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

So I’d like to talk now about some specific foundational concepts from Scriptures, and I’m going to use… I’m going to focus on specific words. These are things that have, misunderstood… they lead to a distorted understanding of theology and the spiritual life. So the first one I thought we could discuss is the word “faith.” This is such a fundamental, critical concept for Christianity, that affects everything, from high-level theology to the everyday experience of the most ordinary believer. How do people get this one wrong? How are we talking about “faith” in the wrong way?

Fr. Stephen De Young: Yeah. [Laughter] So I mean the short version of this, as I’ve said many times, is that most of the places—not all, but most of the places—where we see “faith,” for example, in the New Testament, would be better translated “faithfulness.”

Fr. Andrew: And that’s huge. That’s a huge difference. Huge.

Fr. Stephen: Well, I’ve even had people who—it was a ground-breaking thing for me to point out for them that the Greek words that lie behind “faith” and “believe” and “belief” are the same word in Greek, that those aren’t two separate contexts. That gets me to a liturgical bug-a-boo: We shouldn’t be using the term “believers”; we should be talking about “the faithful.” You can see, probably immediately, just from the general connotations in English, when we think about “faith,” depending on… if you get your really uncharitable atheist, “faith” is either believing something you know isn’t true or it’s believing something is true even though there’s no evidence. But you’ll even hear Christians using it that way. They’ll say, “That’s why you have to have faith, because there’s no proof.”

Fr. Andrew: And then they’ll cite, “Faith is the evidence of things hoped for…”

Fr. Stephen: Which, yeah, I’ll get to that verse in a second.

Fr. Andrew: Great! Good. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Because that interpretation of it literally makes no sense. But anyway. [Laughter] And so “faith” is having the right answer on the true-false test: “Jesus is the Son of God: True.” I put T, so that means I have faith; and atheist guy over there says F, false, so he doesn’t have faith. This makes it difficult to understand, shall we say, passages like “Faith the size of a mustard-seed.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, like do I believe really hard or just a little bit?

Fr. Stephen: Right. I think this is true, really really hard. I think this is true, big. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: I’m super-convinced.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah! [Laughter] And then doubt becomes about: “Well, sometimes I sit and I wonder if it’s really true.” And: “Oh no, I’m doubting! Oh no, I don’t have faith. Oh no, maybe I’m not going to go to heaven.” And you get into this whole neurotic sort of cycle around that.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and, I mean, honestly, speaking generally, this is a huge amount of what I have dealt with in confession as a confessor, a huge amount.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And take that definition of “doubt” to Matthew 28. Jesus is standing there on the mountain in front of them, talking to them, and it says, “But some doubted.” Doubted what? “I must be dreaming…” Like, what? [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Like, here he is, risen from the dead, enh, I don’t know.

Fr. Stephen: He’s standing there, talking to you. But when we understand that the word there doesn’t just mean “to believe something’s true,” but it means “faithfulness”—faithfulness, loyalty, trust—that’s a different concept. That’s not just an intellectual assent or an intellectual idea. That involves your actions.

Fr. Andrew: And we do have an expression in English that retains this idea, and that’s the phrase “keeping faith.” To keep faith doesn’t mean to keep believing; it means to be loyal.

Fr. Stephen: To remain loyal, to remain faithful, right.

Fr. Andrew: And “break faith” is the opposite. So we do have this understanding in English, but anyway, keep going.

Fr. Stephen: And “doubt” or “wavering” is not like thinking. You wouldn’t say, if we’re talking about someone being faithful to their spouse, being unfaithful wouldn’t be “wondering if you were really married.” [Laughter] Like, no one does that.

Fr. Andrew: It’s about an action.

Fr. Stephen: It’s about actions, thoughts, whether that loyalty and that trust is preserved or whether it’s being broken. So that’s the same concept. And that does have a quantitative level. You can be more or less loyal; you can be more or less faithful. So going back to that verse in Hebrews, which actually says, “Faith is the substance of things hoped for”: if faith is just believing something is true, how can “believing something is true” give substance to hope? How is it even a different thing [from] hope? That makes no sense. That literally is unintelligible.

Now if you say, “Faithfulness is the substance of things hoped for,” you’re saying what makes your hope in Christ substantial is your faithfulness. If you’re doubting that hope, if you’re questioning that hope, the answer is to be faithful; the answer is to continue living, continue maintaining your faithfulness and your loyalty to Christ. And that, when you’re showing love to other people, that makes the love of God real to you and in your life. That’s what that verse in Hebrews is talking about.

And that, of course, totally destroys the whole faith-works distinction in Protestantism. This is where one of the places where Orthodox people using Roman Catholic arguments really irritates me, because it happens all the time where I’ll see somebody be like: “In Orthodoxy we believe you’re saved by faith and works.” It’s like… [Growling] Because that’s not even an accurate representation of Roman Catholic theology, frankly!

Fr. Andrew: No, no.

Fr. Stephen: But that’s not true. It’s a different idea, that the distinction St. Paul makes is between faithfulness to God and to Christ and the works of the Law. The works of the Law is not doing good things; it’s not wearing a garment made of two types of fabric. So when St. Paul makes that distinction, he’s saying the same thing Christ kept saying to the Pharisees: “You tithe of mint and dill and cumin. You sit there like you’re grooming a bonsai tree and cut out ten percent of your herb garden, to go and tithe. You’re super fastidious.” He says, “You tithe mint and dill and cumin but you neglect mercy, compassion… You’re not worried about that at all, but you’ve got to get that tenth of the herbs.” That’s the distinction St. Paul is making; he’s not talking about thinking things versus doing things, and you just need to think the right things to be saved. That’s very clearly not what St. Paul is saying.

And then when St. James makes that point, that, hey, the demons all think the right thing—they all know the truth—that doesn’t save them. He’s not contradicting St. Paul; he’s saying the same thing!

Fr. Andrew: And there’s all kinds of places, then, if you understand this the right way, there’s all kinds of places all over the New Testament that suddenly it’s a radical shift in the way that you would read it, if you think that “faith” is about believing something, agreeing with something. Of course, one example, I think a big one would be: “For by grace are you saved through”—what? Through faith? Agreeing? Through checking off the “true” box? “...and that not of yourselves”? But: “By grace are you saved through faithfulness”: the “through” makes way more sense there, because then it’s this ongoing action and process and engagement and loyalty.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and then that being “not of ourselves” doesn’t mean God sticks his fingers into your brain and causes you to believe that the Gospel is true, which doesn’t make a lot of sense; it’s that the only reason we’re able to be faithful is God empowering us and enabling us.

Fr. Andrew: And that he gave us the way to be faithful: This is how to be faithful: do this.

Fr. Stephen: And that resolves a lot of internal Protestant problems, too. There’s a big flap going on now particularly amongst Southern Baptists. I won’t go into all the details of it, but you have people basically asking, “So how come a person can believe that the Quran is true of their own power, they can believe that Judaism is true, they can believe that Hinduism is true of their own power, but there has to be some kind of miracle for them to believe that the New Testament is true?” And then another group calling those people Pelagians. [Laughter] For asking that question.

But, again, if you understand it as faithfulness… I mean, obviously, I’m not going to be able to live a life faithful to Christ on my own, without God acting in my life. I won’t last five seconds, and that’s all St. Paul is saying. The alternatives are not either “God saves you against your will” or “you earn your salvation.” Those aren’t the two possible options.

Fr. Andrew: All right, so here’s another big single-word concept that, if we misread it, kind of changes everything, or if we read it well, changes everything. “Sin.” What’s the popular understanding of sin versus the presentation in Scripture as understood in the Orthodox Tradition?

Fr. Stephen: Right. So when we think about… This is deeply built into American culture.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah! Right.

Fr. Stephen: We tend to think in terms of sins, plural; we think in terms of transgressions. You break commandments; you break laws. The word torah does not mean law; the Greek word, nomos, does not mean law, but that’s a whole other can of worms. But you break a law, now you’re subject to a punishment. Retributive justice: you get punished for breaking that law. And that’s how we think about sins.

There are only a handful of cases where, for example, St. Paul uses “sin” in the plural as “sins,” talks about “sins.” Few enough that somebody, a biblical scholar, wrote a journal article covering all of them in detail recently. That’s how few there are!

Fr. Andrew: In one article.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. Most of the time he talks about “sin.” And this is “sin” as a force, an almost-personified force that is active in the world. So the first place sin is mentioned in the Bible is in Genesis 4, not Genesis 3 with the expulsion from paradise, but Genesis 4 with Cain, when God comes to Cain and says, after Cain is feeling angry and resentful and hateful toward his brother, God says, “Sin is crouching at your door. It wants to master you; you must master it.” And the word he uses there that’s translated “crouching” is actually from an Akkadian root that is describing a kind of demon that they believe crawled up through cracks in the ground in Mesopotamian understanding, sort of went around trying to devour people. So that’s the idea: this has now been unleashed in the world through what your dad, Adam, and your mom, Eve, did. It’s out there, it’s after you, it’s trying to master you, it’s trying to subjugate you, it’s trying to control you—you have to fight back and master it.

That’s how St. Paul talks about it, too, that sin is active in the world and seeking to enslave us. This is why the Fathers talk about the passions when they talk about sin. They’re passions because they make you passive. It takes control of you. But this is a very different and importantly different understanding of sin. Like I said, this has infested our American culture. The American prison system is like no other prison system on earth. Not only do we imprison more people than any other nation on earth, including Communist China—to be fair, they execute a lot more people, but—not only have we imprisoned so many people, but we see our prison system as a punishment. You spend a certain number of years as a punishment and then you have paid your debt to society.

Fr. Andrew: Right, that’s the phrase that’s used.

Fr. Stephen: You broke a law, now you’re being punished, then we let you out. Everywhere else in the world, pretty much, prisons are, at least in first-world countries—other Western nations: we’ll say this—other Western nations, prisons are based around the idea of rehabilitation. They’re penitentiaries in the sense of trying to bring about repentance and amendment of life so that this person won’t commit this crime again. And then in this tiny of minority of cases where there are some men you just can’t reach, they get—

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I just love the movie you just referenced, by the way. Cool Hand Luke, everybody!

Fr. Stephen: They get warehoused, in a warehouse somewhere. But for the most part it’s about rehabilitation. For us, it’s about punishment, because we have this view of sin.

This affects the way racism is discussed in this country. Someone is or isn’t a racist, meaning they either commit the sin of racism or they don’t. People by and large in the United States do not understand racism as a form of tribalism and hatred that’s based in pride and arrogance and sinful passions—hatred of the other, looking down on others—that is something that we all wrestle with, just like all the other forms of tribalism, all the other… It’s not just temptation to break a rule; it is that these passions, these sinister powers, are out to dominate us. It’s something we have to constantly struggle and fight against within ourselves, within our culture. It’s not something we can just find the bad apples and get rid of.

But this also, of course, affects in our churches, when I’m talking to people about coming to their first confession, I have to explain this: it’s not, “Okay, read me the laundry list of the naughty things you did over the last period of time: I said a bad word in traffic, I did this, I did that, I did this, I did that.” It’s not about all the rules you broke. If I had to do that, my confessions would take days. [Laughter] It’s about the passions. It’s about… The things you’re going to tell me are the symptoms, and I’m trying to get at the disease. Why are you doing these things? Is it pride that’s gotten ahold of you? Is it anger that’s gotten ahold of you?

Sin is much more like addiction. It’s something that masters you and takes over your life. At first you’re choosing to dabble with it; you’re choosing to do it, because it seems good and seems right and seems fun—but then it masters you.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. I think, for instance, about… especially when you’re talking about sin as being this demon that creeps up through cracks, I was reminded about a monk one time—I was taking a walk with him in the woods, and he was noting wild grapevines that were in and amongst some of the trees. He said, “Look over here, how it’s kind of pretty down here at the base of the tree.” Then he pointed to another one; he said, “You see how this one has climbed up the tree. And there’s one over here, you can see how this one is taking over this tree, and it’s going to strangle it and destroy it.” And he looks at me and says, “Sin is just like this.” I was like: Oh man!

I mean, it’s an amazing image, and you can see it working. Yeah, I think that this is foundational, and it’s a foundational shift that we have to make, if we’re going to be good Christians, if we’re going to be good evangelists and pastors and whatever. Because, like you said, for instance, our prisons have this idea of punishment, and you mentioned also the racism debate, and I think in both of those cases, repentance is simply not—it doesn’t enter into the equation for our culture, the idea that you could be struggling against this and, God willing, eventually overcome it. That’s not. It’s: “No, you’ve done this bad thing, and so you must be punished,” whether it’s locked away for the rest of your days or canceled, ejected from your job because you said this one thing. It’s like you said. Our culture revolves around either expressing or reacting to Puritanical theology.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah.

Fr. Andrew: In which I would say repentance is just not a thing, at least in the biblical sense of repentance, of struggling against sin and, God willing, making progress against it.

Fr. Stephen: And doing that collectively. Yeah, 99% of American Christians wouldn’t understand why, after the fall of Communism in Russia, they had an extended period of mourning and repentance—the whole nation—over the murder of the Tsar and his family.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, even though none of the people who did it are still alive.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And a lot of them were never Bolsheviks and never signed on. So that makes no sense from that view of sin, because you’re either guilty of it or you’re not. And the idea that—not only that sin isn’t just breaking a rule, but that it’s power, but the fact that sin does concrete damage to a person and to a community where it happens, and that has to be healed. It’s not just about the person who did it being let off the hook or not for the crime they committed. It’s about healing and restoring, and restoring the damage. I mean, this is utterly clear in the Torah. One of the unique things about justice in the Torah, is that when someone commits a crime, they don’t get, like, publicly beaten or mutilated—that was common in the ancient world—

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that was definitely a thing.

Fr. Stephen: There are certain things where the person has to be cut off from the people, meaning, if they’re completely unrepentant; they do it and they’re unrepentant, they have to be expelled from the community, and that took the form of either death or exile, which in some cases was the same thing.

But beyond that, everything else was restitution. As we record this, we just passed Zacchaeus Sunday. Salvation comes to Zacchaeus’ house when he says he’s going to make restitution for everything he stole. That that’s what justice is about. It’s about not just saying, “Oh, that was bad. I’ll try not to do it again,” or “What do I need to say to get off the hook?” or just saying, “Thank you,” because Jesus was punished instead of me, but saying, “I’m going to repent. I’m going to fight against this; I’m going to struggle against this. And I’m going to do everything I can to repair the damage I’ve done, to other people and to myself, in the process.” That’s repentance.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, so here’s another big one. The word “worship.” So the Bible talks about worship all the time. The modern concept seems to be that Christians doing Christian things together. [Laughter] Or sometimes Christians doing Christian things generally aimed at God. Is that what worship is? I mean, can we define it like that broadly? Does it mean a specific action?

Fr. Stephen: Here’s a place where you’ve run into trouble recently. [Laughter] Partially because of what we were talking about before, with people thinking distinction implies opposition, where if you say, “X is worship and Y is not worship,” then you’re saying Y is bad, or not as good, rather than: “No, these are different things.” A truck is a truck, and an Xbox is an Xbox. It doesn’t mean one’s better and one’s worse, and one’s good and one’s bad; they’re two different things.

So, yeah, the core of what worship is is sacrifice in the Scriptures. That’s what it’s all about. You see this really clearly, even in the Church Fathers. St. John Chrysostom—I’ve got a journal article that I co-wrote being published soon in a Protestant journal, actually. It’s about St. John Chrysostom’s sermons against the Judaizers, and in that, that’s one of his rhetorical points. One of his rhetorical points against the Jewish community in Antioch, which was at that time much larger and more well established than the Christian community still, is that, because of the destruction of the Temple, they didn’t have a sacrifice or a priesthood or a Temple, the priesthood and the Temple being important because of the sacrifice.

And so he was essentially saying, “They can’t really worship, whereas we have a priesthood and a temple and a sacrifice, so we can worship God.” That’s one of his arguments. That still held… We’re talking about from the Torah to St. John Chrysostom, we’re talking close to two millennia, that that’s the concept. But that was utterly clear that that was the concept in the entire world at the time. Everyone worshiped through doing sacrifices; that was universal. There weren’t cultures out there in the ancient world that didn’t sacrifice animals and/or people. So that’s just what it was.

And then the other things were sort of attached to that. If there was the singing of hymns, if there was the musical instrumentation, whatever else was going on, prayers, those were joined to the sacrifices, and that was sort of what imbued them with the quality of worship. So this isn’t even an ambiguous thing in the ancient world, the idea that worship and sacrifice are identical. It’s right there in the ten commandments, though it gets hidden a little bit by the translation. The first two commandments, as we number them—“You shall have no other gods before me” is how it’s usually translated—it literally says, “You shall have no other gods in my face.” But that’s talking about God’s face, his presence, like in the tabernacle, in the Temple: no other idols, no other stuff.

Fr. Andrew: Right. It’s not just sort of talking about general priorities.

Fr. Stephen: Right, it’s not talking about not in your life, yeah, or believe they exist or whatever. It’s that you don’t… you’re not combining his worship with the worship of anyone else. And then the second commandment, the “serve them” part, “You will not bow down to them and serve them”: the “serve them” is offer sacrifices to them. That’s literally what that means.

Fr. Andrew: Serve them food. I mean, literally, right? In its most basic sense: serve them food.

Fr. Stephen: So, yeah, in our modern world, you get “praise and worship,” and they’re basically synonyms. There’s nothing wrong with praising God. There’s nothing wrong with singing songs that praise God. There’s nothing wrong with reading and praying and singing the psalms outside of church—while you’re driving in your car, or in your house—but that’s not the same thing as worship.

I think the clearest way to see that is they’re not sort of substitutable. We’re obviously, when we’re talking about our sacrifice in the Orthodox Church, we’re talking about, preeminently, the Eucharist. No one would say, “Well, sitting at home and reading the psalms is just as good as going to Divine Liturgy; they’re interchangeable.”

Fr. Andrew: There are people who say that.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Well, they’re wrong.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah! Right, but I think that they’re… It’s this kind of interiorization of what it means to be a faithful Christian. Like: “I feel something; I can do something on my own.”

Fr. Stephen: I think quarantine has revealed the lie of that.

Fr. Andrew: Right. It’s just not the same.

Fr. Stephen: I think anyone who’s been separated from the Liturgy knows that the Liturgy is a different thing. Again, I’m not saying that reading the psalms at home is bad or not as good. They’re both good things; they’re just different things, and you can’t substitute one for the other. You can’t dispense with one, because the other one is fine.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and we should probably say, okay, so if worship is sacrifice, what exactly, then, is sacrifice? I think part of the reason why it’s easy for us to get these things, in the modern world, to get them mixed up—that praise and worship are the same thing, that prayer and worship are the same thing, that fellowship and worship are the same thing—is because of a kind of metaphorized understanding of what sacrifice even is, or of what worship even is. So what is sacrifice? What is that action?

Fr. Stephen: Right. Well, part of it is that, again, for reasons related to what we were just talking about with sin and the whole idea of atonement in the West, sacrifice is associated with killing something, which makes no sense biblically, because… You have to be very metaphorical about killing to make a wheat-cake killing something. I mean, I guess technically you’re killing the wheat, sort of, but not even that, because you’re just taking the seeds and eating them? But it’s associated with killing something, and so then that means, obviously, if St. Paul says, “Offer yourselves as living sacrifices, or a sacrifice of praise,” you can’t kill praise… [Laughter] So it’s got to be super-metaphorical, right? Something is dying in a very metaphorical manner.

But the core of what sacrifice was in the ancient world was, essentially, in the broadest term, it’s offering hospitality to a god, that usually took the form of a meal, as hospitality normally did in the ancient world and still does today. So that does not need to be metaphorized, I guess, as much, because hospitality is essentially the offering of something pleasing to someone else, the offering of something of yours to please and bring about joy and bring about communion and fellowship with someone else. Again, that normally takes the form of a meal in the ancient world.

But that can include the smell of incense; that can include my… If I offer praise to God and that praise is pleasing to God and is designed to do fellowship, that’s not exactly a metaphorical use of sacrifice. It’s a little more metaphorical, but not completely. It’s still within the very broad outlines, but, again, not in a way that can displace the other. In the same way that there’s a difference between [my] saying nice things about you publicly and me inviting you to my house to share a meal. Those are two different things, two different levels of communion and fellowship and intimacy going on there. So that’s the concept. That’s the concept that’s going on.

So if that’s what worship is, that doesn’t mean those other things are bad, but it means if all you have are those other things, then you don’t have that level of fellowship and intimacy that you could have by embracing the sacrificial worship. Like, [my] going and saying nice things about you publicly, spreading word to people about who you are and the good things you do—those are all great things, and I’m sure you’d appreciate it—

Fr. Andrew: If you don’t mind. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yes, and there’s nothing wrong with it, and it’s a good thing—but if I never actually invite you into my home, if I never actually get to know you personally at that level, then there’s something I’m missing out on. So I think what got you into trouble is that a lot of people read our previous discussion about this as, again, somehow being a criticism of Protestant worship or even Evangelical worship, but it’s not a criticism; it’s an invitation. It’s: “You have good things. Here’s more; here’s richer.” It’s my good old—I don’t know if I brought this up on Lord of Spirits—my good old turkey sandwich analogy.

Fr. Andrew: No! I don’t think you have! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: That I use to talk to non-Orthodox Christians where what you have is not evil or bad or poison. You’ve got like a really good turkey sandwich: the bread’s fresh, the turkey’s fresh, favorite kind of cheese. The vegetables are good; the vegetables are fresh. But a couple rooms over, there’s a whole turkey dinner, a whole Thanksgiving dinner laid out. It’s got all the stuff you’ve got on that good, nourishing sandwich, plus a whole lot more, in abundance. And so for me, if we’re talking to somebody who already identifies as a Christian about the Orthodox Church and about Orthodox Christianity, we’re inviting them to not just enjoy that sandwich, but to come to dinner. And the same thing with worship. What you’ve got is good. There’s more, there’s deeper, there’s richer over here, and we’re inviting you to come enjoy it, too.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, so I’ve got one more can with worms that I want to open up before we finish.

Fr. Stephen: Is this one of those ones where they shoot out with the spring-loaded…?

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] It might be! It might be, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Okay.

Fr. Andrew: So this is another foundational thing, that if you see it differently, then it radically changes everything, as all of these concepts we’ve been talking about do. It’s the relationship between the Old and New Testaments. So how do most people get it wrong, and how does the Orthodox Tradition actually treat that relationship?

Fr. Stephen: “How do most people get it wrong?” is a vast swath… [Laughter] I mean…

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, we’re generalizing, obviously.

Fr. Stephen: You start with Marcian at the end of the first century, beginning of the second century. There is actually a St. Marcian…

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, different person.

Fr. Stephen: The saint is my favorite Marcian, for the record, not the heretic.

Fr. Andrew: Ooh! Nice. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, the punishment will not stop.

Fr. Andrew: We should say, for those of you who do not know about that first-century heretic, Marcian—or is he second century?

Fr. Stephen: End of the first, beginning of the second.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, okay. He basically taught that the God of the Old Testament is a different God than the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, that he’s the Creator-God, that he’s evil, and that the Father of Jesus Christ sends Christ to liberate us from this evil Creator-God, and so therefore the Old Testament is not… we do not need it at all as Christians, and in fact he produced his own, possibly the earliest canon of the New Testament, in which he sort of edited stuff so that any kind of positive references to the Old Testament are out, and he cut a whole bunch of things that we would later recognize as canonical. Is that a good summary of Marcianism?

Fr. Stephen: To be a little more generous with him, it’s unclear whether he actually cut anything out.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, okay. I got you.

Fr. Stephen: It’s unclear whether he cut stuff out or just he accepted a very denuded, limited version of things.

Fr. Andrew: Okay. There was not a canon quite as we understand it now, at that point.

Fr. Stephen: Right, but I mean he rejected the things he rejected, because he didn’t agree with them. It’s kind of six of one, half a dozen of the other. Yeah, and sort of the shade of Marcian has haunted Christianity, particularly in the West, for the entire history of Christianity. The form this takes most commonly now is Old Testament God—angry, vengeful, mean, smites people—New Testament God is Jesus who just loves everybody and is super-compassionate and is going to save everybody and is sort of the friendly God—which is sort of Marcianism, but just a sort of more genteel kind of form of it. Yeah, there are certain figures who self-identify as Orthodox who are basically Marcianites. To be fair, since I said Western Christianity, I won’t mention his name, but everybody knows whom I’m talking about.

Fr. Andrew: And if you don’t, you’re okay. You’re good, yeah. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, don’t worry about it.

So it’s problematic even if you just read the Bible. So I’ve had someone directly say to me that, for example, we can just ignore all the commandments of the Torah now; all that’s important is we love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and we love our neighbor as our self, to which I responded, “You just quoted Leviticus and Deuteronomy.” Which are in the Torah.

If you read just Deuteronomy, over and over again, it’s talking about the love that God has for Israel, for his people. That’s one of the main themes in Deuteronomy, over and over and over again, and how what he’s requesting from them ultimately, is their faithful love in return. That’s the main theme of the book of Deuteronomy. If you read the New Testament very far, you find Jesus saying un-Christ-like things to the Pharisees, right?

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yes.

Fr. Stephen: Calling them a brood of vipers, and calling them white-washed tombs. “You cross heaven and earth to make one convert to make him twice the sons of hell that you are.” You know, nice, up-beat, accepting things like that. One of my favorites, because we read it over the holiday season that just ended, was St. John the Forerunner saying, “You brood of vipers, who warned you to flee from the wrath that is coming.” With these and other words, he preached to them the good news. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Right!? Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: So, yeah, that doesn’t hold up, right off the bat. That God has the same character throughout wasn’t just something the Fathers asserted against Marcian, that, no, this is the same God, and, oh man, we’re going to have to really struggle to make it all fit. They were reading it out of the text like: No, this is clearly the same God.

So that part doesn’t work, so then that affects how you view the Old and New Testaments. Protestantism—and, again, it’s particularly Puritan Protestantism that’s informed our American culture so deeply—has that distinction that hopefully we at least partially overturned earlier between thinking things, believing things, and doing things, because that’s how faith is understood, as believing things, works is understood as just doing things, and those are two separate categories.

So that turns the Torah into the Law: it’s a series of commandments, it’s a series of laws to follow, and then it’s interpreted that St. Paul is saying, “Oh, no. Don’t follow those. Those are bad. Instead, just believe that these things are true about Jesus, and you’ll go to heaven when you die.” I know that’s a very simplistic version, but, you know, we’re rambling enough just to short-hand it. And in terms of non-Christians in our culture, that’s about the amount they’ve absorbed. [Laughter] It’s always about that level.

That means that the whole Old Testament is marginalized. This is Luther’s law-gospel distinction, although Luther himself was very clear that there’s plenty of gospel in the Old Testament and plenty of law in the New Testament, even as he made that distinction. Luther’s successors have not always been that nuanced and that clear, and so it’s just: enh, the Old Testament; aw, that’s in the Old Testament; oh, the Old Testament; don’t worry about that: now we’ve got Jesus. This comes up in moral debates all the time. “Well, Jesus himself didn’t say anything about moral issue XYZ! I mean, it’s all over the rest of the Bible but…” Like that somehow trumps it, like everything else got dumped; it’s just now what Jesus said.

Obviously, from an Orthodox perspective, that’s super problematic, and the reality is the Orthodox Church has always seen Christ as the fulfillment of the Old Testament in the sense that he now establishes it—like St. Paul said he was establishing the Law, not abolishing it—but establishing it in a deeper and richer sense. When Christ says he came to fulfill the Law rather than abolish it, a lot of people in Western Christianity and outside of Christianity in the West take that to basically be synonyms: a distinction without a difference. Abolish or fulfill, it’s done; it’s over, either way.

Fr. Andrew: Either way, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: But it’s just a tiny little bit of nuance, but it really means basically the same thing.

But “fulfill” actually means there to fill full, to fill up to overflowing. So, for example, as just a sort of—maybe not obvious enough example—you have the sabbath in the old covenant, which is the last day of the week, which is a day of rest dedicated to God in anticipation of future rest in the kingdom, at the end of life. Christ comes and fulfills the sabbath by finishing his work on Friday, on the sixth day—he says, “It is finished,” the same words in the Greek that God used in the beginning of Genesis 2 when he completed his work—and then he rests in the tomb on the seventh day, at the end of his work. So it’s been fulfilled. He’s done it. He’s done it in the… He has kept the sabbath in the most full, most rich, truest sense that anyone ever has.

And then he rises again on the first day of the week to new life, the day of resurrection, the beginning of the world to come. So we don’t, as Christians, just toss all that sabbath stuff, but as the synaxarion at Pascha says, the apostles transferred the dignity of the sabbath to the Lord’s day, to the first day of the week. So all of the sabbath stuff in the Old Testament now applies to Sunday, to the first day of the week, to the Lord’s day, and applies in a fuller and richer sense. It doesn’t get tossed out; it gets made more full and more real. So that’s a quick and easy example.

So all of the Old Testament is still in effect. We still celebrate the Passover. That’s what “Pascha” means. This is one of my other hobby-horses, is that in our liturgical hymns, we don’t translate “Pascha.” So we sit there and sing, “A new Pascha! A great Pascha! A holy Pascha!” If we translated that as “Passover,” it would make a lot more sense: “This is a new Passover. This is a great Passover, a holy Passover.” It’s comparing what Christ did to Exodus, to the Passover. So we still celebrate the Passover, but now we celebrate it in this fuller and richer sense, because what Christ did, in bringing us from death to life and bringing us out of slavery to sin, is much bigger than just bringing a group of Asiatic peoples out of slavery in Egypt. It’s not a totally different thing; the two are parallel, but one is obviously bigger and fuller and richer than the other. But we still celebrate Passover.

Even our whole calendar is still structured the same way. There were two calendars; there were two calendars in the Old Testament. There’s an agricultural calendar that begins roughly in September, Rosh Hashanah now, the first day of the month of Tishri, that was the beginning of the year on the agricultural year in September. And then the liturgical calendar that began with Passover, Pascha, the first of months. And if you look at an Orthodox calendar, you see we have two cycles. We have a cycle of feasts that don’t move around that begins on the Indiction on September 1, roughly the same time of year; and we have a cycle of feasts that’s related to the dating of Pascha, of Passover. So we’ve brought all this over, but it’s now fulfilled, and it’s in this fuller and richer sense, but there’s absolute continuity between the two.

Fr. Andrew: All right, well, to wrap up, you’ve got this book coming out soon from Ancient Faith Publishing, The Religion of the Apostles. Why don’t you describe what’s in the book and what the purpose is for it? Who exactly is the audience for this book?

Fr. Stephen: The audience is everyone.

Fr. Andrew: There we go! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Pre-order, everybody.

Fr. Andrew: Everybody order. Pre-order one now!

Fr. Stephen: No, pre-order two so you can give one to someone you know.

Fr. Andrew: There you go.

Fr. Stephen: Who might not hear this and therefore not pre-order it for themselves. No.

Basically it’s what we were just talking about. It fulfills several purposes. At its core, it’s a one-volume Orthodox biblical theology, or at least an attempt at it, or a beginning of such a thing, as such a thing does not exist in English. So that means it’s organized sort of quasi-systematically. I say “quasi” because it’s not like an Orthodox systematic theology, but it is roughly covering a series of topics that’ll be familiar to people who are familiar with reading a one-volume theology. So it starts talking about God and the Holy Trinity in the Scriptures, beginning in the Old Testament, and then talks about Christ, talks about salvation and atonement, talks about what we could call ecclesiology: the Church, what the Church is, God’s people. And then talks about some of the ways in which the commandments are applied in the life of the Church. That’s sort of a rough overview.

The core theme and the reason it’s called “Religion of the Apostles” is that I’m showing the continuity that exists between the religious life and practice of ancient Israel, the religious life and practice of Judean people in the Second Temple period and early Christianity, so let’s say anti-Nicene Christianity, Christianity before the Council of Nicaea. Not to say that later Orthodoxy is different, just that it’s not my field and the book was long enough. [Laughter]

So trying to show that complete continuity between those things so that… I go so far as to say and to argue that you can reasonably talk about Old Testament Christianity, that there were people in ancient Israel who believed and lived the way of life that we live now then, not in the complete details, but in the theological understanding and the theological practice of what they were doing and why. I think understanding that continuity helps not only flesh out and help us understand what’s going on in various scriptural passages, but also helps us understand what we’re doing in the Church, and why this biblical passage is being read at this particular time and how they connect to each other and connect to the feasts and connect to the hymns.

And I say it’s a beginning and an attempt at that, because obviously in one volume you can’t do all of that completely, but hopefully it’ll be helpful to people and kind of pique their interests, and it ends with sort of a bibliography for further reading that’ll give people a bunch of rabbit-trails to start chasing down in different directions in the bits they get interested in. So that’s what that book is all about.

Fr. Andrew: Any other books in the pipeline?

Fr. Stephen: A bunch. [Laughter] I technically haven’t signed any contracts on any of these, but there’s a manuscript I’ve got done that’s about violence in the Old Testament, that deals with a lot of the issues that we were talking about, about the characterization of God in the Old Testament, the Old Testament in general. There’s a lot of passages there that are really troubling to people, and so it’s trying to give some of the theological background of the Scriptures, trying to help people understand those texts and how they work and how they relate to Christ and the New Testament and our worship and life today.

And then there’s also a manuscript I’ve got done that is a sort of an introduction to the Bible that deals with a lot of things like what inspiration is, and from an Orthodox perspective, things like inspiration and inerrancy, a lot of these things that are primarily talked about from a Protestant perspective in biblical studies. I talk about the manuscript of the Bible, how the Bible came to us. It’s sort of an introductory text on that.

And then I’m about 85 pages into an introduction to different Second Temple Jewish literature, and I’m another several dozen pages into a book on St. Paul’s theology of salvation, and someday I’ll do that Baal book. And who knows?

Fr. Andrew: Great! [Laughter] Well, Fr. Stephen, thank you so much for coming on the Orthodox Engagement podcast. I’m really glad we could sit down and spend some time on these big-picture issues.

Fr. Stephen: Are we engaged now? That seems weird.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yes, this is engagement but not betrothal.

Fr. Stephen: Okay, good.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I have been speaking with the Reverend Dr. Stephen De Young, priest, pastor, biblical scholar, podcaster, and author of the forthcoming The Religion of the Apostles from Ancient Faith Publishing. His Bible study podcast and blog are both named The Whole Counsel of God, and of course he is also my co-host on the live Lord of Spirits podcast on Ancient Faith Radio. Thank you, everyone, for listening, and we will connect with you next time.