we have this wrong idea in our head due to Milton, but people have this idea in their head—and again, cards on the table, we’re going to be going after universalism head-on in the third half.

Fr. Andrew: Huzzah!

Fr. Stephen: People will act as if, if some person ends up experiencing eternal condemnation, that somehow the devil has won, that the devil has claimed this person.

Fr. Andrew: No, no, the devil is a loser. Again, welcome to The Lord of Spirits podcast! [Laughter] This is one of our frequent themes. The devil is a loser.

Fr. Stephen: Dragging someone down with you is not winning. [Laughter] That’s not winning. He doesn’t have a kingdom of any kind.

Fr. Andrew: We are not Greek pagans.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah.

Fr. Andrew: Or, actually, almost any kind of pagan, honestly.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, but so what’s going on with this fire imagery is not just: Hey, being on fire is an image of horrible, horrible pain, which of course it is, of suffering. It’s a bad thing that you want to avoid. But this is the fire that comes from God—see death by holiness; see Nadab and Abihu, the fire that comes out of the presence of God and consumes them. So this is about God’s holiness. When the wicked come into the presence of God’s holiness, it’s compared in the Scriptures to fire because this is pain or suffering. Even when— Like think of Isaiah. Isaiah comes into the presence of God’s throne and is tearing his clothes and is like: “I am undone! I am a man of unclean lips from a people of unclean lips.” Let alone the devil.

This is talking about the experience of the presence of God by those who are confirmed in their wickedness. That’s the imagery that’s going on here. But as we talked about, when we’ve talked about mortality and human death, and the ways in which that’s a mercy or a grace from God, if you don’t have that… Nadab and Abihu drop dead. Age to come, no one’s going to die in that sense, in the sense of physical death.

Fr. Andrew: Because the resurrection has happened and everyone was raised incorruptible. Everyone.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And just a note here before we move off of the fire imagery, because I wanted to just briefly touch on it in a couple of places, the term “Gehenna” is used, and we talked about this back in the Chthonic Odyssey episode, the way the term “Gehenna” is used. In some of the Church Fathers, they use the term “Gehenna” as opposed to Hades in order to do what we were disambiguating in the first half. They’ll use “Gehenna” to refer to eternal condemnation as opposed to “Hades” to refer to in this age. We mentioned in that episode, how it’s a reference to the valley of Hinnom. The reason I’m mentioning it here is you get the garbage fire explanation which it seems like maybe isn’t true; maybe they burned garbage there. But rather that’s connected to the history there, of Israel having offered their firstborn to Moloch there, the demonic worship that went on there. And it’s also a valley next to the mountain of God, so you have the geography symbolism there.

But so I thought we should at least comment on that, because the word gets— For more on how the word gets used in the New Testament, see previous episode, but because some of the Church Fathers use Gehenna as their other word to talk about eternal condemnation, I thought it important, at least mentioning that here. It’s not clear in its New Testament usage which it’s referring to. There are places you can argue it’s being used as a synonym of Hades, but yeah. So there’s that.

So the next sort of major image that’s used for eternal condemnation is “outer darkness.”

Fr. Andrew: This is where the weeping and the gnashing of teeth are happening.

Fr. Stephen: Hello, Mormon friends. [Laughter] No. This is a term they use, somewhat differently, but we won’t go into that for our purposes here. This is the term that’s used in Matthew 8:12, Matthew 22:13 and 25:30. And in all three of those cases, as Fr. Andrew mentioned, it’s connected with the imagery of weeping and gnashing of teeth.

Fr. Andrew: I mean, people know what weeping is, but I think gnashing is not something people tend to think about too much these days. It’s a Bible word and that’s…

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, the gnashing of teeth. And people tend to read that, I think—at least the way I’ve seen and heard it interpreted in general American Christian circles is that this is an imagery of suffering, being in the outer darkness.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, grinding your teeth is what gnashing your teeth is, like: [Growling] Like when your dog growls at you. [Growling]



Fr. Stephen: That’s not at all what it is biblically. Biblically, and even in Greek literature outside the Bible, by the way, that imagery is used to describe madness, and madness the way we talked about it in our madness episode.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, like foaming at the mouth kind of thing.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. Think of the Gerasene demoniac, out in the tombs, naked, or think of Nebuchadnezzar, as we talked about in that episode, being reduced to this sort of bestial state. That sort of imagery. And you can find this in all sorts of places. In Job at one point, Job says that his enemies gnash their teeth at him, meaning they’re sitting there enraged. They’re angry. They’re descending upon him like wolves to destroy him violently, not that they grind their teeth at night, because: “Man, that Job!” He wouldn’t care about that. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: It shows up a bunch of times in the psalms, and it’s literally— Every time, it’s about the wicked gnashing their teeth at the righteous. [Growling]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And so this is a good place to point out with this outer darkness that the different types of language used are not, on a woodenly literal level, compatible. Like, fire and darkness are, strictly speaking, opposites.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, how can outer darkness have a lake of fire in it?

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Right. So if you take it at that very literal level, it’s contradictory, but of course, as we’ve already mentioned, that’s not how this is to be understood. And so we’re getting different imagery for something that we fundamentally can’t understand from our embodied human perspective now, with our pre-resurrection bodies. We can’t understand what that’s going to be like, and so we’re given imagery that pertains to our bodily existence in this age as different metaphors. So we can’t understand what that would be like, but if you’ve ever been camping where there’s sort of no ambient light, on a dark, cloudy night, where there’s no ambient light from the city or anything around, where literally you can put your hand in front of your face and you can’t see anything—

Fr. Andrew: Or if you’ve taken one of those cave tours where at some point they’ll say, “Okay, everybody, turn your flashlights out.” I went on one of these when I lived on Guam, because there’s a lot of caves on Guam, and we all turned our flashlights out, and the tour guide goes: “This is what it’s like in the heart of an unrepentant sinner.” [Laughter] I’m not kidding! I was like: Whoa!

Fr. Stephen: Wow. But just feel bad and everything’ll brighten up… [Laughter] No.

Fr. Andrew: It might help the drama here.

Fr. Stephen: But that is a terrifying experience for us in this age to be in that kind of darkness, especially if you hear weeping and gnashing of teeth going on around you.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah… A little freaky. A lot freaky!

Fr. Stephen: So this is an image of terror and madness. This is bad! This is something I want nothing to do—I want no part of. Being set on fire, very clearly: this is something I want no part of. I do not want to be thrown into a fire. This is imagery of terror, madness, suffering: Bad stuff. Stay away from it. Do the other thing. Eternal life is what we want.

And then the third sort of major one is references to the second death or eternal death, and eternal death there is the death of the age to come.

Fr. Andrew: The first death being physical death.

Fr. Stephen: Physical, right. And this gets used in Revelation 2:11, 20:6, 14; and 21:8. In the last two of those, the lake of fire is said to be the second death.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so there’s a linkage between these images.

Fr. Stephen: Even though they’re not directly the same thing. So what kind of death is this that’s getting talked about? Because there’s another group of people whom we’re only going to pick on here, since the third half will be reserved for a whole other group of people, who—it’s generally called annihilationism.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which is this teaching that good people in the life of the age to come get to be with God in heaven, but bad people are just—ffft!—erased.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, cease to exist. So there’s a bunch of problems with that. One of them is that there is no sense of the word “death” in the Bible that refers to annihilation.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, even physical death doesn’t mean ceasing to exist.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and we’ve talked about this before but it bears repeating. St. John of Damascus summarizes this. The reason I come back to St. John of Damascus a lot is that if you read his Fount of Wisdom, he summarizes. He’s in the eighth century, so he summarizes a lot of things from the preceding Fathers and from Scripture, and synthesizes it.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, he’s great. He’s a schoolmaster. He’s really a catechist in that text.

Fr. Stephen: So if you’re looking for good definitional statements, like I need to explain, as we’re about to, there’s physical death and there’s spiritual death and how they relate to each other, you go to St. John of Damascus. He’s got it pulled together and can give you a sort of definitional statement to help convey it. Physical death: separation of the soul from the body; spiritual death: separation of the soul from God. So this obviously isn’t eternal physical death.

Fr. Andrew: Right, because there was a resurrection and everyone was raised incorruptible.

Fr. Stephen: Bodily resurrection, and it’s universal, as we talked about before. So everyone is bodily raised, so it’s not eternal physical death. That’s off the table, meaning this is eternal spiritual death. This is eternal separation of the soul from God. Again, separation here is not spatial language.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because God is everywhere present.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. It is not implying that there is some “place,” some material sense in the age to come where God isn’t, any more than there’s a place now where God isn’t.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s sort of like being detached from God or unplugged, so to speak.

Fr. Stephen: But people can experience spiritual death nonetheless, and that’s what produces physical death. We talked about that in the episode on the soul, for example. So that’s the kind of eternal death we’re talking about.

Let me add this about annihilationism. The biggest problem with it is that there are zero examples—zero examples—in the universe of things that cease to exist in the terms that they mean that.

Fr. Andrew: There you go.

Fr. Stephen: Matter, energy, all that?

Fr. Andrew: It’s just pure concept. It really is. It’s just pure concept.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and pure modern concept, relating to, as we’ve talked about before, the dichotomy—the modern dichotomy—between being and nothingness, or between fact and fiction.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which we think [of] in mathematical terms: there’s a one and there’s a zero.

Fr. Stephen: And where to exist means to have bodily, physical, material corporality. But in ancient terms and in biblical terms, as we’ve talked about before, the opposite of being is chaos. So, yes, you have seen and there are plenty of examples of places where there was a tower and now there is not a tower.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it went from being to chaos.

Fr. Stephen: But, yeah, the tower did not cease to exist. The matter which made up the tower is still around; it’s just not in the form of a tower any more.

Fr. Andrew: Disarrayed.

Fr. Stephen: It’s not organized and set in order as a tower any more. When an animal dies, it doesn’t cease to exist; it dissolves into its component parts, and the energy that animated it dissipates, but neither cease to exist in the sense that annihilationists are talking about people ceasing to exist. So there are zero examples of anything God created actually ceasing to exist. So before you could even argue that this is going to happen to some humans, you have to construct an argument that it happens at all.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that it’s actually a category.

Fr. Stephen: That it’s a thing that can happen. Good luck. Have at it. John Stott’s gone, so he can’t help you. [Laughter] We have to point out— And we’ve tried to be clear here when we use the term “eternal,” because of course—and we’ve mentioned this many times on this show—the pop conception of eternity is “endless succession of moments,” in the way that we currently experience time. Go watch the last season of The Good Place if you want to know why that’s a problematic concept. [Laughter] And that’s not what we’re talking about; we’re talking about what it literally says: the life or the death or the condemnation of the age, which is referring to the age to come.

But everywhere where these things are referred to together—“these things” being eternal life or eternal condemnation, or eternal life or eternal death, or however it’s phrased—wherever the two are talked about, they’re always spoken of as equally ultimate.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and probably the locus classicus for this maybe, which Orthodox Christians should all be familiar with, because this is read at our funerals, is from John 5, where the Lord, talking about the resurrection—I’m just going to read this—he says:

Truly, truly, I say to you, an hour is coming and is now here, when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God and those who hear will live. For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself, and he has given him authority to execute judgment because he is the Son of Man. Do not marvel at this, for an hour is coming when all who are in the tombs will hear his voice and come out, those who have done good to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil to the resurrection of (and then it gets translated variously) judgment, damnation, condemnation.

But anyway, the point you’re making: there’s two outcomes; they are both through resurrection. One is life, and the other is this condemnation.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and there’s no proviso on the second one.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it doesn’t say, “Oh, well, one of these is temporary.”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And of course Matthew 25:46, again at the end of the parable of the sheep and the goats…

Fr. Andrew: “These will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.” Again, perfectly parallel. Again from the mouth of the Lord himself. This is Jesus saying it.

Fr. Stephen: The punishment of the age, the life of the age—so if you want to say that one of those ages has an end, then the other one must also? When the same word is used in the same sentence twice, it becomes really hard to argue that it means two different things without a lot of further evidence to point to.

And honestly, this is the place where we have to acknowledge again this isn’t really complicated. This is really simple. This is taught all through the Scriptures. It’s so plain and so simple, and yet our ability to confound it is bizarre. My favorite summary of it—this is where we are going to dip into the Old Testament, because this is my favorite summary of it, because it’s so clear—is at the end of the book of Deuteronomy, the end of the Torah. Deuteronomy 30:15-20.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so after God tells the whole story of creation and gives all his commandments, everything, he says this:

See, I have set before you today life and good, death and evil. If you obey the commandments of the Lord your God that I command you today, by loving the Lord your God, by walking in his ways, and by keeping his commandments and his statutes and his rules, then you shall live and multiply, and the Lord your God will bless you in the land you are entering and take possession of it. But if your heart turns away and will not hear, but are drawn away to worship other gods and serve them, I declare to you today that you shall truly perish. You shall not live long in the land that you are going over the Jordan to enter and possess. I call heaven and earth to witness against you today, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Therefore choose life, that you and your offspring may live, loving the Lord your God, obeying his voice, and holding fast to him, for he is your life and length of days, that you may dwell in the land that the Lord swore to your fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give them.

What about people who object, “Well, that was just for Israel in that particular moment in time”?

Fr. Stephen: Well, see, every place where Christ says, “Not a yodh or timmel will pass away from the law,” etc., etc., etc. Or read the book of Hebrews where it talks about how the penalties of the new covenant are much more severe than those of the old covenant, not the opposite. [Laughter] On and on. But again, this is super clear. Christ says, “If you love me, keep my commandments.” That sounds an awful lot like what God says here. If you love the Lord your God by walking in his ways and keeping his commandments and his statutes… You know, loving the Lord your God, obeying his voice, holding fast to him, obeying— This is just so obvious and so clear, and it’s a matter of choice.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and I should say—I mean, you can do just a quick search of the Bible and see how many times loving God and keeping his commandments are paired together. It’s at least 25, in those exact words, at least in the ESV. I’m sure we could come up with other ways of saying it. And it’s Old and New Testament; it’s everywhere: if you love God, you keep his commandments.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, because again love is not feelings; love is actions. Love is actions. The idea that love is feelings is what has brought about the divorce rate in this country, because, guess what, feelings come and go, all feelings of all kinds toward everyone. And you either continue to act faithfully when the feelings are gone just like you did when they were there and at their strongest, or you don’t. And that’s what ends up separating people. So when I say it’s a matter of choice, it’s not a matter of choice, like, once, where you’re just like: “No, I’ll take the blessings and life, thanks, God.”

Fr. Andrew: “Blessings and life, please!” [Laughter] Cake or death.

Fr. Stephen: Like, everyone’s going to take that one! But how do you do it? How do you make that choice? You don’t make that choice intellectually. You don’t make that choice on one day, any more than you make the choice to be married to someone intellectually on one day. That choice is a pattern that emerges over your behavior over a lifetime, about whether you’re a faithful married person or not, about whether you’re faithful to Christ or not, about whether you actually love the Lord your God or not. It’s a decision constituted by a thousand smaller decisions. So the person who refuses to repent, who refuses to worship God, who refuses to love God and his neighbor—the person who refuses to do that is making the choice to reject the offer of life that God has extended to that person. And God does not force his love on people. I mean, this is awfully blunt, but God is not a rapist. He’s not a kidnapper; he’s not a human trafficker. He does not force his love on people.

Fr. Andrew: That’s not love. Yeah, buddy.

Fr. Stephen: Because that wouldn’t be love, yes. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: I mean, it seems—

Fr. Stephen: For it to truly be love, someone has to be able to reject it.

Fr. Andrew: Love sets the other person free.

Fr. Stephen: Eternal condemnation becomes a possibility because of the love of God being actually love, and because of his offer of life to everyone being sincere. That means it’s possible for a person to reject it. And so eternal condemnation exists as this future possibility—this horrible possibility, this terrifying possibility the way it’s described in the Scriptures, but a possibility nonetheless.

Fr. Andrew: All right. Well, that’s the second half. There’s one more half to go, because as you know, everybody, it’s a show-and-a-half. So we’ll be right back after this brief break with the third half of The Lord of Spirits.

Fr. Andrew: Welcome back. It’s the third half of this episode of The Lord of Spirits podcast. Once again, this is pre-recorded, so despite what you just heard from the Voice of Steve, don’t call now. Or do—again, it’s up to you—but you probably will not get to talk to us, because that’s how this works.

Fr. Stephen: We literally can’t stop you.

Fr. Andrew: We can’t! I mean, right. You could do what you want. It’s weird. People can do things like not listen to a podcast that they don’t like, and yet so many feel like they have to! I don’t know what’s up with that.

Fr. Stephen: I love our hate-listeners, because I hate-listen to their comments, so… [Laughter] Turnabout’s fair play.

Fr. Andrew: That’s true. But I mean, it’s all that giggling that you do while you’re reading their comments. Okay, well, in the first half we disambiguated the Hades/hell to which the wicked are consigned when they die in this age. And then in the second half we talked about the various biblical images for eternal condemnation. And now in this half, Fr. Stephen is finally going to get us canceled.

Fr. Stephen: By people who already don’t like me, so not really, but…

Fr. Andrew: There we go. [Laughter] We’ll be talking about the heresy of universalism.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, the condemned heresy.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, conciliarly condemned.

Fr. Stephen: The rejection of apostolic teaching, known as universalism. Might as well start the triggering now. [Laughter] If you really can’t handle sustained critique of universalism, if you are a person who is a universalist for some kind of emotional reasons or reasons of sensitivity or something, and you don’t want to subject yourself to hearing a sustained critique of it, you should probably not listen to the rest of this podcast.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and, that said, I know that some people are universalists because they kind of can’t bear the idea of eternal condemnation. And in some cases people are universalists because maybe someone they love killed themselves, cursing God, or something like that, and they’re like: “Well, I don’t want that person to be eternally condemned. How can that possibly be? I love them so much.” Which—I mean, I get that. I get that. I get why people would feel that way, but at the same time I’ll at least say the hope of someone else’s salvation does not have to be founded on, frankly, heretical teaching.

Fr. Stephen: You’re digging in the wrong place, or the conciliation that you need on that count. If you’re universalist because you’re a pompous know-it-all who feels smugly superior to everyone else, go ahead and listen.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yes, right, because a lot of this will be for you! And we don’t feel—

Fr. Stephen: —this is directed at.

Fr. Andrew: We’re not feeling— As you know from the previous half, empathy is dubious in general, or at least its necessity. But we do not have empathy for people who are pompous know-it-alls and are therefore pushing universalism.

Fr. Stephen: Well, yeah. I mean, I don’t want to beat up on suffering and grieving people.

Fr. Andrew: No! Of course not.

Fr. Stephen: Not because I have empathy, being a high-functioning sociopath, but it’s a bad look. Oh, yeah, I will puncture windbags all day. That’s good sport.

Fr. Andrew: Amen.

Fr. Stephen: But, a little more seriously, holding to some kind— And we’re going to go into more detail, but holding to some kind of universalism doesn’t do what you think it’s going to do. People do it to solve a problem, like some of the problems you’ve mentioned, and a variety of others. And so it’s understandable that you’re looking for a solution to that problem, and this presents itself as such a solution. But it has follow-on consequences in your view of God, in your view of sin, in your view of repentance, that cause worse problems, and so there are better solutions.

But so let’s go ahead and get into it. Let me just get this out of the way, too. Back in the beginning of the episode, I talked about here’s the things we’re going to get, just to save us some emails.

Fr. Andrew: You mean save me some emails?

Fr. Stephen: Well, I didn’t say I was going to read them. [Laughter] Bandwidth, spandwidth. I have read That All [Shall] Be Saved, the David Bentley Hart book. Yale sent me a free review copy when it was first released. I read it. I didn’t end up doing a review of it. I did do a review—they also sent me a free copy of David Bentley Hart’s New Testament translation. I did a review of that because I thought, while there were portions I disagreed with, obviously, there were also things about it that were of value, so I did a review, because I could do a review like that: Here are the things I think are of value despite these places where I disagree.

That All [Shall] Be Saved is one of the worst books I’ve ever read; one of the worst theological books I’ve ever read, and I’ve read some bad ones. It is a book— And that’s why I didn’t write a review; I didn’t have anything constructive to say about it. Over the course of this half, people who have read it will see why it’s bad, but it’s the kind of book that draws cheers from people who already agree with its premise, because it’s written from a perspective of “this is the truth; I’m going to primarily establish that truth by ridiculing people who disagree with it and knocking down straw men of an opposition position,” which, if you’ll already agree with it, you’ll rah-rah; if you don’t, then it’s valueless. It’s not going to convince anybody.

But so, yeah, save your email saying, “Oh, have you read this book? Its argument is irrefutable.” Save it. Read it. Not only is it not irrefutable; it’s laughable. Okay.

But now, getting into the topic at hand qua topic. [Laughter] What we’re talking about when we’re talking about universalism is not like the Unitarian Universalists. That’s a whole separate—

Fr. Andrew: Right, the UUs.

Fr. Stephen: We’re not spending a half an episode bashing on them. Doesn’t take that long, frankly. [Laughter] But we’re talking about people who believe, some of whom are in the Orthodox Church to one degree or another, and who believe in some form of apokatastasis, some from of universal reconciliation to God. At minimum, this means the idea that all humans will inevitably be reconciled to God in the age to come.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there’s various ways people get to that, but, yes, that’s where it ends.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, but so that’s defining the term “universalism” as we’re using it. That’s the minimal— And sometimes it goes beyond that. So there are forms of apokatastasis where it’s even the devil, the demons, are all going to be reconciled to God, going way further, but minimally it’s the belief that all humans will receive eternal life in the age to come inevitably and eventually. And then there’s various forms it takes beneath that.

The most infamous, despite recent attempts at rehabilitation— The most infamous proponent of this kind of view, who took it to the extreme point, was of course Origen. I have what is apparently news for some folks: Origen, specifically on the point of apokatastasis, was condemned at the Fifth Ecumenical Council.

Fr. Andrew: What!? [Laughter] What!

Fr. Stephen: And I say this not because I have taken a Tardis to 553 AD and walked into said council with a GoPro.

Fr. Andrew: This is the second episode in a row that you’ve mentioned GoPros, by the way.

Fr. Stephen: GoPros, yes. Well, I feel like it’s more specific than “video camera,” and, who knows? Sponsorship deal! [Laughter] So, right, and I don’t have to. In fact, if I did that and I brought back the video and we watched the video with people fluent in Greek and everyone agreed, “You know what, they didn’t even mention Origen, not once in the whole video,” it would still be a fact that the Fifth Ecumenical Council condemned Origen on apokatastasis.

Fr. Andrew: Right, because...

Fr. Stephen: Because that’s not how holy Tradition in the Orthodox Church works!

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it… It is demonstrably [easy] to show that the Church, for century upon century upon century, has not only repeated what it says about the ecumenical councils—it has enshrined them in hymnography for I don’t know exactly how long, but it’s centuries at the very least, probably well over a thousand years. There are some people— Now, for those of you who might be new to this discourse, there are some people who say that the council did not condemn Origen or that it only said certain kinds of things and not others, or whatever—there’s all kinds of variations on this—and that later St. Justinian altered it. He pulled a fast one on everybody and it’s been a big mistake for all these 1600 years. It’s a big mistake! That there are people who say that.

But that is not how Orthodox Tradition works. So if you’re going to—

Fr. Stephen: If you’re an Episcopalian, by all means, make that argument.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, yeah, totally! That’s basically Anglican, Episcopalian argumentation.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] You think the Church was wrong about all kinds of things for hundreds of years! Sure, great.

Fr. Andrew: But to posit this idea, you have to say that the Holy Spirit was not getting through to the Church on something this big for that long and across the entire geographic range of the Church for centuries upon centuries upon centuries—nor even the subsequent ecumenical councils that confirmed that council, and so on and so forth. It’s just… It is a level of wrong that is staggering to imagine for an Orthodox Christian. I was going to say, and if you think that that’s a thing—and there are Orthodox people who think that that’s a thing—then on what basis can you say that any of the councils or even the Scripture itself are truly reliable? Because, like Nicaea, we all have things we say about Nicaea, but we don’t have the majority of the texts, like the minutes or whatever, of everything that was said at Nicaea.

Fr. Stephen: We have less than we do about the Fifth Ecumenical Council for sure.

Fr. Andrew: Right. So it is a massive methodological problem. You are dismantling all of Orthodox tradition to say that one of the ecumenical councils didn’t say what the Church has, for centuries upon centuries, said that it said. That’s what’s actually at stake, everybody.

Fr. Stephen: And now notice you said, “over something this big,” and this is something we have to call out, too, because of course when folks who hold to some form of apokatastasis are arguing that their views should be tolerated within the Church, it’s always: “Oh, this is… eschatology, it’s a side thing; it’s not a major thing… It’s not a big deal…” And then when they’re arguing for their point, they say everyone who disagrees with them, their God is a monster. [Laughter] It’s like, well, you know what? Who God is seems kind of significant to me, theologically. I’m just—I’m throwing that out there.

So if both sides admit that this is very key to the whole view of God, then it seems this is a major issue, in fact, the kind of thing that an ecumenical council weighs in on—and did—and therefore is obligatory. But what’s really going on here is that these folks are making a Protestant argument. And, say what you want to our Protestant friends about Protestantism, Protestant arguments are not Orthodox arguments; and Orthodox arguments are not Protestant arguments.

Fr. Andrew: And in this case it’s a— Now, not all Protestants make this argument about the Scripture, but it is a Protestant argument, the idea that there is an original text of the Bible that is sort of the infallible one. And I’ve seen this—

Fr. Stephen: The inerrant or infallible text, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: I’ve seen this in statements of faith on church websites, that the Bible is infallible and inerrant in its original manuscripts, which… You got one? I mean… [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Well, in the autographs, that’s the— Yes. And then you use textual criticism and, like, the Nashville statement appends. And this can be reconstructed with modern computer tools. “The rest of history didn’t have an inerrant Bible, but now we’ve got it back again, because computers.”

Fr. Andrew: We do.

Fr. Stephen: But the idea there is the authority there is not in the text as it currently exists or has historically existed in the Church. It’s not in how it’s been received by the Church, it’s not in how it’s been historically interpreted by the Church, but it’s in the original text as it existed historically at the time of its writing. This is why I say the proponents of apokatastasis are making the same argument. They’re saying that the Church council, the ecumenical council, does not have authority as it has been received by the Church, does not have authority in the way its findings have been promulgated, but that the authority lies in what was actually said and done on the day historically as they want to reconstruct it.

That reconstruction has no authority in the Orthodox Church, in the Orthodox view of Tradition, any more than a modern critical scholar’s reconstruction of what really happened behind the Old Testament has any real authority in the Church. What has authority— The Scriptures have authority in the Orthodox Church—this is how Orthodox Tradition works. They have authority in the Orthodox Church as they’ve been received and interpreted by the Church historically. Church councils have authority as they have been received and interpreted by the Church historically. And the Fifth Ecumenical Council has been received as an ecumenical council and historically interpreted as having condemned Origen specifically about the issue of apokatastasis, and there’s no arguing that. It is a simple matter of fact, that you have to just deny reality to argue against that. [Laughter] That’s how the Orthodox Church works.

Now, if, to our non-Orthodox listeners, you may say, “Well, I disagree with that,” I say, “Okay.” So for you, maybe, as a non-Orthodox Christian, the condemnation of Origen on universalism isn’t authoritative, but, as Orthodox Christians, for us it is.

But it’s also worth noting—and this is one of the problems, even accepting the problem with their argument in the first place, like the structure of their argument that we’ve just pointed out, even their reconstruction doesn’t make sense, because the narrative they present is that sort of no one had any problem with Origen except St. Justinian.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, like he came out of nowhere; he was a secret nemesis or whatever.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, came in after the fact. I mean, maybe there were a few people who didn’t like him, who are usually the people whom the given reconstructor doesn’t like in Church history, but this is all kind of a bamboozle that St. Justinian pulls. Reality is—and again this is not controvertible—is that Origen was condemned particularly on this issue, over and over again, at local councils, by Church Fathers, for a couple centuries leading up to the Fifth Ecumenical Council. The Fifth Ecumenical Council was just ratifying what everybody else had already done and making it the binding finding of an ecumenical council.

Fr. Andrew: So even if that council had never happened and Origen never mentioned, it still was the tradition of the Church up to that point.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, everywhere. And this included, most tellingly, people who were admirers of Origen in other regards, or people whose biblical exegesis and whose theology was dependent on Origen, who will say, “There are these good things in Origen, but”—and they single out— The most commonly singled-out—sometimes there are some other things, too, but most common thing singled out about Origen that they say is wrong is apokatastasis. So these great admirers of his say, “Well, in that one place at least he was way off.”

So beyond Origen, there are a couple other figures—these are actually saints, unlike Origen—who are pointed to and said to be proponents of apokatastasis. The two primary ones are St. Gregory of Nyssa and St. Isaac the Syrian. People who reject the Church’s teaching on this will point to them and say, “Oh, well, see, look, there’s these two saints who we’re going to say held to some kind of apokatastasis. Therefore, we can hold to our, albeit different, form of apokatastasis, and it’s okay.” I mean, you see the flaw in that argument there at the end anyway. Like, you’re not even holding to the view you claim that saint held exactly, just one that’s in the ballpark, and acting like he opens up the ballpark for you to theorize for yourself. But there’s an added problem, which is it’s not entirely conclusive that either of those figures were universalists.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and there’s even— Like with St. Gregory of Nyssa, for instance, there’s actually— I mean, you can do some really quick Googling, just write in: “Was St. Gregory of Nyssa universalist?” And there’s actually a gazillion articles out there, showing in great detail about how he was not, and how he taught eternal condemnation and so forth.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so there’s a relative paucity of writings from St. Issac the Syrian. We have more from St. Gregory. You get people who quote-mine and prooftext Church Fathers, who pull things out that kind of sound… St. Gregory of Nyssa has this done to him all the time. All the time people online pull out this quote from his Life of Moses to say, “Oh, St. Gregory didn’t believe that the death of the firstborn actually happened at the Passover.”

Fr. Andrew: Wow.

Fr. Stephen: And all you have to do is read the passages immediately before and immediately after the quote to see that he did. So in the ways not to read Church Fathers, looking for quotes—especially having ChatGPT look for quotes, because it will make up patristic quotes.

Fr. Andrew: It will! You can literally ask it, and it will come up with citations that look great but are completely false.

Fr. Stephen: They’re fake! But even using Google, yes, you can quote-mine the Church Fathers, just like you can prooftext the Bible if you pull verses out of context, to try and argue for anything, but that’s disingenuous and doing violence [to them]. But also, there are things that people like to freely interpret, like someone saying that we should pray—a saint saying we should pray for all of creation. There are saints who say we should pray for the demons and the devil and pray for insects and pray for— That doesn’t make you a universalist. That doesn’t mean you believe in apokatastasis. That doesn’t mean you believe that they’re all going to be inevitably reconciled to God. In fact, the fact that you’re praying for them kind of argues for the opposite, that it’s not inevitable. You can argue from praying for it that it’s possible, but that’s not even necessarily true. One could pray for a demon. If a saint is being tormented by a demon and he prays for the demon, he might do that as a way of expressing love for his enemy, without believing it’s possible for that demon to repent, for example. So it might not even be that they believe it’s possible, but the act of praying for it tends to indicate it’s not inevitable.

You also have any time a saint reflects hope that all humans would be saved, would find salvation, hope that all humans would be reconciled to God. And that’s like: “Oh, see, look: they believed in apokatastasis.” That’s hope. All Christians should hope that all people would be reconciled to God and find eternal life, because the Old Testament says God wills that all men be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth. So, yes, we should want the same thing, but wanting that and desiring that, as we talked about with God at the end of the second half, is not the same thing as believing it’s inevitable. Those aren’t the same thing.

So beyond those historical issues—and that’s really it for the historical case—the whole historical case is trying in vain to undo the condemnation of Origen and trying desperately to identify a couple of Church Fathers who might have held a minority opinion on this. That’s the historical case for somebody believing in some kind of apokatastasis. Everyone agrees that all the rest of the Fathers, the reception history of the Fifth Ecumenical Council, all condemn apokatastasis. All condemn this idea; all point to the possibility of eternal condemnation.

This isn’t ambiguous. There is no ambiguity here in reality, other than people trying to create it. In the book I mentioned at the beginning of this half, the author, in trying to argue for apokatastasis, has to condemn, ridicule the Church Fathers. He calls them “moral pygmies” for believing in eternal condemnation. That is the position you have to take to argue for apokatastasis. That’s not him going too far; that’s the position you have to take. You have to reject the Church Fathers and the saints as not knowing what they’re talking about—morally, theologically, and religiously—in order to hold this view. You have to cut yourself off from holy Tradition to hold this view. That’s a bad consequence. Remember when we said this solves— People see it as solving a problem, but it causes bigger ones? That’s a much bigger one than the other problem.

So getting past that historical case, though, universalism, apokatastasis, again is the belief that God must—must—ultimately grant every human eternal life. He must do it because otherwise he’s evil. They will often straight-out argue this. Or that if he doesn’t grant every human eternal life he is unjust, they will argue. Or they will say, “Well, if he doesn’t do it, he must be incapable of it.” And that last incapable one, as well as the unjust one, may remind people of some other discussions we’ve had on this show, because, deep down—deep down, and this is the central argument of the book we mentioned at the beginning of this half—this is really a Calvinist argument that they’re making. So, yes, I am saying right now: David Bentley Hart, his argument in this book: deeply Calvinist. It’s Calvin by way of Karl Barth, but it’s still Calvinism. Karl Barth famously said everyone is reprobate in Adam; everyone is elect in Christ. So this is where this is going. It’s Calvinism where everyone is elect. It’s universal election. And this is based on displaying the justice of God. As we said before when we were talking about penal substitutionary atonement, when we were talking about other related issues, if God has some standard of good and evil that stands above him, or some standard of justice that stands above him, why aren’t we worshiping that?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Is God subject to necessity?

Fr. Stephen: This is arguing that God is subject to necessity, that God must do something, namely he must give eternal life to all of his human creations. And stop! Pause for a minute! at how patently absurd that is. Because God created a human, he must share his divine life with that human eternally? He is obligated somehow. So now there is no grace, there is no gift in regard to salvation. It is necessity. There is some “old magic” to which God is beholden. [Laughter] This is absurd! This is absurd, and you can make sophistic arguments for it. You make sophistic arguments for it, but it’s absurd on the face if you really think about it from the perspective of biblical theology.

I don’t want to— I’m not going to digress too far into this, but it has to be said. It does have to be said. Get ready for a spicy take.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] You think this one’s spicy so far!

Fr. Stephen: So there is a dirty secret in liberal theology. It’s a dirty secret now; it used to be open, but since the end of World War II, it’s been a dirty secret. All liberal theology is at least vaguely Marcionite, if not outright.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, they don’t tend to like the Old Testament.

Fr. Stephen: Right. Old Testament God, New Testament God. David Bentley Hart is Exhibit A of this. Again, book mentioned at the beginning of this: read what it says about the God of the Old Testament, calling him a monster, calling him the devil. When it was pointed out to him, when it was pointed out to Hart that it made him a Marcionite, his defense was: he doesn’t believe the Old Testament God exists, so he’s not a Marcionite.

Fr. Andrew: Wow. [Laughter] What?

Fr. Stephen: Yes. Okay. Well, where’s he getting this? Where is this wild thing? Well, he’s beholden to a theological tradition that runs through 18th- and 19th-century Germany up into the 20th century with guys like Jürgen Moltmann. He’s dependent on this. It is deeply anti-Semitic. I know, shocking: 19th-century Germans are deeply anti-Semitic, but… It is based on the idea that the God of the Jews, the God of the Hebrew Bible, the God of the Old Testament is a false god, a pagan god, a deficient god, and not the real God. And what that requires, if you throw out the Old Testament and then want to reinterpret the New Testament, you can’t carry over any of those Hebraic notions of who God is into the New Testament.

So who is God in liberal theology if we’re not going to use the God of the Old Testament? Who is the God in the New Testament? It’s Plato’s god. It’s the god of Greek philosophy, because the Greek tradition is a European tradition and not Jewish. And if you read the book we’re talking about, David Bentley Hart’s argument in that book is deeply anti-Semitic and is seeking to replace the God of the Old Testament in Christian theology with Plato’s god, the same way that German theological tradition has been doing for a couple hundred years. The anti-Semitism is just slightly less overt. You don’t have to scratch that deep when you see what he says about the Old Testament God, but that’s what’s happening. That’s what’s being put forward in all of this liberal theological trajectory.

This is why, if you read Nietzsche, Nietzsche was always praising the God of the Old Testament, because Nietzsche despised liberal German theology. That’s the very form of Christianity he despised the most! [Laughter] He actually says nice things about Russian Orthodoxy, which he encountered through reading Dostoevsky.

Fr. Andrew: Interesting.

Fr. Stephen: But this is why he praises the Old Testament God: he’s trying to invert what these German liberal Christian theologians were doing. And Hart’s book on universalism is just a modern American incarnation of this. This is another reason why this whole thing causes more problems than it solves. We’ve now entered into this wildly problematic theological view—from the perspective of the Church and Church history, from the perspective of common decency, from the perspective of intellectual history. This is deeply problematic.

This is not where you need to go because someone you love died outside of the Christian faith. You don’t need to go to all this over that. I don’t think that’s why Hart’s there. I think Hart’s there because actual Christianity offends his moral sensibilities the same way it did those 19th-century Germans. It’s too gauche for him; it’s too vulgar, too common. But there are a lot of decent and good people who go down that road for those reasons, and it’s not a road you want to go down; there’s nothing good down that road that’s going to really help you.

So, that said, one of the problems I’ve personally experienced—I think this is probably true for Fr. Andrew, too; he can say—in trying to talk about these issues with people is that every individual person who believes in some kind of universalism or apokatastasis always has their own nuances.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: So I say something critical of Hart and his book, and they say, “Well, I don’t agree with him about everything. This and that is different, this and the other.” But here’s the thing, and it’s even suggested sometimes that, like, unless someone takes the time to study each individual variation and answer each one individually—like, oh, you can’t then comment on this issue. Of course, that’s impossible. That’s like saying no one can ever really discuss and argue with me.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. I mean, relatedly: “Unless the Fifth Ecumenical Council condemned the specifics of the particular view that I hold this, then I’m not—my view is not condemned.”

Fr. Stephen: Right. And that’s obviously not true. The Council of Nicaea and the Council of Constantinople did not have to conceive of every possible minute variant of Arianism and Semi-Arianism to condemn Arianism and Semi-Arianism. They condemned any view which says that the Son is different in substance from the Father. Boom, done. And so the council condemning the view that all will inevitably be reconciled to God by some necessity means any view that has that feature, regardless of all the other particulars—if it has that feature, it’s condemned.

Part of this, too, plays into this idea that people have received, and I think it’s due to this idea of theologoumena, which most people who talk about it don’t understand in the Orthodox Church. Theologoumena is basically the idea of pious opinion, something that’s not a teaching of the Church from which you can’t—that you can’t disagree with, and things that are secondary or tertiary or—in other ways. So they’ve come to this idea that there’s sort of, on various issues of theology or various topics of doctrine or various things about the way of life within Orthodoxy, that there’s a range of acceptable Orthodox views, and as long as your view is somewhere in that range, then you’re okay; that you’re allowed to believe it. People will phrase it that way: “Am I allowed to believe X?”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which is just not the right question.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Right. “Am I allowed to believe the sky is purple?” Well, I mean, I can’t stop you, but it’s not. [Laughter] “Am I allowed to believe that two plus two equals five?” Well, I mean, if you really want to. This assumes—this basically has nested in it post-structuralist or post-modern presuppositions, that the truth is unknown and/or unknowable; that there is no substantive teaching in the Church on this topic. Therefore it’s just the subject of conjecture, and so various opinions are allowed. But then there may be some that are disallowed, too, but, you know. And so there are things I want to believe are true, and I just need to find out if it’s okay. Not if it’s true, but if it’s okay, like permission.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Can I find someone somewhere who said something like this? Aha!

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] And let me suggest a more radical solution. If it’s a theological topic on which there really is no teaching—there is no authoritative teaching within the Church on it, you shouldn’t have an opinion. Like, just don’t have one. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yep. Because everything that is given to us—I’ll say more about this at the end, I think, but I just wanted to say it here—everything that is given to us in the Church is for the sake of our salvation, not for the sake of having an opinion about everything.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. This is why—and I know it confounds some people—this is why there are things I’m not interested in talking about. I’m not interested in talking about the date of the exodus. I literally don’t have an opinion. I know about the late date, I know about the early date, I know about the even earlier date—I don’t know for sure that any of those three is the accurate date. I believe the exodus happened, but I have no opinion on the date. There’s no Church teaching about which date is correct, so this is not of concern to me.

And, hey, if you want to have a really strong opinion about that—and I know people who do—and you want to spend a lot of your life arguing about it, go for it, man. I play wrestling video games, so I waste time, too. [Laughter] But it’s the same level of usefulness in terms of salvation: me playing online matches of Mortal Kombat and you having online arguments about the dating of the exodus are of equivalent value. And if you accept that, fine; it’s your hobby, great.

But this issue is an important issue. And this issue there is very clear Church teaching on. And so it behooves us to accept it, especially if we don’t like it. Everybody believes in authority until authority tells you to believe or something you don’t want to.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Right! That’s pretty—

Fr. Stephen: Everybody believes in the Tradition of the Orthodox Church until it says something they don’t like.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, obedience requires—almost requires—that there be a difference of opinion, and that one person’s opinion is going to be the determining opinion, although in this case it’s not about personal opinions; it’s about the teaching of the Church.

Fr. Stephen: Right, which is objective and accessible, not unknown or unknowable.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, you should not have to dig. You should not have to dig to find…

Fr. Stephen: “Well, there’s this thing in my face, but I don’t like it, so I’m going to dig and try and find some way under it, around it…” [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: I know. I even saw someone— There’s this made-up word, infernalism, which is used by universalists to describe the teaching of the Church, frankly.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, yes, people who hold to the apostolic teaching.

Fr. Andrew: And it’s used to describe someone like St. John Chrysostom even. I’m like: you know, if St. John Chrysostom says something and your response is: “Could I talk to somebody else,” you… I… It’s hard for me to believe that you’re Orthodox! You can’t get more mainstream than him!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. “Second opinion, please.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah… [Sigh]

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Right. Now, that’s not to say— So, for example—heading off an email—

Fr. Andrew: Thank you.

Fr. Stephen: Somebody out there is going, “Well, St. John Chrysostom, uh, said that the nephilim were Cain’s descendants, Abel’s descendants, and you guys say this other thing.” That’s what’s coming. Go back and listen to that episode, where we lay out facts about what the Church Fathers say, including that one, and our goal there is to reconcile what the Fathers say where they apparently disagree.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, not just to say, “Well, I disagree with this Church Father. I want to be with this other one.”

Fr. Stephen: Right. And if you do that on this issue— For example, you go to St. Gregory of Nyssa and you read something and you say, “Well, that almost sounds like apokatastasis,” then, using this approach, you would say, “But all of the Church Fathers teach against that, so that can’t be what St. Gregory means.”

Fr. Andrew: Which, if I recall correctly, is basically what St. Photius says at some point. I might be misremembering, but he said—I think he said—“Well, some say that he taught apokatastasis, but that is a scandalous slur against him. He would never have said such a thing.”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. So if you use that approach on this issue, you don’t end up saying, “Well, I can kind of read these two people to agree with me. Therefore, I reject everyone else.” That’s never our approach on anything on this show. Sorry.

Fr. Andrew: It’s not Orthodox. It’s just not.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. So that’s kind of the… If there is a positive argument made for apokatastasis, it is that kind of positive argument, from kind of divine necessity, and we’ve just gone through how problematic that is. Most of what you get, though, is not that, even. The more sophisticated form, like Hart’s book, you get that at least. Problematic as it is, you get at least that as an argument, but most of what you get, including in that book, are a bunch of negative arguments directed at particulars of a Western view of hell, which is also kind of problematic. If most of your arguments for your position are just a bunch of negative arguments against a particular other position, you don’t have any strong arguments for your position. It’s not even negative arguments against all of the other possible positions; it’s just one of them!

And making these arguments even weaker is the fact that they are arguments against that particular Western view, which is kind of a caricature, that accept the presuppositions of that very view. “Don’t question those presuppositions.” So they’re not even strong undermining arguments to that view. What do I mean by that? Well, so for example, when they attack this Western view of hell, they presume a certain definition of what sin is. The person who believes in apokatastasis accepts the presupposition that sin is a violation of a statute.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s breaking a rule.

Fr. Stephen: And breaking that rule requires punishment. And it even accepts the presupposition that God must punish every sin. Here we have divine necessity again: must. So where’s the quibble? Sounds like you’ve accepted almost the whole farm. The quibble is then: Oh, but punishment must be proportional to the offense. So it says to that particular Western view, “We agree with you that sin is breaking a rule and it makes God angry and God has to punish sinners, and we agree with you that God must punish every sin to its full extent. We just disagree about the extent.”

So already, if you’ve been listening to this show for very long, you know that the Orthodox Church does not actually accept any of those presuppositions. It doesn’t accept that God must punish every sin to its full extent, does not accept that sin is primarily rule-breaking, does not accept that it makes God irate. We already went over that this episode. But they then argue that—so eternal punishment, punishment that goes on forever, is disproportionate to sins that are committed in time in this life. So there’s this really interesting passage in Theodore Abu Qurrah.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, Theodore Abu Qurrah. Look him up on Wikipedia, everybody. He’s a medieval Arabic Orthodox Christian bishop of Harran.

Fr. Stephen: Bishop, yep.

Fr. Andrew: And has a massive corpus of writings.

Fr. Stephen: A lot of which is not translated.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, lots just in Arabic. Does not seem to be on any synaxarion, that is to say, a calendar of saints right now, but he is spoken of as a saint in a lot of medieval Orthodox Christian writings.

Fr. Stephen: Later Christian writings refer to him as St. Theodore Abu Qurrah, but we couldn’t find him on a calendar; that’s why we didn’t call him “saint,” because we’re trying to be consistent about that, too.

He has a number of sort of dialogues. They’re a little bit Plato’s Dialogues-ish, with, frankly, various heretics. [Laughter] And one of those is with an Origenist, because, go figure, in the eighth century, Theodore Abu Qurrah, as bishop of Harran in Mesopotamia, thought Origen was a condemned heretic. Go figure! And the discussion with the Origenist is specifically about apokatastasis. So he not only thinks Origen is a condemned heretic, he thinks he’s condemned on this point. And this is that sarcasm they’re going to point out, that I mentioned earlier. [Laughter]

He basically— So when the Origenist makes this very argument, says, “Well, what you’re talking about is an eternal punishment for sins that were committed in time, and that’s unjust.” This whole justice thing, where God needs to live up to “justice.” Because, guess what, like we said, they’re basing this on Plato’s view of God; so were Origenists. So then how does that work out?

And Theodore’s response is, essentially—I’m summarizing a little bit—“How are you defining justice?” He says, “Are you defining justice by nature? Because,” he says, “if you’re going by nature, I can think of a lot of examples where someone gets wounded and it takes a second, but the consequences of that wound, the pain from that wound, the suffering from that wound as it heals, take a long, long time.” And he says, “Are you talking about justice like the legal system? Because I can think of examples in the legal system: someone murders someone. It might take him a few seconds to murder the person, but we then go and we execute them, and that executing them is kind of permanent.” [Laughter] And he says, “If someone came and had sexual relations with your wife, would they only be punished for the period of time it took for the sin to happen, for the crime to happen?” [Laughter] He’s like: “Well, no.”

So Theodore’s counter-argument is simply: “You’re using this word ‘justice.’ I don’t think it means what you think it means.” [Laughter] That you’re declaring something unjust, but on no basis other than your own predilection!

Fr. Andrew: It’s notable, by the way, that Theodore Abu Qurrah was also a monk at Mar Saba Monastery where St. John of Damascus was, and in many ways is kind of like his intellectual successor. He’s really the first Church Father writing in Arabic, which is pretty interesting all on its own, living in early Islam and so forth.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and a lot of his writings are interacting with Islam.

Fr. Andrew: I like the way that he reasons, the way you described, because it’s like: Well, let’s get this down to brass tacks and stop—up here in the rarefied, ephemeral world of concepts that interact with each other, and down to what is justice on the ground? How does this look? It’s not just a theory; this is real, you guys.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And there’s also— Another presupposition that is just sort of accepted, that we’ve already kind of dealt with tonight, is they accept the presupposition that repentance is basically just regret or guilt.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, surely everyone would feel bad when faced with eternal damnation.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yes! Yes, if you’re under eternal condemnation, you would feel bad! You might even feel regret! Like: “Man! I wish I wasn’t here!” [Laughter] But, first of all, this assumes that these departed condemned humans, in the state that they’re in, and demons sort of have feelings the way that we do. But more important, as we said earlier, feelings are not repentance.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there’s a difference between Judas and Peter. Judas, it said explicitly in the Scripture, felt regret, but Peter actually was reconciled with the Lord.

Fr. Stephen: Right. They both had the same feelings. Judas and St. Peter had the same feelings after they betrayed Christ. They both betrayed Christ; they both had the same feelings. They did different things based on those feelings.

So that just assumes feelings. And therefore they just assume that at some point in this state they will “repent”; they will “have their feelings change.” And, related to that, the idea that “Well, I mean, on a long enough timeline, wouldn’t eventually everybody sort of wise up?”

You often, within these views of apokatastasis, to try to make them work— Because generally these folks find just full-on apokatastasis: everybody dies, everybody goes to heaven, everybody’s resurrected, everybody enjoys eternal life in the world to come. They find that somewhat distasteful, or at least some of the consequences. You point out to them: “So you’re saying that Anne Frank and Adolf Hitler experience the exact same afterlife of eternal bliss.”

Fr. Andrew: I mean, that’s what it comes down to.

Fr. Stephen: Right. But saying that it’s that from the jump, they recognize the problem. So what gets inserted is a purgatorial idea of hell. And I say “purgatorial” deliberately, because basically they’re taking the Roman Catholic version of purgatory and trying to sort of refab that into a stopgap. So you say, “Well, Hitler’s going to have a real bad time for a long time before he gets to that eternal bliss.”

But this requires a whole bunch, again, of presuppositions that are foreign to at least the Orthodox Christian Tradition and the Scriptures, which, for example, they’re going to be punished for some period of time. Well, number one: time? This assumes time works in the age to come. There’s this really caricatured view of the way purgatory works in Roman Catholicism, which, to be fair, a lot of people in the medieval Church talk like that’s their view. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Oh, totally. I mean, it’s not made up.

Fr. Stephen: Modern Roman Catholics are more sophisticated about it, and the great Roman Catholic theologians of the Middle Ages were also a lot more sophisticated about it, but you get a lot of common stuff of just, like, “Hey, this indulgence is two years off purgatory.” [Laughter] That makes it sound like purgatory is a place that experiences a linear succession of moments the same as we do. As I said, that’s a caricature of what the Roman Catholic Church authoritatively teaches.

But that’s sort of what this is based on within these folks who believe in apokatastasis, is that there’s some time—and they need that time in order to parcel off an amount of suffering. Because, remember, their whole argument for this is based on proportionality. So there are some sins that are really bad and some that are less bad, and there’s a certain amount of suffering, and you kind of need to use time—I suppose you could use intensity— There’s a certain amount of suffering that then is a proper amount of punishment for that individual sin, based on something?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, you can see this is a kind of parody of purgatory.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And there’s just simply nothing in the Scriptures from which you can derive any idea of this.

Fr. Andrew: No. Yeah, the idea of making satisfaction, especially in terms of “Well, you need to do this much for this...”

Fr. Stephen: Right. So the Torah does not parcel out inflicting X amount of pain for X amount of time in response to breaking this commandment.

Fr. Andrew: Nor is there—correct me if I’m wrong. Nor is there even a sense of “Okay, well, if you killed someone, this is the sacrifice you have to make, but if you killed two people, you have to do twice as much. Two bulls or whatever.”

Fr. Stephen: No, no, it’s based around restitution. It’s all based around restitution, restoring, the way we talked about repentance, making it right, fixing it, repairing the damage. No amount of inflicting pain on Hitler accounts for what Hitler did.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it does not undo the Holocaust.

Fr. Stephen: There’s no calculus there. It doesn’t repair anything. And allow me to submit that his victims will either forgive him or not, would either forgive him or not forgive him, but they wouldn’t do it based on, like: “Well, I can’t forgive him until he’s experienced 1,374 days of intense pain. Then I can forgive him.” I mean, this literally doesn’t make sense. [Laughter] This is less sensible; this makes less sense than the Church’s teaching on this subject.

So sometimes, to get away from that, since that’s obviously super problematic and difficult and doesn’t make a lot of sense— And this is more or less trying to leave aside this caricature of Roman Catholic purgatory and move more toward a caricature of Protestant sola fide—again, a parody—and as we were talking about earlier in the episode, this move away from belief in content to feeling. So the idea is that, essentially, they reject God, they don’t believe in God, they don’t accept God, they don’t want to worship God, they don’t want to serve God, and so they’re sort of put into this hell and tortured until they change their mind about that.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, one day, after a thousand years of torture, they’re going to be like: “I think I made a huge mistake.”

Fr. Stephen: “Okay, fine, I’ll worship God.” Again, kind of super problematic!

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, torturing people into changing their mind, that’s…

Fr. Stephen: And if this is what God is going to do, then doesn’t this justify, like, the Spanish Inquisition?

Fr. Andrew: Nobody justifies the Spanish Inquisition! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Should we go imitate God and go torture people and use the rule of law and use everything we can to get them to accept Christ so they can have eternal life? I mean, that’s what God’s going to do, according to these folks.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so they can skip the eternal, not really eternal, condemnation.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, they should thank us!

Fr. Andrew: Whoo.

Fr. Stephen: This is the inquisitors’ idea of— This is the grand inquisitor’s idea of God and evangelism, being promoted by the apokatastasis people whose raison d’être is that they want to believe in a kinder, gentler God, and now they’ve become the grand inquisitor. These are those consequences we were talking about that are worse than the problem you’re trying to solve.

Some of them even go a little further and want to say, “Oh, torture! We don’t want anybody tortured! God isn’t inflicting suffering; it’s just that’s how they’re experiencing God’s love. God’s just loving on them so hard and they hate him, so they experience it as pain until they relent and love him back.” So this is God as Glenn Close, like in Fatal Attraction. This is God as Lennie in Of Mice and Men. Like, I don’t— Again, these folks are going to say this, and then say that the God taught by the apostolic teaching preserved by the Orthodox Church is a monster for allowing people to choose eternal condemnation. That makes him a monster, but him aggressively loving people, tortuously, painfully, until they relent and love him back, oh, that’s cool; that’s good.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and knowing full well that it hurts.

Fr. Stephen: Yes! Knowing that it’s torment. So, yeah. Now, just to cover another term, part of what happens, as I mentioned, is there’s a lot of ways— There’s a lot of logical fallacies at work here, but one of the biggest ones is the construction of a false dilemma. As I said, a lot of the argumentation is just negative argumentation toward a straw man of a particular Western view of hell. And therefore, because that’s all the argument the proponent of apokatastasis has, they have to present the false dilemma of: “Either you agree with me about apokatastasis in some form or you hold to this caricature of you that I’m attacking.” There can be no other views, because if there are any other views, their whole argument falls apart, because it’s mostly negative arguments toward that one particular caricature.

What they call that caricature, for those of you who have been fortunate enough to not be involved in these arguments, is eternal conscious torment.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, if you Google that exact phrase, you will come up with 33,900 hits.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so this is presented as this is the view of hell held by everyone who doesn’t believe in apokatastasis. And to show once again—we’ve already shown it, but, quickly, to show once again why this doesn’t work— You’ve got three words, “eternal conscious torment.” What does “eternal” mean here?

Fr. Andrew: Before you get into that, I want to just say, by the way, since I just decided to Google up “eternal conscious torment,” there is actually an essay on The Gospel Coalition website, which starts—

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] They’ve just accepted, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: And this is not, like— I mean, I’m not a fan of The Gospel Coalition website; just putting that out there. But this is not just pop theology; these are actually people who have—do a bit of theological work and have submitted it. This is theoretically some kind of mainstream Calvinism or whatever; I don’t know. And it starts out this way; this is how the essay begins: “Hell is a place of eternal, conscious torment for everyone who does not trust in Jesus Christ.” Like, that’s how it starts out. So this is a real view that they’re responding to. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Well, yeah, they tend to respond to caricatures of it. But also, never underestimate the ability of a Calvinist to whole-heartedly believe in a caricature of his own position.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Oh, sure! Absolutely, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: That is a Calvinist argument strategy. I’ve heard this many times. I literally know Calvinist professors with PhDs and theologians who, if you try to say, “Well, that makes God the author of evil,” they just say, “Yeah? So?” [Laughter] Or if you say, “Well, that makes human beings just robots,” they say, “Yeah? So?”

Fr. Andrew: Right, exactly.

Fr. Stephen: So I have a feeling that’s coming from an: “Okay… Sure. Eternal conscious torment.” But, from the perspective of “the Orthodox view that we’ve been talking about has nothing to do with this,” what does “eternal” mean here? Does it mean an unending series of moments in the sense that we experience time now? How does time work in the age to come?

Fr. Andrew: We have lots of reasons to believe that that’s not the way it works.

Fr. Stephen: Right, we’re talking about the age to come, which is an age that has no end, yes, but that doesn’t mean we experience time the same way. So what do you mean by “eternal”? What does “conscious” mean here? How does consciousness work in the age to come?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and what about the whole weeping and gnashing thing, again, with the madness? So what kind of consciousness is that?

Fr. Stephen: The madness, the loss of humanity, yeah. What does that mean in terms of consciousness? What does “torment” mean here? “Torment” in the sense that it’s unpleasant? “Torment” in the sense that God or someone else is actively torturing people? What do you mean by that? Because this isn’t— We, in our second half, repeated the biblical language about this, said, “Here’s the images in Scripture. Here’s the language about this. This is how it gets picked up in the Orthodox tradition.” And this isn’t the language. Eternal conscious torment is not the language that gets used by the Scriptures, the Fathers, or our Church Tradition.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and a lot of universalist critiques of eternal conscious torment will talk frequently about the idea: “Well, you guys believe that God is torturing people forever,” but that’s not what the Scripture actually says. It does talk about being in torment forever—we see that in Revelation, in which that language is specifically applied to demons—but it doesn’t say, “And God will torture them forever.” The only way you can connect those dots is again using a Calvinist God, where literally everything that happens, God has willed that thing to happen; he’s making it all happen. So it’s deterministic.

Fr. Stephen: Monergism: God is the only one who really has activity; everything else in the universe is passive before God. So, again, Calvinism. [Laughter] So, yeah, to an extent, this whole argument between apokatastasis and eternal conscious torment is an intra-Calvinist dispute. It’s the same presuppositions, and that’s all it is. Where does the Orthodox Church stand on intra-Calvinist disputes? Nowhere. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Let them duke it out!

Fr. Stephen: Right. We don’t share those presuppositions, or shouldn’t, at least. But are we saying that some significant number of people are going to be condemned eternally? No.

Fr. Andrew: We don’t know.

Fr. Stephen: Of people, no. Are we saying anyone in particular is going to be condemned eternally, even Hitler? No.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I think you might be able to make a decent argument for Judas. As I recall some Church—

Fr. Stephen: Well, the Bible says Judas went to Hades, but even that, see, we disambiguated that.

Fr. Andrew: There you go, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Right? So we don’t know! And the fact that we don’t know means it could be zero. It could turn out in the end on the day of judgment that every human being is reconciled to God. Now, doesn’t that contradict everything we’ve just said? No. If you think it does, you haven’t been listening clearly, because the problem, what’s condemned about apokatastasis, is the idea of necessity and inevitability.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that, as one person put it, that all shall be saved.

Fr. Stephen: Right. So we don’t counter the idea that God is required to reconcile everything to himself with the idea that God is required to not reconcile some things to himself. We counter it with the idea that God is completely free, meaning God is free to reconcile every human person to himself and grant them eternal life if he so chooses; he is also free to send any of his creations to eternal condemnation. God is free to do these things.

So, then, why is it so important to condemn this idea of necessity? Why does the idea of necessity make it a heresy? And that’s because of the consequences of believing that. We’ve outlined some of those over the course of this episode and especially this third half, but also, the consequences to repentance. It is critically important that we accept the teaching of Scripture and the apostolic teaching as it’s been preserved within the Orthodox Church about the possibility of eternal condemnation for me, not for other people, not for my “enemies,” not for the people I don’t like, not for the people I resent, but for me, that I have that possibility in my mind, to drive me to repentance, meaning to drive me to actually do things about repentance, to drive me to take my sins seriously, to drive me to be ever more faithful to Christ, to drive me to pursue Christ.

So the way I have summarized this in the past is: Universalism may end up being true, in the sense that every person might be, but you can’t be a universalist. It is a sin to embrace the heresy of universalism, even if it turns out to be true. And again, this is about yourself. We do not, as Orthodox Christians, and the Church does not teach, that you must accept that some particular person whom you loved is going to face eternal condemnation, because the Church hasn’t said that that person is under eternal condemnation or will be under eternal condemnation. Even being anathematized, even being condemned like Origen by an ecumenical council doesn’t say that he is going to face eternal condemnation. That judgment is up to Christ at the last judgment.

So you do not have to believe that, just because the person you love died outside of the bounds of the Orthodox Church or Christianity broadly conceived or having committed some sin that they didn’t obviously repent of—you are not required to believe that they are going to face eternal condemnation on the last day. In fact, you’re called to pray for them.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and what would be the point of praying for them if there was no hope for them?

Fr. Stephen: Right, if that’s already sealed. You’re called to pray for them. You’re called to intercede for them. You’re called, as we said earlier in the episode, to repent on their behalf. This is the actual solution for that problem that the Church gives us that doesn’t have all those horrible follow-on consequences. The Church gives us something to do. We offer memorials. We offer memorial prayers. We gather together as a Church and remember the people we’ve lost and remember the people we love who are departed. We pray for them, to try to make things right where they’re not able to. We have these concrete things to do, to work out those feelings and those fears and those doubts regarding those we love who have passed away. And just flipping the switch and saying, “Oh, okay, I’ve got this intellectual argument where I don’t need to worry about it any more, assurance of other people’s salvation that comes through apokatastasis,” crosses those wires, short-circuits the whole thing, because now I don’t need to do any of those things.

So in this area, accept the recourse that the Church has given you, the fix and the healing method that the Church has given you, rather than rejecting the Church’s teaching and going after apokatastasis.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. So to summarize—I mean, there’s a lot of things, a lot of thoughts running around my head. I, at this point in my life, have been an Orthodox Christian for a little over 25 years, but I remember immediately before I learned about the Orthodox faith and became Orthodox that I began to have a lot of questions about the faith in which I was raised, and it was not because I encountered arguments against it. I didn’t meet some apologist telling me that some Evangelical Protestantism was wrong. It actually came out of the internal theology of that movement. Certainly we were not universalists, but we definitely believed in what is called eternal security, which is another variation on a lot of these things, which is sometimes summarized as “once saved, always saved.” It’s a kind of truncated version of one of those points on the Calvinist TULIP, perseverance of the saints.

So I was raised with this idea that once you “get saved,” which is an experience of often praying a particular prayer to God, repenting of your sins, asking him to be the Lord of your life and you trust him forever for your salvation, these kinds of things together. And those of you who are familiar with this tradition, you probably recognize that combination. That once that happens for you, then you have effectively your ticket to heaven. You’ve got it. You can’t lose it, no matter what you do. Now, it was generally also believed that if you really did have it, that there would be effects in your life that you wouldn’t live an evil life, that the worst that could happen to you is that you could become—and I always loved this word; this is very common in Baptist circles—“backslidden.” Still saved, but backslidden. In other words, you’re Christian, you’ve got your ticket to heaven, but you’re not living right.

Well, one of the questions that I began to have in my late teens and early 20s was: Okay, if I really do have my salvation kind of wrapped up, if it’s taken care of, if assurance of salvation means absolute mathematical certainty of salvation, guaranteed, then what am I doing in church? What am I actually accomplishing here? Also, why should I behave according to moral strictures? Why? Because— It’s not because I just had this inner impulse, like “I want to do evil things! I want to taste the wild side!” but, for instance, the job that I worked, I was paid by the hour, so it was often the case that I would get offered work on Sunday mornings. And since I wasn’t making a lot of money, there was good reason to work on Sunday morning. And if I didn’t believe that participation in corporate worship actually had any critical effect in my Christian life, then why did I need to prioritize it such that I would do things like make less money, especially at a time in my life when I really could’ve used the money? [Laughter]

So since I didn’t have a good response to that question, I began to take some work on Sunday mornings. I was in church on other Sunday mornings. I didn’t just sit home, but, you know, it seemed like a pretty decent balance. I was like: “Oh, well, I’ll work sometimes.” And certainly, someone’s in college—I was in my early 20s—there’re definitely moral temptations. There are definitely things that I wanted to do, I didn’t really see the harm in them, but I had been told that they were wrong, and I was like: “But I’ve got my salvation nailed down. Why? If I do it this one time, or even if I have a pattern of doing it, there’s no actual risk.”

Part of the reason I became Orthodox, one of the motivations that I had, was this question: Well, what am I supposed to be doing as a Christian? Is there something to do? Something more than just recruit more Christians? Which, again, I could just ignore if I wanted to: not absolutely required. Is there something more to do? And then I encountered the Orthodox Church and encountered the teaching that life is supposed to be about repentance, that the whole life is for repentance. And this was utterly revolutionary for me. Utterly revolutionary! Because it made everything that I did critical; it made everything that I did important. It made everything that I did have an ultimate effect of permanent importance. It did not mean that all of my history, other than that one moment of getting on my knees and praying when I was six years old in front of my bed, that all the rest of that history didn’t matter—it meant that it all mattered, that it’s all going to be carried with me into eternity, that it all becomes permanent. And the whole shape of my life is what will be carried forward.

The consequence of universalism is that it doesn’t matter. No matter what version you want to put on it, whether it’s the “well, it matters temporarily but not long-term,” it still ultimately doesn’t matter. That’s why some critics of universalism have said that it’s the erasure of history, because—because it is. St. Paisios famously said, “Don’t believe those who say that all will be saved, because it means that we won’t struggle.” I mean, that’s pretty straightforward. Because if there is nothing at risk, if eternal condemnation is not a possibility, then the fire that’s going to be lit under a Christian is just simply not there. Now, somebody could argue, “Shouldn’t you have a better reason to struggle than just being afraid of being punished?” Well, again, we talked about all of that. The point is that there is something at risk. There is something at risk.

Another one of the modern holy Fathers of the Church, St. Silouan the Athonite—I just saw this again recently; I was reminded of this—he said this:

Understand two thoughts and fear them. One says you are a saint; the other, you won’t be saved. Both of these thoughts are from the enemy and there is no truth in them. But think this way: I am a great sinner, but the Lord is merciful. He loves people very much, and he will forgive my sins.

If you eliminate one side of that, then you’re eliminating the whole Christian life. Repentance ultimately does not matter; it’s optional, like it’s a bonus, even for the people who say that hell is a kind of purgatorial experience, that it will eventually go away. So it’s like, “Well, you can repent now, or you can repent in the next life. Eh, why shouldn’t I wait? Why shouldn’t I? I could have both! I could have my cake and eat it, too.” So universalism, like the Calvinist arguments on which it depends, eliminates the very character of repentance. And repentance is to change, to become more like our Lord Jesus Christ. It’s to become more like our Lord Jesus Christ. It’s not— As we said, it’s not about feeling a certain feeling, feeling bad, guilty, or whatever, regretful; it’s about becoming more like our Lord Jesus Christ.

And so being saved is to become like Christ. So you can’t be saved without repentance. That’s like saying, “I want to get wet without any water.” Like, it’s not a thing! It’s not a thing. You can’t get wet without water. You can’t be saved without repentance, because repentance is the process of being saved. Salvation is not a status that you receive at the end; it is becoming more like Christ. It is this elevation to become, like the Lord says, to be equal to the angels.

As Fr. Stephen said, we don’t know: we don’t know how many or if any actually will be eternally condemned. And God forbid! I find it really reprehensible sometimes when certain people say that if you believe in eternal condemnation as it’s laid out in the Scripture and Church Fathers and so forth, that means you like the idea of people suffering. Excuse me! False. Utterly false. The fact that I believe that frightening things are true does not mean I want them to be true. Something is true whether or not I want it to be true; that’s part of why it’s true.

But the whole Christian life, it’s not that it’s about trying to avoid eternal condemnation, but that is one of the things that’s included in the broad, comprehensive, complicated, and endlessly fascinating image that the Scriptures and the whole Orthodox Tradition present in order for us to fix our eyes on Christ and to press forward to the prize of the high calling of God, as the Apostle Paul said. Maybe you don’t need to think about eternal condemnation in order to do that, but, you know, some of the saints who are the holiest people, like, the holiest people, who really knew God and who really loved him, that was part of their toolkit of salvation. If St. Paisios uses that as part of his toolkit of salvation, then who am I to think that I don’t need that? I’m nobody. I’m nothing like him in terms of sanctity. And so if he needs it, then how much more do I need it? And it’s not because I want to dwell on darkness and gnashing of teeth and lake of fire or whatever, but I need to know that there’s this boundary that exists there. There’s a boundary, and unless I keep vigilant, I could be potentially tossed over it. Father?

Fr. Stephen: So everything I’m about to say is once again aimed not at good people who are drawn toward some kind of view of apokatastasis for emotional reasons, out of love for a departed loved one, that kind of thing. There are a lot of people, as we’ve said several times, who are drawn to it because of that, and honestly, and while we’ve argued that’s a bad solution, what I’m about to say is directed at the other group, because there is this other group that finds it attractive, I think for other reasons. What these folks have in common is a certain class identity, to be blunt. We’re talking about upper middle-class intellectuals, college professors, other people in the professional managerial class. There’s a reason it’s referred to as “liberal theology.” And it’s not just that, like: “Oh, those people are libs and therefore believe liberal theology.” It’s much deeper than that.

Liberalism proper brings about and grows through the bourgeois revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries, where, starting in the US and France, the mercantile class seized political power through violence from the feudal nobility—the king, the lords—who had previously possessed political power. The newly expanding mercantile class had money; they seized political power through revolution; they became the new governors and rulers of the territory. And with their newfound political power were not per se inclined to the same sense of obligation before God that their feudal predecessors had been, because, in addition to not accepting the hierarchical ordering of the world in feudal monarchy, they also didn’t accept the hierarchical ordering of the world religiously within the Church. This is why in the French Revolution they go after the Roman Catholic Church. This is why Roman Catholicism was so very unpopular throughout US history—Orthodoxy, too, by the way, though to a lesser extent, because we were a smaller presence, but go look at the history of the Greek community in Toronto in Canada for examples of how they faced the same kinds of persecutions that Roman Catholics did in the United States. That was sort of rejected.

And so that class of people wanted authority not only in the realm of politics but also in the realm of religion, and so you get the creation, for example, in the United States in the colonial period of a pastorate that is in parallel with his mercantile class. You have lawyers, you have physicians, you have pastors and parsons, and these are the influencers of society. Again, because they now receive this religious authority, too, one might expect that, in the same way a feudal lord had certain obligations that they viewed as imposed by God on them morally toward the peasants who worked their lands, you might expect that the new sort of nobility might feel those same obligations; or that because they now had this religious authority, they might feel the same obligations that bishops did, to care for the poor and those who were under their authority. And, frankly, the whole current of philosophy and theology at the time ran in the opposite direction: ran in the direction of justifying why there is no such responsibility, why the person who has worked hard and earned his position of power and authority has no obligation to those beneath him in terms of the class structure because those people are beneath him because they are reprobate, they are less virtuous, and if they are virtuous they will inevitably arrive at their own station. This is just a constant current in intellectual history.

This grasping of universalism by this university intellectual class among upper middle- and lower upper-class in the United States and Europe is part and parcel of this, because what ultimate function does it have for them? We talked about the other group of people, where this is functioning to give them consolation in the face of someone they’ve lost. For these other people, for these intellectuals, this is doing something different. This is justifying them not caring about the poor. This is justifying them not caring or doing anything about injustice in the world. This is serving the function of justifying them doing nothing to try to evangelize anyone. This is used to justify them not having any responsibility to investigate their own religious beliefs very deeply, and definitely never have to make any sharp distinctions that might make things awkward at a dinner party. This is functionally a sort of neo-Pharisaism. It is a belief used to justify oneself, to identify oneself as one of the open-minded, one of the elite, to represent: “I am above those sort of lower-class proles who believe in things like hell, who believe all of these fables.” And believing in Plato’s god helps them a lot, because Plato’s god is a god of aristocratic rationalism.

And I’m not just saying this as an attack on them. I’m saying this because, in the same way that we say to those folks who have grasped onto this because they need it for consolation, the Church provides you with a means of having consolation that doesn’t come with all the costs associated with latching onto this deviant view, apokatastasis, in the same way, we need to—because we love our brothers and sisters from that other group, from that intellectual group, from that upper-class group; we love them, too, and that means we need to call them to repentance and faith, too. We need to call on them to cease trying to justify themselves, cease trying to justify the way of life they’ve become addicted to. Call on them to get rid of the false idol of their own self-perception as one of the elite, one of the knowledgeable, one of the intelligent, to abandon those things and come to repentance.

There are going to be a bunch of people who listen to what I said in the third half and say, “Oh, there he— He’s a hater. He’s a DBH hater. He hates David Bentley Hart. He hates these people.” I do not. I want David Bentley Hart to repent and draw close to Christ. I want him to repent of a lot of the things he’s said, meaning I want him to sort of repair the damage. I want him to draw closer to Christ. I want him to live a Christian life. I want him to become a saint. That’s what I want. But that means, right now, with what he’s doing now and teaching now and promoting now, I have to oppose him. And this is the truth for us all the time in our Christian lives, because it’s not just “those folks” who are addicted to a certain way of life and to not having things be awkward and to not having to make harsh distinctions; it’s all of us, to one degree or another.

There’s a small group of us who are super combative and aggressive—I say “us” because I’m probably one of those people—who need to rein it in a little. But most of us don’t like conflict, don’t like having to take stands, don’t like having to oppose someone, especially don’t like having to oppose someone to their face. But often—not just sometimes, but often—that’s exactly what we have to do if we love someone. We have to tell them that they’re wrong, that they’re deeply wrong, that they’re wrong for bad reasons, and that what they’re doing is going to be self-destructive.

It would be great to honestly believe that everybody can just do anything they want and it’ll all turn out great in the end for them and for everyone else—I mean, that’s kind of ridiculous, because some of the things they want to do would be directly hurting other people—but that’s not reality. That’s not the real world. That’s like a child’s view of the world. Everybody just goes off and follows their bliss. In the real world, we need to work together to sort these things out and find salvation, and part of that means that we need to have some uncomfortable clashes. We need to have some uncomfortable discussions, we need to hash some things out, we need to risk hurting feelings, so that in the end everybody, myself included—I need people to challenge me, often; it’s one of the reasons I’m married: my wife is good at it; she calls almost everything I say into question [Laughter]—but we all need that, to find salvation and to find eternal life.

Our goal has to be what God wills, which is that all men should be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth.

Fr. Andrew: Amen. Well, that is our show for tonight. Next time, I think, should be our third anniversary show. That’ll be fun! Thank you very much for listening. We’d 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.

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