Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick: This is the second part of my interview with Fr. Stephen De Young. If you didn’t catch part one, make sure you go back and listen to that first.

There’s a question that we sometimes get, connected with our Lord of Spirits podcast, and it’s an honest question, because it’s based in people’s actual experience of being Orthodox Christians in America. And that is, they hear you and me talking about these things, and then they ask, “Well, wait. Why is it that here in the English-speaking world, including in the Orthodox Church, we don’t generally here about this stuff”—that’s the phrase; it’s the way it’s always put: “this stuff”—“in sermons, in educational classes, in Orthodox books? Why is it not there? Or why is it not apparent?” I mean, I kind of know what you might say to this, and I have some things to say to it, too, but I just wanted to set this up, because it is an issue. We’ve had people say, “Why are you bringing in this stuff from outside of Orthodox Tradition and trying to insist that we should believe it?”

Fr. Stephen De Young: Well, obviously, as I was just saying, I don’t think it’s outside. I think it’s the connective tissue, inside. But, I mean, this gets to the core of what you wanted to talk about today, which is that, in the English-speaking Orthodox world in America, we haven’t fully appropriated everything. So as sort of the fullness of Orthodoxy comes into the English language, you look at the tiny fraction of the Fathers’ works that we have that have been translated into English. As that comes into English, as we become aware of it, it’s going to look like a lot of new stuff. It’s going to look like new info, but that’s why: because there’s more out there; there’s more fullness out there. That’s not to say that people aren’t really Orthodox or something because they don’t have this, because being Orthodox is not about… It’s primarily a way of life, not a body of knowledge, and giving intellectual assent to it.

Fr. Andrew: You don’t have to listen to Lord of Spirits podcast in order to be saved.

Fr. Stephen: As much as that might help grow our listener base. [Laughter] But knowledge definitely helps you on the road of that way of life. It’s not like virtue is to remain ignorant. So, yeah, it’s not… This isn’t new stuff; this is recovery. This is old stuff, and more of the fullness coming into English-language Orthodoxy and people being made aware of it and seeing the connections and seeing, starting to see the whole. If you never find out about that Ugaritic Baal story, you’ll be fine. You can go and participate in the Paschal Liturgy and get the point and fully understand Christ’s victory over death, the devil, and you’re fine. But if you do know about that, that can help you appreciate and understand what’s going on in a deeper level, so that’s a good thing, too.

This is—I don’t know how deep we want to go into this—but this is one of the basic problems in Western thought that’s crept in through early Platonist Christianity, is the idea that distinction implies opposition, that if I make a distinction between two things, one of them innately has to be better and one has to be worse. The reason that this comes from Platonism is the good is always one; the good can only ever be one, so any diversity implies that there’s some kind of defect in the diverse things. At most, one of them can be good. So, from that perspective, when I say, “You’re fine not knowing, but it’s good to know,” there will be people who hear, “Well, okay, but the one who actually knows about the Baal story is somehow more Orthodox or a better Orthodox…” Like, one has to be over the other. And that’s one of the things, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: Hello, Gnosticism!

Fr. Stephen: It’s one of the things we have to shed; it’s one of the fights, like celibacy and marriage: one does not have to be better than the other. There can be… Diversity does not imply defect; distinction does not imply that they’re opposed to each other. So there’s… You can be open to richness; you don’t have to find: this is the one, true expression, and anything else that comes along is therefore bad and wrong and dangerous.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Do you, I mean, does this problem persist? Is there this need for recovery in the same way in other parts of the Orthodox world that aren’t English-speaking that you’re aware of?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, in some cases yes. Our Orthodox brothers and sisters and fathers and mothers in, for example, the former Soviet Union, the former Soviet Republics, did, through suffering and pain and death, preserve the Orthodox faith for us, for example. But they weren’t able to get a deep and rich seminary theological education in the midst of persecution.

Fr. Andrew: And, I mean, I would probably suggest that Ottoman domination in the Middle East and that area also…

Fr. Stephen: And even Greece.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, exactly, took its toll. But, yeah, you know, one of the things that I have noticed, especially as I have been learning a lot of this material, is how much I am starting to notice things, especially in the texts of liturgical services that I frankly did not notice before. And it’s funny, because, as long as I’ve been Orthodoxy—and I can say this without any pride, but I’m saying it with seriousness—I have been very dedicated to participating in liturgical worship from the beginning. Any time there was a service going on that I could get to, I would get there. And even in my whole priesthood, I’ve tried to do as many liturgical services as possible, including when no one else shows up. I simply do a reader’s service or whatever. So I’ve been immersing myself in liturgical life as much as I can without being a monk for over 20 years now, and, frankly, there was stuff that I must have sung a hundred if not a thousand times that never sort of leaped out at me. I’ll just give an example.

One of the things that you’ve mentioned a lot and is pretty clear from Scripture if you look at the right places is that part of the destiny of Christians is to become part of God’s heavenly hosts. And I didn’t really think about that theme before—I mean, I’m sure I read it or sung it or whatever, and it just never… It was never something I paid attention to, and if someone had asked me, “Do we become part of the heavenly host?” I might have said, “Enh, I don’t know. That sounds interesting.” And yet, now that I’ve focused on the idea, it’s all over the place in the liturgical services! Like, it really is! It’s remarkable how often our hymnographers write essentially versions of those words that Christ himself said, when he said that the sons of the resurrection become sons of God and equal to the angels. It’s everywhere, and that’s an example.

So that’s why, sometimes, when people say, “Why have I never heard this before,” my response now often is, “Actually, you have, but you weren’t paying attention,” because I could say that I’d heard it before, but I wasn’t paying attention. No one had pointed it out to me, and so it just kind of went by.

That’s just one example that I might give. I think that this is an important framing question for what we’re discussing because we’re not saying that Orthodox Christians have lost Orthodoxy, because, as you said, it’s a way of life, not a specific set of knowledge or understanding. And we also haven’t lost—even though it’s not being preached on or books being written about it, it is in the divine services, it is in our patristic inheritance. It’s all there, frankly.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and our fellow Orthodox Christians in those other countries have a big leg up on us, because even though they may have lost awareness of some of these things because of the history of persecution, these understandings and ideas are still embedded not only in their liturgical and worship life, but they’re embedded in their culture, in their language.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and they’re not materialists. A lot of them are not… I mean, there’s some places, for instance, in some of the former Soviet areas, that materialism was hammered into people, but in a lot of places it simply wasn’t. I married into a Middle Eastern family, and sometimes when I talk to my wife’s relatives, I’m like: “Okay, you guys are seeing and experiencing things that I just don’t. I just don’t.” There’s definitely a different sense of the way that the world really is in a lot of those cultures.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so they have a huge leg up in sort of re-appropriating their legacy. In the United States, this is an entirely different project, because our language and culture is all formed around Puritan Christianity, either embracing it or rejecting it, but it’s still formed around Puritan Christianity, which is foreign to Orthodox Christianity. So we are appropriating it for the first time, so for us it’s more like when Christianity came to the Rus or to the Greeks than it is like the Russians or the Greeks coming back to Orthodoxy.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, although I would say that we don’t even have the advantage of having been pagans.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] In some ways, yes.

Fr. Andrew: Because pagans at least know that they’re… Right. I don’t want that to be taken as an absolute!

Fr. Stephen: And there’s this false-friends idea. In language study, “false friends” are when you have a word in another language that seems like an English word, but it doesn’t mean the same thing, so it’s a false friend, because you think, “Oh, well, that must…”—and it doesn’t. And you get that with our… Because our culture is around a form of Christianity, you get these false friends, like the idea that what the Orthodox Church means when it talks about justification or any of these things is what American culture in general means when it uses those terms or it thinks about those things—and it’s not. And that makes it sort of more difficult in that assumption.

So I think probably the closest thing to our situation—and this is why we should have more appreciation for St. Martin of Tours—is when—because he was the pivotal figure in Orthodox Christianity overtaking and converting the Arians of Western Europe, among the Goths… People forget that Western Europe was majority Arian before, for a couple of centuries, and before Orthodox Christianity reasserted itself. So you have there a dynamic where people considered themselves to be Christians and have an understanding of Christianity, and then Orthodox Christianity is coming in to say, “Well, not exactly.” [Laughter] “And there are the things that need to change and shift.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so, I mean that brings me to one of the things in the outline I have as sort of a sub-question but I think is actually a major question, which is: How does this relate to our evangelistic witness? I’ve been explicit over and over again in my whole ministry: I want everybody to be an Orthodox Christian, not because it sort of authenticates or verifies what I think is true and it makes me feel good about being Orthodox, but rather because I want everyone to share in this life. So how do we…? How does this affect what we’re doing in terms of inviting people into Orthodox Christianity?

Fr. Stephen: There are a lot of bad reasons to become an Orthodox Christian, and I think a lot of what we’ve done is… Well, first of all a lot of what we’ve done is preaching Orthodoxy, where Orthodoxy is the noun, not an adjective describing Christianity: it’s not a form of Christianity; it’s its own thing. And that skews things a great deal, because the Gospel we’re called to proclaim to the world is not “clergy should wear cassocks” or “people should let their beards grow.”

Fr. Andrew: Our our calendar dates.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, that’s not what we’re called to preach; we’re called to preach the Gospel. And if we’re Orthodox Christians, that means we have the fullness of the Gospel and the right understanding of the Gospel to proclaim to people. I tell inquirers and catechumens at my parish that the only reason they should join the Orthodox Church… Well, I also emphasize to them that they don’t join the Orthodox Church, they join an Orthodox Church. But the only reason to do that is that’s where they find Christ, that they’re trying to draw closer to Christ, and that’s where they find him. And any other reason is not a good reason, and they should not join. I at times actively discourage people from joining the Orthodox Church, but too long we’ve approached it the opposite way, where we’re almost desperate for people to join the Orthodox Church.

Fr. Andrew: “Whatever gets them in the door.” Which is a very Evangelical Protestant kind of… Well, in its worst form; not all Evangelicals are like that. I can say that from experience. But, yeah, it’s sort of “whatever gets them in the door, at least they’re in the door, and maybe they’ll change” or whatever. But I’ve experienced this myself during my time as a pastor, that people came in, and yet they weren’t actually rooted in Christ, and so they didn’t stay, or they came in and there was something destructive that happened—destructive to them and to other people, maybe.

In the ancient Church, the way you became an Orthodox Christian was really important. It wasn’t just: “Welcome! We’ll chrismate you next Sunday” or baptize you, whatever. There has to be the sense of coming because you’ve been converted to Christ, and not anything else. Not anything else.

Sorry, I am… This is one of my soap-box issues, too, and I tend… I have a whole set of rants kind of just ready to go!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, if you’re a high-church Protestant and your denomination starts ordaining women, and that’s the only reason you’re interested in joining the Orthodox Church; if they had never started ordaining women, you would’ve stayed there happily your whole life? You shouldn’t be joining the Orthodox Church, because that’s not a reason. And it’s causing, frankly, a crisis in the American Orthodox Church, that we have a lot of people who are sort of Russophiles and Putinstans, and they’re just on the political right, and so they’re just attracted to things that are traditional, and whatever church they were in, if any ordained women or took some biblical stance on homosexuality or something, so they want to be in the traditional place, and that’s not only unhealthy for them… Because when we bring someone into the Orthodox Church, we’re bringing them into the presence of God; we’re bringing them into the direct presence of Christ; we’re bringing them to the Eucharist. If we’re bringing people in who are in a state where they’re not able to receive that, we’re damaging them, we’re harming them. We could be killing them. So out of compassion for them we shouldn’t be doing it, and out of love for the Church we shouldn’t be doing it, because that’s bringing strife and division into the Church and into our parishes. So, yeah, we have a problem with that, of people just loving traditionalism as such and coming from a very right-wing point of view where that’s appealing.

So that’s a really bad reason for someone to join the Church, and I’m not saying we should put up a sign and throw people out and tell people: Go away. But I’m saying that catechesis is not about, again, teaching a body of knowledge. That’s not what Orthodoxy is. Catechesis is about bringing people into the Orthodox way of life, which will mean calling people who are trying to join for the wrong reasons to repentance, and trying to get them to join for the right reasons. It’s not that we don’t want these people to join at all; it’s that we don’t want them to join for the wrong reasons and bring what is really ultimately sin with them. That the length of time, one to three years in the ancient Church, of how long it took someone to join the Church was not based on how much they knew and how educated they were about the faith; it was based on how much repentance they needed to do, how much their way of life needed to change, and what fruits they needed to show of that before they were allowed to enter. And we need to get back to more of that and less of the education model of catechesis.

Fr. Andrew: Right, the Orthodoxy 101 approach, as I’ve heard it called. So, I mean, related to that, you’ve sometimes said that one of our problems here, of Orthodox Christianity in America, is that we tend to use Roman Catholic arguments against Protestants and Protestant arguments against Catholics, without actually putting forward a positive presentation of the Orthodox faith. Would you mind giving a couple examples of that, of how we’ve been doing that?

Fr. Stephen: Well, I mean, the most obvious examples are the super-cringy arguments Orthodox people use to go after sola scriptura, when they’re talking to Protestants, which—I know they circulate as memes in these Orthodox circles and these “gotcha"s and things. First of all, the Roman Catholics have been using all of those for centuries; they’re not new things that some Orthodox person came up with. So they’re not based in anything in Orthodoxy; they’re actually based on the view of Scripture and Tradition in the Roman Catholic Church, which is problematic, but also Protestants have had centuries to come up with answers to them. [Laughter] You’re playing ping-pong! It’s just going to come back right at you, and you’re going to shoot it right back at them.

But even if it works, even if it worked on some Protestants out there, where you threw those memes at him—this has never happened, as far as I know—but you threw a bunch of internet memes at them, and they decided, “Well, hey, you’re right. Sola scriptura? That’s bunkum.” You would have basically converted them to Roman Catholicism partially, because those are the arguments you’re using.

And then the flip-side of that would be, most of the time when I see Orthodox-Roman Catholic debates about the papacy, it’s just all the Protestant arguments against the papacy, which again, Roman Catholics have had centuries to come up with answers for. And so, again, you’re playing ping-pong, and even if you win you’ve sort of partially converted them to Protestantism, not to Orthodoxy, because in the process… So in that example what you end up doing by using those Protestant arguments against the papacy is you end up devaluing the episcopacy in a way that isn’t true for Orthodoxy. You end up arguing against the whole idea of primacy and the whole idea of episcopacy, which are things that Orthodoxy holds to. The same reason I never argue with Protestants about sola scriptura. Best case scenario, if you win, you’ve lowered their view of the Scriptures. And the Orthodox Church does not have a lower view of the Scriptures than Protestants. That’s not authentically the teaching of the Orthodox Church if you’re bringing them to a lower view of the Scriptures. My approach is probably, “Okay, you’re only willing to talk about what’s in the Bible, let’s talk about what’s in the Bible.”

And then when we get into what the Scriptures teach about themselves, at the end of the day, if they join the Orthodox Church, they’ll end up giving up sola scriptura in favor of something else, but that’s not really one of the points of difference. The reason Roman Catholics and Protestants argue about this the way they do is that those are the points of distinction between a Roman Catholic and a Protestant. They accept 90-95% of the same things, and then argue about these other 5-10%, so us joining in to argue about this 5-10% does not advance the cause of Orthodoxy.

Fr. Andrew: And there’s also kind of the problem of the way that the arguments are made. It’s often: “Yes, well, this Bible verse,” or, and the Orthodox version of that, “Yeah, well, this Church Father said this.” And especially with Bible verses, it’s really obvious. They’ve had centuries. It’s like, what, you don’t think that your interlocutor hasn’t read the whole Bible? Now, maybe they haven’t, but you kind of have to assume that someone in their tradition has. It’s around there somewhere! [Laughter] But again, also, this idea of: “Well, this Church Father said this, and so therefore you are wrong,” that is not an Orthodox Christian way of even forming an argument. And sometimes this stuff is not obvious to people, because they’re so used to: This is what reasoned argument consists of. And also even that argument is the main thing to be using for these discussions.

Fr. Stephen: And the alternative is you come and say, “Okay, here’s what the Orthodox Church has historically believed about the Scriptures, believed and taught about the Scriptures. And here’s what the Orthodox Church has historically believed and taught about the episcopacy and about episcopal primacy and the relations of different bishops in the Church.” You present that in a positive way, and then you can say to someone, “Okay, what part of that do you disagree with, if anything?” and assess it from there. But we don’t even have… I get asked all the time for book recommendations on topics in English. “Is there a good English book for the Orthodox perspective on blank, just presenting it positively?”—and there isn’t one.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, you and I are both working on various books to try to begin to answer that call. I have often said that half the things, maybe 90% of the things I write, are because I wanted something to exist and I couldn’t find it. I’m not saying that to just sort of puff myself up, but just to say: Look, somebody’s got to make an attempt at this, and maybe somebody’s going to do something even better after I finish my thing. Like the main thing I’m working on now is a basic presentation of the Gospel from an Orthodox Christian point of view. As far as I know in English, there is no such book—which is crazy! How can that be!? But here we are.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and that’s… All the things I’m writing, I’m able to, based on my education at all, I’m able to help with sort of the Bible piece of bringing this stuff into English. Not accomplish it all on my own, but help a little bit, so that’s what I’m trying to do. So I’ve said, and I’ve got book projects going on with Ancient Faith—I’ve said to people at Ancient Faith, besides you; I’ve said, “I’m not interested in doing “my version of blank” that already exists, where I sit and I look at all the commentaries or all the Orthodox books in English on X, and I say, “None of these are good enough! I have greater insight! I’m going to write my version and displace all of these as the magisterial book!” I’m interested in trying to fill in some of the holes, so at least there’s something. Mine may be great, it may be lousy, it may be somewhere in between, but at least it’s something that’s better than zero.

Fr. Andrew: And there’s some big holes, unfortunately, but that’s the task. So, all right. I want to get into some specific about the ways that you talk about reading the Bible. So you talk a lot about ancient paganism in both your writing and your podcasts. Why is that relevant to understanding the Bible? I mean, can’t we just use what’s in the Bible without looking outside of it? And maybe isn’t that even dangerous, to be reading about pagan sacrificial rituals and narratives? Why is paganism important?

Fr. Stephen: Right, well, paganism, of course… There wasn’t like a pope of paganism. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: What!?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, we may, later in this discussion, get into the fact that the whole idea of a religion is like a 17th century idea that comes out of European Protestantism. But not only do we think of things in terms of “religions,” but we tend to think—everybody tends to think of other religions as being patterned after their religion. So get these assumptions. It’s really interesting when you hear a Muslim or an Orthodox Jew talk about Christianity, and you’re kind of going: “That’s not quite right,” and you look a little closer and you’re like: “Oh, well, his religion functions this way, and so he’s assuming Christianity must be functionally…” You know what I mean? When there’s no connection.

So when we talk about paganism, we’re talking about all the religion in the world before Moses is functionally paganism. Abraham’s religion, in terms of his practices, [was] targeted toward a different God, and for Abraham, at least, only the one. But other than that, they’re identical to everybody else’s. So we have this presupposition, or at least there’s a presupposition that lies behind that question, that is—and this comes out of, as most mad things do, 19th century German Protestant academia—this idea that ancient Israelite religion was antithetical, was an antithesis to the thesis of paganism. So they were of course, being 19th century Germans, they were Hegelians, and so they had this thesis-antithesis-synthesis model for history.

So you have ancient paganism as thesis, ancient Israelite religion and Judaism as antithesis, and they see Christianity as this synthesis: all the noble things from paganism brought together with all the spiritual insights of Judaism. But that means you’re reading the Old Testament as just this antithesis, just this giant objection and remonstrance against the pagan world. [Laughter] So the two have nothing to do with each other, and of course both are then less valuable than the synthesis, which is where some of the anti-Semitism enters in. And of course they believe themselves to be now at the end of history the purest and greatest form of religion ever conceived.

But that reading of the Old Testament—it’s just antithetical, it’s just sort of the minority report, a separate brief unrelated to the rest—falls apart just very, very quickly, and it makes big parts of the Bible unintelligible. A little example: the show-bread in the tabernacle. God says, “Build a table in the tabernacle. Put bread on it. Keep bread on it. Keep the bread fresh. Replace the bread. The priest, doing the service, will eat the bread.” If you take that in isolation, it’s like: “Okay, yeah, I guess the priests need lunch.” [Laughter] “Didn’t have a sack lunch; you don’t want him eating moldy bread, so you’ve got to replace it.” If you understand that in the rest of the pagan world at that time there were tables in temples because they had to come and feed the god, they had to come and provide for the god; and you understand that Yahweh in the Torah is reversing that—he’s got a table in his tabernacle from which he feeds his people and provides for them, now all of a sudden that makes sense, and you can understand it.

So if you break that relation, you’re not going to see that. And so much of the Old Testament and the New Testament are interacting with what we would now call pagan religion, but with the cultures, the beliefs, the views of the surrounding cultures. We gave that example of the Baal story that gets inverted in the psalm. That happens a lot. A lot of the Old Testament is taking stories about Enlil and Baal and Marduk and these other beings, and inverting them and turning them around and sort of giving the… correcting them, interacting with them. So if we’re just…

Fr. Andrew: I’ve got to say, that would be a cool book, by the way. [Laughter] Ancient mythology and how the Old Testament corrects it, or something. I don’t know.

Fr. Stephen: I have long been plotting a Baal book. Call it something like Baal and History and Tradition and scare everybody. [Laughter]

Yeah, so there’s just tons of that. So saying that we can ignore paganism is saying: We can just ignore the context. We can ignore the culture that produced these documents, we can ignore the world that it took place in, we can ignore the history. We can just ignore that. We just have text on paper. Even the most extreme sola scriptura Evangelicals have abandoned that view of Scripture a long time ago, at least when asked directly about it. There have been people who have thought that sort of a guy fell in a trance and came to: “Oh my gosh, I wrote something! What is this?” [Laughter] “It’s the book of Judges! Oh wow! This must have come directly from God; I was in a trance.”

Everyone kind of understands that, while we do believe that all Scripture is God-breathed, that it was actually written by humans in a particular place, in a particular time, addressing particular situations, even though we accept that when we’re directly asked, we make arguments that presuppose the opposite. Like the big flap I’ve had online—although it’s not hard to start a flap on social media. But pointing out that St. Paul’s epistle to the Romans was a letter that he wrote to a particular community, talking about issues going on in that church at that time—that had people up in arms, just me saying that, which is obviously true. But that that somehow means it’s irrelevant, that means it’s not the word of God, that means, that means, that means—which all presupposes that other view, that it just sort of fell out of the sky and has no relationship to the culture, the history, and what was going on at the time, which is absurd.

Fr. Andrew: All right, so, same question, but with what’s called Second Temple Judaism. So what actually is that? because I’m sure a lot of people maybe have heard the phrase but don’t know what it means. And why does it matter for understanding the Bible?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and even the term “Second Temple Judaism” is starting to fall into disfavor—not the “Second Temple” part; the “Judaism” part. The Second Temple period is the period when the second Temple in Jerusalem existed, so from roughly 500 BC to 70 AD.

Fr. Andrew: So this is after the Babylonian exile, right?

Fr. Stephen: Right, after the return from the Babylonian exile, when the Temple was rebuilt, it had to be reconsecrated a couple times in between, but that basic structure was there and was being reconsecrated and rebuilt and built up and expanded by Herod, etc., etc., until its destruction in 70 AD. So it’s just… saying the Second Temple period is a way of referring to that late Persian, the Greek, and then the Roman periods.

The reason the “Judaism” part is getting rejected is trying to fight a really bad tendency that has afflicted theology for a long time in the West, which is to assume that the people, for example, the people whom Jesus encounters in Judea in the first century basically live and believe and understand and practice the way whoever the local Orthodox Jews are in your culture, in your time, in your place. And this is one of the big problems, which is why academia is pretty well overturning Luther’s reading of St. Paul, for example, is that… And it’s not like Luther was being mendacious or something; that was the only reference point he had for what Judaism is like.

Fr. Andrew: Right. His assumption was that the Judaism St. Paul is talking about is the Judaism of his local Jews.

Fr. Stephen: Right, that the Pharisees and 16th century German Jewry are pretty much identical in their beliefs and practices. I mean, there’s obvious holes in that, because the Temple still existed, so they were all oriented around the sacrificial life of the Temple, which obviously, since the destruction of the Temple, the Jewish people have not had! So their religious beliefs and way of life had to be re-centered away from the Temple that was destroyed and on to other things.

But not only does it combat that idea that the Judaism of that time is like what we call Judaism today, but there’s also the problem that there isn’t, again, like we were talking about there’s no pope of paganism, there’s no pope of Judaism. So there was no united organizational structure, so there were countless… even just reading the New Testament, you’ve got Pharisees, Sadducees, scribes. You go beyond that, you get into Egypt and Jewish communities in Europe and still in Babylon and Mesopotamia. Jacob Neusner, who’s a Jewish scholar in the middle of the 20th century, famously sort of shifted everybody’s way of talking about it to talk about Judaisms, plural, during that period, and now Jewish scholars like Daniel Boyarin and others are saying you shouldn’t even use the word “Judaism” to describe that period, because he says that the only thing it means at that time—it’s sort of like Hinduism. Hinduism isn’t an organized religion; it’s sort of a catch-all term for the religion of people in India.

Fr. Andrew: Religions, really, almost.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, for the religious practices of all of those people. So it’s the same thing. Judeans had these diverse religious beliefs and practices during that period, and so even that is kind of tricky. But in terms of why it’s relevant, the New Testament is a collection of Second Temple Jewish texts—that’s what it is—that represents the teachings and way of life of one of those sects, Christianity. So all of those sects saw themselves as being in continuity with ancient Israelite religion. They saw themselves as the inheritors of the ancient Israelite tradition, and obviously as Christians we would say that we are, but this is why the Bible of Orthodox Judaism and the Christian Old Testament are more or less the same text. That’s part of that inheritance from ancient Israel that we’ve received. Christianity is in some way an off-shoot of Pharisaism, but that’s a whole ‘nother discussion about that relationship.

So this is a huge element of context. The reason why someone might hold that it’s not relevant, you have to presuppose sort of a very, very extreme form of sola scriptura, because St. Paul talks about Jannes and Jambres contesting with Moses.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, where is that?

Fr. Stephen: You’re not going to find those names anywhere in the Old Testament. St. Jude quotes the Prophet Enoch. Enoch doesn’t say anything in Genesis. There are references all over—we don’t want to take the time to run through just miles about it.

Fr. Andrew: Just give us a few examples.

Fr. Stephen: Christ, at one point, basically quotes Ben Sirach. There are just countless… There are all kinds of ideas in Matthew that come straight out of the book of… St. Matthew’s Gospel is heavily dependent on the book of Enoch. You don’t find anything about a lake of fire, for example, in the canonical Old Testament, but you find it in the Enochic literature. All of these concepts and ideas that are being cited, because the New Testament documents are interacting in that world… And so if you start out with sort of the sola scriptura presuppositions, then that presents a huge problem. Well, wait, if St. Jude quotes 1 Enoch, does that mean 1 Enoch is canonical? Does that mean…?

Fr. Andrew: Just the one verse. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Right. And you could go into… Oh, there are Protestant scholars to this day who are trying to argue that that’s not really quoting the book of Enoch, by various means, like, for example: “That was inserted back into the book of Enoch by Christians.”

Fr. Andrew: Oh wow!

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] All kinds of things. But so, yeah, it’s literally impossible to understand what’s going on in the New Testament if you don’t understand the world of Second Temple Jewish literature. People came to all kinds of false conclusions. One of the biggest ones that’s been overturned recently was people were characterizing—and by “people” I mean European Bible scholars—were characterizing the gospel of John and the Johannine literature in general as being Gnostic. They were saying, “Look, there’s all this dualism between light and dark, and the children of God and the children of the devil. There’s all this dualism. This is coming out of some Gnostic form of Christianity.” Then we discovered the Dead Sea Scrolls, and we found out that was a perfectly Jewish way of talking about things and had nothing to do with Gnosticism.

And as Orthodox Christians in particular, most of this literature we have—the Dead Sea Scrolls aside, but most of the Second Temple Jewish literature we have was preserved by the Church in our monastic settlements. You can do just a casual perusal of the apparatus in Charlesworth’s Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, in his introductions, where he tells where all the manuscripts are. You get to the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs—it’s Mt. Athos, and it’s not just: “Oh, someone dropped a copy of it in a corner on Mt. Athos,” it’s like there’s eight copies from different centuries, meaning they were copying it and recopying it, spending the time and energy to do that over the centuries. You look at it, and a lot of it’s from Mar Saba in Palestine. Our great monastic settlements are where these texts were preserved, so they thought they were relevant. They didn’t put them in the Bible, they didn’t read from them in the liturgy, but they preserved them, as part of the Tradition and part of the [words] to help us understand what is in our Scriptures.

Fr. Andrew: All right, so, you know, from both of these contextual perspectives, on the one hand ancient paganism, on the other hand Second Temple Judaism, you end up talking about angels and demons a whole lot. If you just dip your toe into any of those texts, you start to see them everywhere—which I’ve been dipping my toes a little bit. But, you know, is angel-and-demon talk really necessary for the average Christian? And do theologians and preachers really need to spend time on that?

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, short answer. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: No, okay, I’ll expand.

Fr. Andrew: Please do!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so there’s a fundamental issue here about the nature of reality. The fact that we even ask that question reveals something about our worldview, because for most of the history of the Church, no one would have asked that question. No one would have said, “This stuff’s kind of weird. Do we need to talk about that?” And I’ve talked before about having brackets, where we have, like, here’s the stuff I’m willing to believe. And if you’re Thomas Jefferson, there’s like nothing in those brackets, and you’re just pure, head-on materialism, and you edit the Bible, taking that into account. If you’re an Evangelical Protestant, you’ve got even bigger brackets, but if people start talking about miracles outside the Bible, all of a sudden, it’s: “Whoa, Nelly.” Or saints doing miracles after the period of the New Testament, then we’re all going to get nervous. If you’re Roman Catholic, that’s going to be bigger.

And the problem is that we have the brackets at all. The problem is that we think in terms of: “My nature is to be a materialist and a skeptic and to systematically doubt everything I hear, and, being a religious person, I am going to accept certain elements of my religious tradition from that systematic doubt, but then proceed to approach everything else in my life as if I were an atheist.” And that should be problematic for obvious reasons, but it’s also a symptom; it’s a symptom of a larger problem where, as I mentioned, the whole idea of a religion is this sort of 17th century Protestant thing that evolves out of the end of the 30 Years’ War, frankly, where Europe spent 30 years murdering itself over who was a Catholic and who was a Protestant and what kind of Protestant.

So to settle that, what happened is the concept of “a religion” was introduced. You have “a religion”: this is part of your life, this is a secondary element. So this isn’t something we fight and die for; this isn’t the primary part of our identity. So you and I are both Frenchmen: you’re a Protestant, I’m a Catholic, but our core we are both Frenchmen, and we can come together over that. The religion part is going to divide us, so we have to relativize it, separate it off, put it into the brackets, and approach our lives as secular people.

This is what caused, in Prussia, the split between Orthodox Judaism and Reformed Judaism, because the government essentially offered, “Hey, you want us to stop committing pogroms against the Jewish people? Well, you have to stop living this separate way of life of your own people, and you have to become good Prussians. If you want to be Prussians who are religiously Jewish, that’s fine, but you can’t be Jews who happen to live in Prussia. We’re not going to allow that.” So the ones who stuck to their guns became what we now call Orthodox Judaism, and the ones who said, “No, we’ll relativize our Judaism,” became what’s now known as Reformed Judaism. And that’s effectively happened to Christianity in the West.

People will come straight out and say it. I’ve had parishioners come straight out and say it on social media. “We’re Americans first, and our religion is this secondary issue. What matters is that we’re both Americans.” And so the way we’re looking at the world and perceiving the world and interacting with the world is not so much Christian; it’s American, or Canadian, or British, or what-have-you. That’s the culture, and then religion is this other little piece that you may or may not have, and you may have different things filling in those brackets.

And so, because of that, there’s nothing particularly American about angels and demons or spirits in the woods. There’s nothing American about the supernatural, there’s nothing… If anything, we’re supposed to be the ones who are utilitarian, and we’re about technology and capital and this sort of thing and political freedom. Those are the things we’re about, and this other stuff is sort of loony nonsense and a distraction and potentially dangerous, because if you start really taking it seriously and your identity shifts to being Christian rather than American, well, now you’re a foreigner; now you’re not one of us; now you’re other.

So that sort of is the basis for even asking that question, but if we accept what the Scriptures clearly teach, even without taking those other things into account, just the way the Scriptures talk about the spiritual world, if we accept that that’s true, then… Not believing in a reality doesn’t make it not real. I can not believe that my wall exists and close my eyes and not see it, but I’m still going to run into it if I walk into it. Martin Heidegger had a good phase for that. He said, “Everywhere we’re confronted by the brute facticity of reality.” We constantly want by wishing and willing to change the way things are, but we’re constantly confronted by the fact that they are what they are, and we can’t change it by just wishing.

So if angels and demons are real, you’re interacting with them and they’re interacting with you, and they’re affecting you whether you believe they’re there or not. That doesn’t just make them go away, if we all stop believing in them. That’s a potentially dangerous situation. Someone who’s not living in reality is in a dangerous situation, because there are all kinds of dangers presented by reality, and they’re going to be denying those dangers by denying that reality. You’re never going to be…  If it’s true that the thoughts that come into my head, many of them are coming from spirits that want to do me harm and want to destroy me, and I refuse to accept that, I say, “No, these are just being ginned up by the random electrical firings of my brain,” I’m never going to be victorious over those thoughts. Worst case scenario, I’ll say, “Well, no, these thoughts are me, no matter how dark or weird or disturbing they are, they’re me,” and then that means I’m now going to be subject to them rather than them being subject to me.

You can’t do spiritual warfare if you don’t believe in spirits. If spiritual warfare is going on and you don’t believe in spirits and you don’t do it, you’re going to lose. That’s the destruction that has been and is being wreaked in the modern West. It’s losing a war that they refuse to believe is even going on. And attributing all of these things—we attribute the despair, the heart-ache, the struggles we face, all of these things—we attribute them, but we have to find natural, material causes for them, and then we don’t actually address the actual causes, and there can’t be any actual healing.

So if you’re talking about whether we should be preaching this stuff, your people in the pews or standing in rows or in a jumble, depending on your parish structure, they’re going to hear all about all the naturalistic causes; they’re going to hear about all the materialist stuff. They’re going to hear all that without you; they don’t need you for that. They need you to explain the parts of reality that the rest of the world, the outside world now, is ignoring, to help them actually make sense of what’s going on in their hearts and minds and their life, beyond just “the wrong person got elected” or “the economy is doing XYZ” or whatever they might chalk it up to.

Fr. Andrew: That wraps up the second part of my interview with Fr. Stephen De Young. Be sure to tune in next time to hear the conclusion.